By Mattia Landoni

As China prepares to roll out its 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030), global investors, multinational corporations, and financial institutions are watching for signs of the country’s economic direction. 

In this article, Associate Professor of Finance Mattia Landoni examines what the upcoming Plan could mean for global financial markets, international investors, and for the operating environment of multinational businesses.

China’s Five-Year Plans are more than policy manifestos; they are strategic instruments that shape how capital is allocated, how industries evolve, and how both domestic and international firms interpret China’s long-term political commitments. They function as national development blueprints that set the country’s economic, social, and technological priorities for fixed five-year periods, guiding government policy, public investment, and—indirectly—private sector behaviour across the entire economy. 

The fifteenth of these plans will cover 2026-2030, and as such all eyes are on China as global businesses seek insight into the country’s economic direction. Before assessing specific opportunities in finance, technology, and cross-border collaboration, however, it is essential to understand the instrument itself. Five-Year Plans are not simply policy catalogues; they shape how capital is allocated, how industrial upgrading proceeds, and how both domestic and international firms interpret long-term political commitment.

The 15th Five-Year Plan sets out China’s priorities for 2026–2030 across economic, technological, social, and environmental domains. It outlines targets for high-quality growth, industrial upgrading, and innovation in advanced manufacturing, alongside strengthened commitments to green development and energy security. It also emphasises expanding domestic demand, improving public services, and raising household income to support a more consumption-driven economy, and calls for continued opening of the services sector and deeper financial reform, including further integration of Shanghai and Hong Kong as international financial centres. In parallel, it reinforces long-term objectives such as rural revitalisation, demographic adaptation, food and resource security, digital infrastructure, and the pursuit of “high-standard” international economic and trade rules. Together, these priorities form the blueprint that will guide policy coordination and investment decisions over the next five years.

Why does China continue to use Five-Year Plans?

Understanding the role and logic of planning is not a theoretical detour. It is the analytical foundation for interpreting which parts of the 15th Five-Year Plan are likely to become operational reforms, which represent a continuation of existing trajectories, and which mainly express longer-term strategic positioning. It is also key to seeing how the Plan’s structure influences the risk perceptions, investment horizons, and strategic choices of global financial markets and multinational corporations.

First of all, everyone plans. The European Union has multi-year budgets and continent-wide rail and energy strategies; ministries across major OECD economies publish multi-year roadmaps for climate, digital infrastructure, and R&D. In domains where long-term coordination matters such as energy grids, logistics, defence, or semiconductors, planning reliably outperforms improvisation. What distinguishes China is not the presence of planning, but the political stability and institutional capacity to publish a single, all-economy plan that can reasonably be expected to guide ministries, provinces, and firms for multiple years.

Planning accelerates national priorities by concentrating capital, talent, and entrepreneurial effort in sectors identified as strategically important. This coordination can produce powerful advantages in areas such as advanced manufacturing, green energy, and digital infrastructure, but it also carries structural costs. Periodic overinvestment or overcapacity—seen at times in photovoltaics, parts of the battery industry, and segments of AI hardware—reflects the intensity with which policy-endorsed sectors attract resources. At the same time, planning inevitably shifts some entrepreneurial energy toward centrally determined missions and away from the decentralised discovery of consumer preferences.

Recent data from the final year of the 14th Five-Year Plan offer a timely illustration of these dynamics. In 2025, China met its official 5% growth target, but did so largely through exceptionally strong exports, which offset weak domestic demand, declining fixed-asset investment, and continued household caution. Consumption growth again lagged policy aspirations, while a record trade surplus carried a disproportionate share of overall growth. This outcome highlights a recurring feature of Five-Year Plans: they are most powerful in domains such as industry, infrastructure, and exports, where coordination and scale matter, and less decisive where outcomes depend on dispersed household behaviour and preference formation.

These trade-offs are inherent to any system that relies on long-horizon coordination at scale, and China continues to accept them because they support national strategic objectives. The transition to a more market-driven and globally integrated economy has not increased the relevance of these costs; it has simply reshaped how they are managed and balanced against the benefits of sustained policy direction.

A useful way to interpret a new Five-Year Plan is to read it against the previous one and ask how the emphasis has shifted. Some elements represent genuinely new priorities: areas where language is upgraded, broadened, or placed in a more central section of the document, signalling meaningful policy momentum. Other elements reflect continuation of long-running trends, where the Plan reaffirms commitments already underway. Still others function primarily as strategic positioning, expressing China’s long-term aspirations or diplomatic stance without implying imminent operational change. This comparative reading helps distinguish where global investors should expect substantive innovation, where to anticipate gradual evolution, and where language mainly serves to articulate China’s role in the international system.

Implications for global financial markets

From a global finance perspective, the 15th Five-Year Plan contains several themes that could meaningfully shape China’s financial architecture and its interaction with international markets. One important shift is the clearer commitment to strengthening monetary policy transmission and deepening the system of direct financing. The Plan calls for improving the “monetary policy transmission mechanism” and developing “technology finance, green finance, inclusive finance, pension finance, and digital finance” while moving more quickly to “build Shanghai into an international financial centre”. Compared with the 14th Plan, which emphasised stability and risk control, the 15th Plan frames financial development as an affirmative tool for market completeness. This suggests accelerated work on interest rate benchmarks, collateral systems, repo-market depth, and the growth of derivatives and structured financial products.

A second highlight is the elevation of pension finance. While multi-pillar pension reform has been discussed for years, the new Plan positions pension finance as a strategic component of capital-market development. In practice, this means expanding the institutional-investor base that anchors long-duration investment. Global asset managers, insurers, and annuity providers could see new opportunities in lifecycle funds, risk-adjusted portfolio strategies, and long-horizon infrastructure or green-transition assets. Pension capital is a structural reform, not a cyclical one, and could turn out to be one of the most consequential financial developments of the decade.

A third area to watch is cross-border finance. The Plan signals a push to “advance the internationalisation of the RMB” and build a “risk-controllable cross-border RMB payment system” while fostering Hong Kong’s role as an international financial centre with global connectivity. These priorities are evolutionary rather than revolutionary, but they suggest gradual expansion of RMB settlement, deeper treasury functions for multinational firms, and stronger infrastructure linking Shanghai, Hong Kong, and emerging pilot zones like the Hainan Free Trade Port.

Equally important is what the Plan does not emphasise. The conspicuous absence of crypto-asset, tokenisation, or market-led digital-asset language confirms that financial innovation will remain closely tied to the state-managed perimeter, with the digital RMB and regulated payments infrastructure absorbing most of the experimentation. Similarly, calls to “promote reform in global economic and financial governance” reflect diplomatic positioning more than imminent market reform.

Taken together, these signals suggest that the financial highlights of the 15th Five-Year Plan will not be dramatic liberalisations, but rather targeted deepening of financial markets where foreign expertise complements national priorities: improving monetary transmission, expanding long-duration capital through pension finance, and building cross-border financial architecture that supports Shanghai’s rise as a global hub.

New opportunities for multinational businesses, global investors, and international collaboration

The 15th Five-Year Plan signals a period of widening opportunity for multinational businesses and global investors, particularly in areas where policy clarity lowers risk and enables long-horizon investment. The Plan explicitly commits China to “expand market access and open up more areas, in particular in the service sector” while creating an institutional environment that is “transparent, stable, and predictable”. For firms accustomed to modelling policy uncertainty as a risk premium, this type of commitment reduces a hidden cost of doing business and broadens the feasible frontier of investment.

The Plan creates a complementary set of opportunities through parallel emphasis on boosting consumption, via a call for the “expansion of high-quality consumer goods and services” and the creation of “high-profile new consumption scenarios with broad appeal. Faster income growth, better public services, and more inbound consumption position China as a more mature consumer market, even as supply-side missions remain central. China’s consumer markets are already impressive; clearer signals on domestic demand raise the ceiling on how diverse and globally influential they can become.

The Plan’s broader agenda to modernise financial markets—including deeper direct financing, market-based interest-rate formation, and the development of long-duration capital—opens new avenues for foreign financial institutions. Foreign institutions with expertise in asset management, risk analytics, credit infrastructure, and treasury operations stand to benefit as China’s capital markets deepen and become more internationally connected.

According to the plan, international collaboration will also become more structured. It calls for alignment with “high-standard international economic and trade rules” and development of the Hainan Free Trade Port to ‘high standards’”, creating spaces where foreign universities, research centres, hospitals, and digital-services providers can participate more freely. In frontier sectors from biomanufacturing to 6G, green hydrogen, and AI, the push to “create an open and globally competitive innovation ecosystem” provides opportunities not only to teach but also to learn, as Chinese firms increasingly become technology partners rather than technology takers.

Conclusion

In short, if followed through, the 15th Five-Year Plan presents a compelling and multi-dimensional roadmap. The Plan’s combination of long-term strategic direction, with expanded services openness, deeper consumer markets, greener industrial upgrading, and financial-sector reform lay a foundation for a more mature, open, and globally integrated Chinese economy.

For multinational businesses and global investors, this means a wider, more predictable field on which to build long-horizon strategies and collaborative ventures.

Mattia Landoni is an Associate Professor of Finance at CEIBS. Prior to joining CEIBS, he served as a Senior Financial Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. His research primarily focuses on public finance policy, lending markets and regulation, financial stability, tax optimization strategies, and cryptocurrencies.