A national five-year plan tells you what a regime believes about the unfolding of society over time: that the future is an engineering problem, history has a rhythm, and the state holds the baton. China is now in its 15th such plan. Its language has evolved over the decades. Whereas early plans stressed Soviet-assisted heavy industry, the current one elevates “AI Plus,” swarm intelligence, embodied AI, and intelligent agents. The word “rejuvenation” appears with the frequency of a liturgical response. But the plan remains a metronome for national development, as an official commentary put it in 2026.
China spent 3.93 trillion yuan on research and development in 2025, or 2.8% of GDP. The country holds 6.3 million valid invention patents and installed 295,000 industrial robots in
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