Public suggestions shape Shanghai's next five-year blueprint

Improving income, healthcare, elderly care and education are top priorities among the suggestions raised by Shanghai Municipal People's Congress delegates for the city's 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30), according to recently collected survey results.

Shanghai Municipal Development & Reform Commission, the city's economic planner, said on Tuesday that the public consultation phase for Shanghai's development plan in the next five years has been basically completed, soliciting over 34,000 suggestions from Shanghai Municipal People's Congress delegates, 1,900 representatives of city dwellers as well as 147 entrepreneurs and scientists.

Consolidating Shanghai's role as an international center for economy, finance, trade, shipping and innovation should be high up on the agenda of the city's economic development, according to the suggestions. Building a modern industrial system, further improving people's livelihood, seeking high-level reform and opening-up, facilitating the integrated development of urban and rural areas, and strengthening urban management and security are the other major focal points as suggested by the representatives and experts.

While Shanghai saw its GDP stand at 5.39 trillion yuan ($760 billion) in 2024, ranking the fifth globally, the city started the preparation of the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30) in the same year, gathering 26 experts specializing in industrial development, innovation, transportation, education and healthcare.

Zheng Yongnian, dean of the School of Public Policy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen suggested Shanghai advance institutional reform in technology innovation. Zhang Yong, executive vice-president of COSCO Shipping, said the city should strengthen its dominant role in the core parts of the supply chain so that it can become a world first-rate hub. The deep integration of artificial intelligence models and financial business models should be promoted in Shanghai, which is inseparable from the completion of a new-type financial infrastructure system, said Jing Xiandong, chairman of Ant Group.

The development of new quality productive forces has been underlined in experts' suggestions. Liu Cong, vice-president of China's AI and intelligent speech giant iFlytek, said that Shanghai should step up the exploration in key algorithm and frontier technologies, advancing the development of the chip industry and the application of large language models in various scenarios.

It should be noted that Shanghai's municipal development planning regulations were implemented in July. The introduction of these local regulations, which serves as important reference for the city's development plan in the next five years, marks for the first time that Shanghai has enacted legislation for development planning.

Given the current internal and external environments and the rapidly changing economic complexities, the compilation for the development plan for the next five years incurs the most difficulties if compared to the previous editions, according to Wang Sizheng, president of the Shanghai Society of Macroeconomics.

Therefore, coordinated development and highly efficient resources allocation, to which the regulations can be of much help, are crucial for the implementation of the next five-year plan, he said.