Xi Focus: Navigating headwinds and charting new blueprint

BEIJING -- With a high-level meeting wrapped up in Beijing this week, China set out a clear roadmap for how it intends to steer the economy as the next five-year plan period is set to begin.

The annual Central Economic Work Conference, chaired by President Xi Jinping, laid out the country's economic work priorities for the coming year -- including implementing more proactive and impactful macroeconomic policies, continuously expanding domestic demand and optimizing supply, fostering new quality productive forces according to local conditions, and developing a unified national market -- measures aimed at ensuring a solid start to the 15th Five-Year Plan period (2026-30).

As the current five-year cycle approaches a strong finish, China is looking to carry that strength into the next one, laying even stronger foundations for its ambition of basically achieving socialist modernization by 2035, a goal marked in part by lifting per capita GDP to be on par with that of a mid-level developed country.

While acknowledging risks and challenges ahead, Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, said the fundamentals supporting China's long-term growth remain unchanged and called for bolstering confidence, harnessing advantages and meeting challenges head-on to consolidate and build on the steady economic momentum.

RESILIENCE AMID HEADWINDS

Despite mounting pressures from escalating global trade tensions and domestic cyclical and structural headwinds, China's economy has held firm this year.

A set of data illustrates the economic vitality. Every day, roughly 24,000 new businesses spring up nationwide and more than 120 billion yuan (around $17 billion) in goods cross the country's borders. Each second, over 1.43 million gigabytes of data stream through the cloud, while some 6,000 parcels enter logistics networks.

Recently, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) lifted its 2025 China growth forecast to 5 percent, up from 4.8 percent in October -- a move echoed by the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the OECD, all raising their projections in quick succession.

"China's economy has shown notable resilience despite facing multiple shocks in recent years," said Sonali Jain-Chandra, who led an IMF team that visited Beijing and Shanghai early this month.

During an inspection in Henan in May, Xi called for remaining confident and unswervingly managing the country's own affairs well amid a complex external environment, and confronting uncertainties with the certainty brought by high-quality development.

Over the year, Xi traveled across China's economic map -- from the northeastern heavy-industry heartland to the innovation centers of the eastern coast -- and presided over a string of major meetings that discussed topics from boosting consumption to private sector development. These trips and meetings were aimed at reviewing on-the-ground conditions and refining policies for stable and sustainable development.

On factory floors from Liaoning's steel mill to Henan's bearing plant, Xi stressed that the real economy remains the backbone of national strength, calling for advancing manufacturing along high-end, intelligent and green pathways.

Talking with entrepreneurs at a symposium, Xi assured that supportive policies would remain unchanged and that private businesses have broad prospects ahead, shoring up confidence in the private sector. This year, the country enacted a law to promote the private economy, introduced targeted measures to spur private investment, and sped up the clearing of overdue payments to companies.

In particular, innovation has emerged as a central focus for Xi.

At a fast-growing large-model incubator in Shanghai, Xi was briefed by a number of start-ups, including Infinigence AI, then less than two years old, which has rapidly scaled its cloud capacity to more than 25,000 petaflops across 53 data centers in 26 cities. Xia Lixue, CEO of Infinigence AI, said the company's breakthroughs were made possible largely thanks to strong national support for AI development.

Accelerating innovation in digital and intelligent technologies such as AI has been written into the CPC Central Committee's recommendations for formulating the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30) adopted at a key Party plenum in October.

China must deliver substantial progress and new breakthroughs in boosting scientific and technological innovation, fostering new drivers of growth, and promoting economic structural improvement and upgrading, Xi said.

BRAVING CHALLENGES WITH REFORM, OPENING-UP

The next five years will present a landscape where strategic opportunities sit alongside risks and uncertainties. But China remains steady-handed: the tougher the challenges, the more it will lean on reform and opening-up to unlock potential and cultivate new drivers of growth.

Following the key Party plenum in October, Xi inspected Hainan and Guangdong provinces last month.

His selection was highly symbolic. Hainan is preparing for the launch of island-wide special customs operations for the Hainan Free Trade Port (FTP), representing China's latest landmark move of opening-up. Guangdong, the cradle of many of the country's early reform initiatives, is aiming to carry its pioneering role forward.

During the trip, Xi highlighted the significance of the Hainan FTP in expanding high-standard opening-up and advancing an open world economy. For Guangdong, he called for comprehensively deepening reform and opening-up to drive high-quality development.

These messages reflect China's enduring commitment to reform and opening-up.

In 2025, an array of key reform measures came into effect. Efforts to build a unified national market gained pace, as authorities cleared market access obstacles, enforced a revised anti-unfair competition law, and curbed "involution-style" competition. Progress continued on drafting an ecological environmental code and strengthening the national carbon market. Meanwhile, the negative list for foreign investment was further trimmed, and access in service sectors such as telecom and healthcare was expanded.

Analysts believe the reform and opening-up drive, anchored in an upgrading and transforming economy, is creating more opportunities for global companies and investors.

Multinationals doubled down on China this year. FAW-Volkswagen rolled out its 30 millionth vehicle in October, and Tesla's new Megafactory in Shanghai, dedicated to manufacturing energy-storage batteries, launched production in February, which is the first of its kind outside the United States.

Siemens Healthineers is constructing a new manufacturing and research facility in Shenzhen, and Airbus launched its second Final Assembly Line for A320 family aircraft in Tianjin in October, which is also its second such facility in China and in Asia as a whole.

In March, Xi met more than 40 representatives of the international business community in Beijing, reassuring them that China will open up wider by focusing on lowering the threshold of market access, ensure equal national treatment for foreign businesses, and uphold fair market competition.

China has been and will remain an ideal, secure and promising destination for foreign investors, and investing in China is investing in the future, Xi said.

Looking ahead to the next five years, China will continue to share its opportunities with the world and foster common development. The CPC Central Committee's recommendations for formulating the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30) called for opening wider to the outside world, promoting the innovative development of trade, expanding two-way investment cooperation, and pursuing high-quality Belt and Road cooperation.

Spanish economist Pedro Barragán underscored the significance of an open, fast-evolving China moving steadily toward modernization in an unsettled global environment, calling China's five-year plan "an anchor of stability."

"As China manages to maintain orderly economic growth, advance reforms that promote a more open and diversified business environment, and sustainably stimulate domestic demand, its role as an engine of the global economy will be strengthened," Barragán said.