This month the Chinese government rolled out its 15th Five-Year Plan, a central orienting document for Chinese policy through 2030. The plan, as well as the annual output from the National People’s Congress, signals both targets for technological advancement and some of the tools the government is likely to use to hit them. This is the first five-year plan since the popularization of the current paradigm of artificial intelligence and the first since the United States and its partners implemented export controls aimed at stemming China’s access to advanced semiconductors. At the same time, official Chinese ambitions to advance in high-tech sectors stretch back decades. We asked an array of specialists: In the broad area of technology, what stands out about the Chinese government’s approach in 2026?
This DigiChina Forum was edited by Johanna Costigan and Graham Webster.
Note: Additional responses have been added since this Forum went live. Check the bottom for the latest!
KENDRA SCHAEFER
Partner, Trivium China
The 15th Five-Year Plan indicates that U.S. export controls on advanced semiconductors are pushing China to craft policies aimed at compute utilization efficiency as the country attempts to squeeze more output from the hardware it already has. The plan pursues this goal on three fronts: national infrastructure planning, local government oversight, and enterprise cloud adoption.
At the national level, the FYP calls to continue building the National Unified Computing Power Network and related state-backed scheduling platforms. The purpose of this network is to pool compute resources nationally and route workloads to underutilized data centers, ensuring that existing hardware is fully utilized.
At the local level, the plan moves to prevent local officials from wasting capital on ill-considered data center projects. In recent years, local governments raced to build data centers to hit regional digitalization targets and national KPIs, often without regard for local grid capacity, renewable energy availability, AI readiness, or actual demand. The FYP's directive to "coordinate the layout and orderly construction of computing infrastructure" reasserts central planning authority over where capacity gets built.
At the enterprise level, the FYP calls to "actively develop public cloud services," signaling a deliberate effort to migrate organizations onto hyperscaler platforms such as Alibaba Cloud and Huawei Cloud, another efficiency measure. State-backed think tank CAICT data places China's cloud utilization rate at approximately 28%, against roughly 60% in the United States, a gap that reflects years of state-owned enterprises and government agencies defaulting to on-premises deployments. The result is scattered, fragmented data centers all competing for the same limited pool of AI-optimized semiconductors. These smaller installations cannot match the hyperscalers’ ability to efficiently allocate resources through greater expertise and advanced tooling.
Why the focus on wringing out waste? At this point, the strength of China's high-end semiconductor manufacturing capabilities is an engineering problem. There is little more the state can do to accelerate R&D timelines. Infrastructure optimization, by contrast, is precisely where direct state intervention can move the needle. And regardless of how the chip export controls ultimately play out, a leaner, better-coordinated compute infrastructure will serve China well over the long term.
JEREMY WALLACE
A. Doak Barnett Professor of China Studies, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies
From a climate-oriented perspective, the 15th Five Year Plan is a disappointing, conservative document. To be sure, Chinese plans on clean energy have tended to be “under promise, over deliver” affairs. And there is the new Ecological and Environmental Code, which some see as laying the groundwork for a future Climate Law. Still, this document refuses to plan for the transition. Instead, it extends the current situation—where clean electricity covers all new demand but little or nothing is done to displace coal—for another five years.
It’s unclear to me why this conservatism is present. Of course, electricity grids are famously focused on reliability. Blackouts are serious political problems to be avoided, and memories of inadequate generation leading to shortages in 2021 are only five years old. Yet China has added a once-unfathomable amount of solar generating capacity over those five years. An additional 55 GW came online in 2021, then a conspicuously lucky 88 GW in 2022, followed by 216 GW, 278 GW, and 315 GW in the past three years, respectively.
That’s 950 GW in just solar. The country’s numerous solar manufacturers can now pump out 1,000 GW of panels every year. China could race to become the first electrostate, but instead, if the Five-Year Plan is any indication, it remains frozen.Even absent democratic decision making, it’s politically hard to lay off miners and cut off the tax-paying companies of the coal sector. It’s even harder when the mood of the country, especially its urban middle and upper classes, is demoralized by the policy-induced bursting of the real estate bubble. That being said, solar has come so far and so fast in the past five years that I dare to dream about what could be, despite a disappointing five-year plan. Perhaps the 15th FYP will be eclipsed as dramatically as the 14th FYP was in this space. After all, the green tech revolution is a huge mess that just might save the world.
ANGELA HUYUE ZHANG
Professor of Law, Gould School of Law, University of Southern California
China’s new Five-Year Plan offers a revealing answer to a question that observers often get wrong: What role does law play in Chinese technological development?
The conventional view is that China advances innovation through industrial policy and state subsidies, while law is largely irrelevant. But the 15th Five-Year Plan makes clear that this view is misleading. In fact, regulation features prominently in Chapter 5, which addresses emerging and future industries, including electric vehicles, advanced manufacturing, biopharmaceuticals, embodied AI, quantum technology, and brain-computer interfaces.
More specifically, the Plan explicitly calls for regulatory approaches including “sandbox regulation” and “trigger-based regulation,” as well as for legislation in emerging sectors such as biopharmaceuticals and “intelligent driving.” This points to a distinctive Chinese model of legal governance, one I have explored in a recent paper: Law should not be seen merely as a brake on technological change, but rather as critical infrastructure for innovation.
Consider first “trigger-based regulation.” The idea is straightforward. Instead of attempting to design comprehensive rules for every technology in advance, regulators allow innovation to move forward and intervene quickly when concrete risks emerge. In effect, the state tolerates uncertainty at the front end, often delaying sweeping legislative or regulatory intervention until problems become highly visible, systematic, and politically salient. There are certainly downsides to such an approach, as sharp regulatory swings can also spook investors and entrepreneurs, as seen in the previous tech crackdown. Nonetheless, permissive and tolerant regulation was central to the early growth of China’s internet economy, and a similar stance has now been applied to generative AI.
Now consider the other concept detailed in the Plan: “sandbox regulation.” Here the state does the opposite. In some sectors, innovation cannot proceed unless government acts first. Autonomous driving is the clearest example. Existing legal frameworks were not designed for fully driverless vehicles on public roads. If the law is not updated quickly, the technology remains trapped in the lab. So regulators have created bounded zones for experimentation, authorized pilot programs, and gradually constructed rules for liability, insurance, and technical standards. In those settings, law is not merely reacting to innovation; it is clearing a path for it.
This helps explain why China has moved so quickly in autonomous driving. Robotaxis, for instance, have now expanded to more than 20 Chinese cities, while commercial deployment in the United States has so far been permitted in only six, even though companies such as Waymo began experimenting years earlier.
The point is not that China is simply “better” at regulating technology. It is that China’s hierarchical political system can align legislation, administrative approval, and local experimentation more quickly when it decides that a sector is strategic. Democratic systems, by design, are more decentralized and often move more slowly. That can be a virtue, offering stronger protections for individual liberty and public safety. But it can also impose real coordination costs in fast-moving sectors.
Law, in other words, is not peripheral to China’s innovation model. It is central to it. The 15th Five-Year Plan makes that plain.
PAUL TRIOLO
Honorary Senior Fellow, Center for China Analysis, Asia Society Policy Institute
China’s 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030) marks a sharper, more security-driven technology agenda than its predecessor. The 14th Five-Year-Plan was drafted before Washington’s sweeping 2022–2025 semiconductor-related export controls and investment restrictions—and before generative AI became the defining field of technological competition.
As a result, the 14th FYP treated semiconductors, AI, quantum, and digital infrastructure as major development priorities, but kept them within a familiar framework of modernization and industrial upgrading. The new Plan outline is different in tone and design: it is much more explicit about breaking bottlenecks, securing “strategic initiative,” and reorganizing state support around resilient control of critical technologies and rapid deployment at scale.
What stands out most is that AI is no longer just one priority sector among many; it is the organizing logic for a broad industrial transformation. The new outline calls for progress on the comprehensive “AI+” action plan—building on implementation guidance released last summer. AI+ links AI to science, industry, culture, public services, and governance, and pairs AI development with a three-part buildout of computing power, algorithms, and data. It calls for national hub computing clusters, explores building ultra-large intelligent computing clusters, supports government purchasing of computing services and compute leasing, promotes coordinated siting of green electricity and compute, and aims to lower compute costs for small and medium-sized firms. It also pushes “model-chip-cloud-application” (模芯云用) coordination—while promoting multimodal models, agents, embodied intelligence, and even “explore” the development of artificial general intelligence. Just as important, it calls for national AI data corpora, sector-specific high-quality datasets, and a framework for the reasonable use of AI training data.
On semiconductors, the new plan is less about a single headline performance or capacity target than situating the chip ecosystem into a broader sovereign digital stack. The outline explicitly calls for upgrading high-end processors, optoelectronic devices, basic software, and industrial software, while highlighting the need for “decisive breakthroughs in key core technologies,” signaling unprecedented emphasis on self-reliance. In other words, Beijing is no longer thinking only in terms of catching up in one manufacturing node; it is trying to thicken the entire ecosystem around compute infrastructure, software, data, and application deployment under external pressure. This approach was also reflected in an important paper released just before the NPC by semiconductor industry leaders.
The plan is also more ambitious on robotics and future industries. It names robots, particularly humanoid versions, as among critical strategic industries—and elevates embodied intelligence to the same tier as quantum technology, brain-computer interfaces, 6G, and nuclear fusion. It also introduces structured mechanisms for the state to support future industries: large-scale application-demonstration programs, national AI application pilot and testing bases, concept-verification centers, and explicit risk-sharing mechanisms for investment.
Finally, the financing modes around government support for advanced technology is evolving. Major Chinese banks last week began ramping up lending to technology firms, with some targeting around 30% growth in loans to innovation-oriented companies; loans to small and medium tech firms had already risen to 3.63 trillion yuan by end-2025. That matters because the 15th Plan is not just prioritizing AI, semiconductors, and robotics rhetorically. It is building the financial plumbing—through banks, state planning, compute procurement, and industrial pilots—to fund them at scale in a far more hostile external technology environment.
Expect to see a lot more Chinese AI and advanced semiconductor and robotics firms tap capital markets in 2026, following on the heels of major IPOs in Shanghai and Hong Kong at the end of 2025 and early this year, including GPU players Biren, Moore Threads, Illuvatar, and Enflame, and AI model developers Zhipu, Minimax, and, soon, Moonshot. China’s five year plans have long since given up their planning aura in favor of high-level guidance, and the 15th iteration reflects both Beijing’s industrial priorities and its flexibility on how precisely they are achieved.
MARTIN CHORZEMPA
Dennis Weatherstone Senior Fellow, Peterson Institute for International Economics
China’s latest five-year plan reveals how central AI has become for China’s leadership. The plan mentions AI 52 times and includes a standalone AI+ action plan. By contrast, the last five-year plan from 2021 mentioned the term six times. AI has gone from a sideshow listed among other critical technologies to a key part of government ambitions for its economy and society.
China’s AI strategy can seem like the opposite of America’s: U.S. labs are framed as racing to artificial general intelligence (AGI) with closed source models, while Chinese are fast followers focused on diffusion of open models. The U.S. aims for limited regulation, while China organizes a massive industrial policy effort to develop indigenous capacity and reduce dependence on the United States for key semiconductors and equipment.
Yet, China’s approach has striking similarities to the U.S. AI Action Plan. Both frame AI as crucial to strategic competition. Both aim to accelerate AI development and diffusion, and both are positive on open-source AI despite safety risks.
The U.S. aims for “unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance.” China’s plan deploys military metaphors like “storm heavily fortified positions,” alongside a narrative of “win[ing] the strategic initiative” in “fierce international competition.”
Point after point in China’s plan calls to “accelerate” initiatives to develop and diffuse AI, reminiscent of the second Trump Administration’s support for AI “accelerationists” over more cautious voices accused of being “doomers.”
China’s government work report said that “China-made large AI models spearheaded the development of the global open-source AI ecosystem” and vowed to “support the development of open-source AI communities.” The U.S. plan more explicitly notes the “geostrategic value” of ensuring the United States has competitive open models to rival China’s. Notably, China’s plan does not preclude labs, such as Alibaba, going in a more closed direction.
Where the two countries differ the most is the role of the state. The U.S. plan is more focused on eliminating perceived barriers to AI development and adoption through deregulation. China’s more interventionist plan calls for the state to take on a more active role to foster “self-reliant, controllable” inputs for AI that do not depend on the United States. The plan thus includes efforts to make more advanced chips for training and inference, forming nationwide networks of computing power, and a national market for data—a longstanding ambition that is now more important as it could serve as a training data source for technical AI applications.
BEN MURPHY
Translation Manager, Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), Georgetown University
One of the major problems the 15th Five-Year Plan is attempting to address is the innovation-application mismatch in China. Compared with competitors such as the United States, a much greater proportion of scientific research breakthroughs in China occur in state-run universities and research institutes rather than in corporate R&D labs. The disconnect between the academically oriented, state-funded researchers who make discoveries and the Chinese corporations and startups with the market knowledge and profit incentive to exploit innovations is a perpetual concern for policymakers.
Hence the 15th Five-Year Plan’s emphasis on the “mainstay status” (主体地位) of companies in technological innovation. The 14th Five-Year Plan (2020-2025) featured a lone call for “strengthening the status of enterprises as the principal entities of innovation,” and the fact that the 15th Five-Year Plan repeats similar language and elevates the phrase in importance (it is the subject of Chapter 10 of the Plan) is a tacit acknowledgement by China’s leaders that this problem has not been resolved and is in fact becoming worse.
And so—despite the irony that five-year plans are one of the most obvious holdovers from China’s Stalinist planned economy era—the 15th Five-Year Plan advocates putting more power and resources into the hands of Chinese companies. It calls for “increasing enterprises’ level of participation in national major technological innovation decision-making.” It encourages major corporate technology projects to be included, in an unspecified way, in state technology plans. It grants “greater autonomy” to “leading enterprises” in choosing which technical routes to pursue, which entities they collaborate with, and how they allocate expenditures when working on state-funded technology projects. A notable example of this policy in the 15th Five-Year Plan is the emphasis given to developing China’s commercial space sector, subject of a recent national plan of its own. Commercial spaceflight was mentioned only once in passing in the 14th Five-Year Plan, but in the 15th, it is one of 10 “new industries” to be developed, along with perennial priorities such as integrated circuits and large aircraft.
Of course, like many policies before it, the 15th Five-Year Plan is long on aspirations and short on specifics. Making more scientific data from state-funded projects available to companies—another proposal in the Plan—sounds smart, but who decides which companies get the data, and how much? If state-funded universities and labs are to permit “micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises” to use their innovations per the Plan, how will issues like licensing fees and IP ownership be handled? It remains to be seen whether and how policymakers will translate aspiration to reality.
