China’s New Five-Year Plan

Derek Scissors / March 08, 2011

This year’s meetings of China’s National People’s Congress, which started March 5, roll out the 12th five-year plan covering 2011–2015. A flock of freshly minted experts assure us that five-year plans are sacrosanct: If the PRC makes a commitment in the plan, it will be met.

Hardly. The PRC’s five-year plans give a general sense of the direction, whether new or old, that Beijing wants to go. But China often does not end up there five years later.

Headlining plan 12 is the new, lower target for annual GDP growth of 7.0 percent. This is not a genuine objective. Beijing intends to exceed that figure each and every year, just as the last five-year annual growth target of 7.5 percent was easily exceeded. Nearly all provincial governments, as they have each year for more than a decade, will then announce results yet higher than the national “average”—new math with Chinese characteristics. (more…)