Matthew Johnson
The Fourth Plenum of the Twentieth Central Committee, held in October 2025, marked more than a routine leadership meeting: it ratified the culmination of a ten-year project to fuse national planning, security strategy, and technological control under Xi Jinping’s direct authority. The new 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030) formalizes an architecture that has been taking shape since 2013, as Xi consolidated command over the Party, military, and financial system and began redesigning the economy around “self-reliance” and long-term systemic confrontation. The result is a model of strategic endurance—a self-contained system able to sustain rivalry with the United States through control of capital allocation, industrial organization, and information flows. Three bedrock features define this strategy:Centralized control of strategic resources and flows. The state maintains direct command over the levers of production—finance, energy, data, and critical minerals—enabling it to calibrate access, pricing, and supply as tools of deterrence and coercion. The aim is not autarky but strategic interdependence: a system flexible enough to weaponize trade while preserving internal stability through external market access and resource absorption.
Directed innovation through the “new national system.” Xi’s new national system (新型举国体制) transforms the Party-state into a permanent strategic mobilization machine, fusing industry, research, and security planning. By integrating AI, infrastructure, and state finance into a single command framework, Beijing can coordinate technological catch-up and retaliation as routine functions of governance.
Security as the organizing principle of development. Economic growth, once an end in itself, is now subordinated to the preservation of political control and survival under pressure. The guiding formula, “using a new security pattern to guarantee a new development pattern” (以新安全格局保障新发展格局), recasts every policy domain, from technology to the One Belt One Road initiative, as a component of long-term confrontation management. [1]
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