China’s latest five-year plan aims for technological self-reliance

China’s new five-year plan — an overarching policy proposal for the next term of Chinese Communist Party leadership — is focused on making the nation technologically self-reliant and less vulnerable to foreign pressure, Bloomberg reports. The plan has yet to be officially adopted, but is being released ahead of a summit between President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping in South Korea.

The main focus of the proposal is to make China’s tech and science industries self-reliant and less dependent on products created by international companies. Bloomberg writes that the proposal is particularly interested in developing “fields such as semiconductors and artificial intelligence” which are currently driven in part by products from US companies like Nvidia and OpenAI. China also hopes to “bolster domestic consumption” and make the country less dependent on exporting, a business that’s been thrown into chaos by a fluctuating tariff regime set by the Trump administration.

Per the AP, this new five-year plan mostly builds on the previous five-year plan China set during Trump’s first-term, which focused on investing in technology as part of the country’s economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, the new plan aims to continue the growth of China’s wind and solar industries and “accelerate the all-out green transformation of economic and social development.”

In the context of the US and China’s back and forth over international trade and access to resources, the new plan, as reported by Bloomberg and the AP, seems like a response to the growing tensions between the two countries. One that could make China less burdened by the US moving forward.