When China’s top leadership meets next week, there will be an unusually packed schedule. The upcoming Fourth Plenum – a closed-door meeting of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) more than 300-member Central Committee – will review not only how the country will be run for the next five years, but also, perhaps, who will be running it.
Traditionally a session dedicated to CCP governance, this Plenum has been repurposed to focus primarily on reviewing China’s upcoming Five-Year Plan (2026–2030), the country’s foundational social and economic blueprint. But it is also a chance to fill some of the growing number of high-profile vacancies in China’s military and civilian leadership.
Who Wins out in Efforts to Shape China’s New Five-Year Plan?
China’s governance system is built around documents, and few carry more weight than the Five-Year Plan.
Once the backbone of China’s planned economy, Five-Year Plans have evolved into high-level roadmaps, laying out the priorities and performance benchmarks that set the parameters for more in-depth national and subnational policymaking.
Drafting a plan of that scale is an extremely labour-intensive process – preparations begin at least two years in advance. But as a primarily economic, rather than political, document, it is a process that also brings in a remarkably broad range of stakeholders: academics, businesses and even more than 3 million public suggestions.
The result is a rare level of insight into Chinese policy debates – but also an unusual amount of noise.
While full details won’t be announced until the Plan is formally adopted next March (with sector- and province-specific versions landing even later), the Plenum will be the first chance to get a sense of the Chinese leadership’s thinking on these key debates.
Some of those big questions include:
Building a “national unified market”: how can central leadership crack down on local protectionism and bring down inter-provincial barriers?
New binding indicators: should the government adopt explicit new targets for priorities like carbon emissions or consumption’s share of GDP?
Rebalancing growth: the age-old debate among Chinese experts – how (or should) China pivot from investment- and export-driven expansion towards demand-led growth?
What Is the Next Stage of China’s Sci-Tech Agenda?
China’s last Five-Year Plan committed to building foundations for greater technological self-reliance, reflecting the leadership’s growing conviction that sci-tech innovation underpins both China’s economic vitality and its national security. This time around, the focus is likely to expand into diffusing those tech gains across the Chinese economy.
China’s diffusion ambitions are dual track. Unlike most advanced economies, which have traditionally shed lower-value-add manufacturing as they developed, Beijing wants both to secure an advantage in the industries of the future and upgrade productivity in more traditional sectors. An applications-oriented approach to new technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, is seen as key to both.
The tech ambitions of the new Five-Year Plan, which officially launches in 2026, will be building on the success of the Made in China 2025 initiative, which aimed to move China up the value chain in ten priority sectors, including next-generation IT, green tech and robotics. The initiative has been remarkably effective in mobilising Chinese industry – but also remarkably effective at sparking US alarm.
Reports have suggested that leadership is considering a successor to Made in China 2025 but, even without a direct successor, the lessons of the initiative – that technological self-reliance is China’s best buffer against an uncertain world – are now firmly baked into leadership’s thinking.
And they’ll also be baked into the Five-Year Plan, which acts as the ultimate cross-agency signalling device. Expect it to reinforce the message that developing and diffusing new technologies is now a core criterion for individual progression.
Does the Plenum Replace Purged Generals on China’s Top Central Military Commission?
Three out of seven seats on China’s Central Military Commission (CMC) are currently vacant – probably the most serious disruption to China’s military leadership since the Cultural Revolution. Plenums are the easiest opportunity to reappoint these positions – if President Xi Jinping chooses to.
There are two key places to watch on the personnel front: the CMC itself and the Politburo, a body comprising the CCP’s 24 leading officials. If General He Weidong, who is reportedly under investigation, is formally removed from the Party, it would open up a space on the Politburo – a good place to watch for rising stars as competition intensifies ahead of 2027’s Party Congress (as are the nine spots up for grabs on the lower-ranking Central Committee).
But it is also entirely possible that there will be no change on either front. There are no fixed rules on either the CMC’s or Politburo’s size, and Xi has proved himself to be quite comfortable with bending norms to suit political priorities. Keeping the CMC at four members for now, for example, might present some operational challenges, but would be a sign that Xi still believes that significant work remains to curb corruption and disciplinary issues in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
Will Xi Announce Changes to His Own Role?
The Chinese political rumour mill runs like clockwork: nearly every summer reports emerge of a new challenge to Xi’s power.
Those rumours were unusually widespread this summer, with reports that Party elders, dissatisfied with Xi’s performance, were looking to oust him.
Theoretically, a Fourth Plenum would be the place to do this. A full plenary session of the Central Committee can create or revive new bodies, propose changes to the Party constitution and make key personnel decisions; in fact, it was at a Fourth Plenum in 1989 that General Secretary Zhao Ziyang was formally dismissed.
But Xi’s position is vastly different to Zhao’s, not least because, at least by the Party’s own standards, he is proving largely effective – holding firm under US pressure and successfully reasserting Party control. His dominance over state media remains unchallenged and military restructuring appears to be happening around him, not in opposition to him.
That’s not to say there won’t be any changes, with clear signs that elite politics are shifting behind the scenes. Xi’s growing tendency to skip overseas engagements, for example, could be read as a loss of power. Much more likely is that he is becoming increasingly comfortable delegating to Politburo deputies after securing a clean sweep of loyalists at 2022’s Party Congress (a remarkable success that quickly debunked similar rumours of a leadership coup back in 2022).
But either way, it is possible that the demands of Xi’s three concurrent roles might be up for discussion. He could, for example, consider handing over his role as president at some point; this is by far the least important of his three main roles, and the one that requires the most international travel.
Again, it is entirely possible nothing happens – or nothing is made public, at least. But there are some genuine unknowns in Chinese elite politics – the sources of PLA turmoil in particular – with a track record of producing surprises.
How Does the Leadership Tighten Party Discipline?
The military is not the only place where China’s leadership wants higher standards. Next week’s meeting will also likely retain some of the traditional focus of a Fourth Plenum: Party governance.
Intra-Party discipline has been a key focus under Xi. Increasingly, leadership is turning its attention to tackling excessive “hedonism” and “bureaucratism” – issues such as dereliction of duty or extravagant wining and dining – seen as root causes of more overt corruption. Tens of thousands of Party members are being punished every month, a record high, as part of an intensified crackdown on violations of the “eight-point anti-corruption regulations”.
It is not necessarily that behaviour is getting worse, but that leadership appears more concerned by public perceptions of poor service, especially post-Covid, which go against the Party’s promises of a “people-centred approach”. Tellingly, 94 per cent of investigations in the past 18 months have been at township level or below, targeting the grassroots cadres who tend to be ordinary people’s primary point of contact with officialdom. [_]
The Plenum will be a chance to double down on leadership’s message that it needs officials to work in the public (and Party’s) interest – not self-interest. For all the focus on the new policies of the Five-Year Plan, the personnel side matters too: leadership sees the discipline and loyalty of those delivering it as important as the Plan itself.
As Xi himself puts it: “The world is undergoing great changes unseen in a century.”
In Beijing’s eyes, the next five years will be decisive: the pace of technological and geopolitical disruption demands that every lever of state policy be aligned to secure China’s position.