While China will unveil its 14th Five Year Plan at next year’s National People’s Congress, the government is already working on it.
For what we know, it will surely involve Made in China 2025, but not only that.
The results of the 13th Five Year Plan so far
The 13th Five Year Plan is almost finished, and with it, many important steps have been done.
China Daily has recently published a infographic to show the results of the past five years.
There are few particularly important feats shown in the infographic.
1. China’s position on the Global Innovation Index went from 29th in 2015 to 14th in 2020. This is an important result that shows how China is moving into hi-tech for its future, as required by the Made in China 2025 plan.
2. China is currently accounting for 20% of the top 2500 R&D investors of the world, and her importance is going only to increase.
3. Companies involved in hi-tech and advanced technologies are now almost three times as many as 5 years ago.
4. What used to be a typical problem when talking about China, the air quality, was greatly improved. Now the air quality is good in 82% of the days, considering a wide range of cities and prefectures. This was not achieved in just 5 years, but it’s an outstanding result, considering most policies have been introduced less than 15 years ago.
5. The water in rivers and lakes improved greatly. The areas with good water quality went from 66% to 74,9% in these five years.
The results of the 13th Five Year Plans can be seen by the income growth and the urbanization rate. Central China is catching up with the Eastern Coast, which has always been far more rich.
Last, but not least, is poverty alleviation: managing to lift the entire Chinese population out of poverty is an outstanding result, that should be delivered by 2021.
The potential topics of the 14th Five Year Plan
The next Five Year Plan will focus on key areas that China needs to work on.
Some of these key areas will probably be:
1. Hi-tech development, in order to prevent trade wars from crippling the economy and proceed to realize Made in China 2025;
2. Scientific and medical development, both to prevent future pandemics and fight the current one, which is far from over in most of the world;
3. Financial growth, which can be expressed by opening more to foreign investment and by launching the digital RMB in the world market as a rival of the USD. Furthermore, many Chinese companies need support to go global because they have low experience abroad. This calls for both consulting companies and import/export specialists;
4. Preventing climate-change with new technologies, materials and clean energy. Investing in both the development and the diffusion of these will greatly help to reach the objective of being carbon-neutral by 2060.
5. Digital infrastructure development, including not only the current 5G, but also the future 6G. A better digital infrastructure will help both the government and the citizens communicate to both prevent and solve issues more easily.
Opportunities for future businesses in and outside China
Consumption is the growing engine of the Chinese economy. But sustainable development is perhaps an even more important topic.
The healthcare system will surely increase in importance for the social expenditures.
Especially public hospitals need to be built, so that a future outbreak can be prevented more easily without having to organize makeshift hospitals.
We need also to consider that the growth of China influences the world: getting ready to seize the opportunities coming with the 14th Five Year Plan will be useful to overcome the global crisis brought by the coronavirus.