The Fourth Plenum of the Twentieth Central Committee, held in October 2025, marked more than a routine leadership meeting: it ratified the culmination of a ten-year project to fuse national planning, security strategy, and technological control under Xi Jinping’s direct authority. The new 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030) formalizes an architecture that has been taking shape since 2013, as Xi consolidated command over the Party, military, and financial system and began redesigning the economy around “self-reliance” and long-term systemic confrontation. The result is a model of strategic endurance—a self-contained system able to sustain rivalry with the United States through control of capital allocation, industrial organization, and information flows.
The plan is therefore less a policy blueprint than a reconstituted Cold War playbook for both enduring and exerting external pressure without succumbing to internal fracture. It is, in effect, the operational expression of “comprehensive national power” (综合国力), the Party’s systems-engineered framework for converting the country’s material, technological, and institutional resources into strategic capability and geopolitical advantage (
, September 5).
