Abstract
China’s pursuit of its second centenary goal—to become a fully developed modern socialist country by the middle of the twenty-first century—coincides with an international order increasingly characterised by strategic rivalry, fragmented production networks and competing institutions.
This article examines whether China can translate its industrial scale, technological capabilities and international connectivity into realizing its goal under these conditions. Drawing on the concept of a multiplex world, it argues that China’s prospects cannot be understood through a binary choice between American predominance and Chinese succession. Instead, China’s development will depend on navigating overlapping centres of power while correcting domestic economic imbalances. A qualitative synthesis of policy documents, international institutional assessments and research literature identifies three interacting requirements: productivity-enhancing transformation, stronger household welfare and demand, and the preservation of an open external environment.
China possesses substantial advantages in manufacturing, clean technologies and infrastructure, but demographic ageing, financial indebtedness, uneven institutional incentives and geopolitical escalation constrain developmental returns. China’s fifteenth Five-Year Plan constitutes an important implementation window rather than a guarantee of success. The article concludes that centenary achievement remains plausible but conditional: China must convert productive capacity into broadly shared prosperity and international economic centrality into durable, mutually beneficial cooperation.
Keywords: China; centenary goals; multiplex world; economic rebalancing; technological development; geoeconomic fragmentation; global governance
1. Introduction
China’s long-term development project confronts a central paradox. Its productive capabilities and international economic connections have expanded dramatically, yet the environment in which those capabilities must generate further prosperity has become less accommodating. The International Monetary Fund’s assessment published in February 2026 described an economy that remained resilient, recording 5 per cent growth in 2025, but faced weak private domestic demand, property-sector repercussions, persistent disinflationary pressures, and obstacles for youth employment. The World Trade Organization’s March 2026 assessment likewise identified intensifying trade fragmentation, particularly through trade frictions between China and the United States. Economic strength and strategic vulnerability are therefore advancing together. (IMF, 2026a; WTO, 2026).
This article asks: under what conditions can China realise its second centenary goal in an increasingly fragmented but still interconnected international system? The political timetable envisages the basic realisation of socialist modernisation by 2035 and the construction of a prosperous and powerful modern socialist country by mid-century, coinciding with the People’s Republic’s centenary in 2049. Either stage implies that China may overtake the United States in aggregate economic output, with implications for income growth, technological capacity, public welfare, environmental quality and national strength (CPC, 2022).
The historical foundation is substantial. A joint World Bank and Chinese institutional study found that, over four decades, close to 800 million people moved above the international extreme-poverty threshold used in the study. It also stressed that vulnerability persisted at income thresholds more appropriate to an upper-middle-income economy. This distinction is important: overcoming mass extreme poverty does not automatically provide the institutions, productivity or distributional systems needed for advanced prosperity. The next phase presents qualitatively different challenges from those encountered during early industrialisation (World Bank and DRC, 2022).
The argument developed here is one of conditional developmental resilience. China possesses the capacity to withstand significant external pressure, but endurance alone does not guarantee that its development model can deliver the desired destination. Its prospects depend on converting industrial and scientific capabilities into economy-wide productivity, increasing the security and purchasing power of households, and preventing international rivalry from destroying the relationships on which advanced development depends.
Methodologically, the article uses qualitative documentary analysis and structured scenario reasoning. It draws on Chinese policy statements, multilateral economic assessments, sectoral studies and international-relations scholarship available by 30 September 2026. Official documents are treated as evidence of declared priorities, not proof of implementation. Forecasts are distinguished from observed outcomes; research-output indicators are distinguished from commercial capabilities; and analytical scenarios are not assigned unsupported probabilities.
The article develops the supplied conference presentation’s emphasis on China’s adaptability while replacing a predominantly geopolitical narrative with a political-economy framework. Its contribution is to connect three questions often considered separately: the changing distribution of international power, the domestic foundations of Chinese development, and the practical conditions under which external connectivity supports rather than undermines national resilience.
2. Understanding the Multiplex World
A multiplex world is not simply a multipolar world with more powerful states. Acharya’s formulation emphasises an international system containing diverse political traditions, regional institutions and non-state actors, linked through overlapping economic and governance relationships. Authority is dispersed without eliminating interdependence. The analytical significance is that no single centre necessarily determines outcomes across security, finance, technology and development simultaneously. Different actors can exercise influence in different domains, while smaller states retain opportunities to shape institutional arrangements rather than merely choosing a dominant patron (Acharya, 2017).
For this article, multiplexity has three implications. First, relative power must be disaggregated: industrial leadership does not necessarily confer financial leadership, and military strength does not ensure political legitimacy. Second, partnerships are issue-specific rather than invariably comprehensive. Third, international influence depends partly on the usefulness and acceptability of the relationships a state offers. These propositions suggest that China’s developmental success need not require replacing the United States as a universal hegemon.
The persistence of American financial advantages illustrates the first implication. Federal Reserve researchers reported that the dollar accounted for approximately 58 per cent of disclosed official foreign-exchange reserves in 2024, compared with around 2 per cent for the renminbi. Their broader assessment connected dollar predominance to deep financial markets, liquidity and the supply of widely accepted assets. Although the research note could not capture all subsequent policy effects, it demonstrated that changes in production geography had not produced a corresponding transformation in monetary hierarchy (Bertaut, von Beschwitz and Curcuru, 2025).
Multiplexity must also be distinguished from an inherently benign distribution of power. Farrell and Newman’s account of “weaponized interdependence” shows how control over central nodes in financial and information networks can create opportunities for surveillance and exclusion. Interdependence may constrain conflict, but it can also supply instruments of coercion. The crucial variable is not simply how interconnected countries are, but where authority and substitutability are located within their connections (Farrell and Newman, 2019). This insight has become more prominent with recent coercive dynamics surrounding critical rare earths and the Strait of Hormuz.
Applied to China, this framework reveals a dual position. Chinese firms and institutions can be vulnerable where critical inputs or financial services remain concentrated abroad. At the same time, China’s own position in manufacturing and materials processing can create dependencies for others. Neither side therefore possesses an uncomplicated route to economic separation. Efforts to reduce one vulnerability can generate another, especially when diversification requires higher costs, longer supply chains or dependence on a different concentrated supplier.
The resulting strategic objective should not be self-sufficiency in every activity. Such an objective would confuse resilience with isolation. A more useful definition of resilience is the capacity to maintain essential functions, adapt production and preserve developmental choices when particular relationships are disrupted. Under this definition, domestic capabilities and diversified international cooperation are complementary.
This framework generates three propositions for the subsequent analysis. Firat, China’s external resilience should improve where overseas engagement supports genuine productive development in partner countries. Second, China’s domestic resilience should improve where productivity gains translate into household income and security. Third, geopolitical risk should increase where economic centrality is used coercively in ways that encourage a multiplicity of counter-coalitions. These are analytical propositions rather than established causal findings; they organise the evidence and identify questions for further empirical research.
3. Defining Centenary Achievement
A meaningful assessment of China’s centenary prospects requires a multidimensional definition of success. National output provides resources for development, but it does not independently reveal how those resources are distributed, whether public services are widely available and dependable, or whether growth can continue without accumulating financial and environmental liabilities.
The distinction between the 2035 milestone and mid-century end-goal is particularly important. China’s official political framework presents 2035 as an intermediate modernisation milestone, not the completion of every element of common prosperity. The fifteenth Five-Year Plan, approved on 12 March 2026, covers 2026–2030 and establishes an implementation period within that longer timetable. Its stated priorities span innovation, livelihoods, environmental transition and security, making it inappropriate to evaluate the programme through a single aggregate growth indicator (CPC, 2022; State Council, 2026a).
Simple growth arithmetic also requires care. Doubling a consistently defined real income measure over fifteen years requires average compound growth of approximately 4.73 per cent annually. This calculation does not establish the growth required from 2026 onwards: that depends on the increase already achieved, the precise income measure, population developments and the target’s interpretation. Per-capita disposable income, per-capita GDP and aggregate GDP are not interchangeable. Nor can comparisons in purchasing-power terms be substituted without explanation for comparisons at market exchange rates.
The article therefore proposes five dimensions for evaluating centenary progress.
First, productive advancement concerns output per worker, innovation diffusion and movement towards higher-value activities. Second, household prosperity concerns real incomes, secure employment and access to essential services. Third, financial sustainability concerns whether debt supports future productive capacity rather than recurrent refinancing. Fourth, ecological sustainability concerns absolute environmental outcomes, not merely improvements relative to a rapidly expanding economy. Fifth, external resilience concerns the ability to maintain access to markets, technology, resources and cooperative institutions without unacceptable strategic dependence.
These dimensions can conflict. Investment that advances technological security may deliver weak commercial returns. Rapid restructuring can improve capital allocation while imposing employment losses. Higher social spending may strengthen consumption but require fiscal reform. The analytical task is consequently to assess how such tensions are managed, rather than assume that every policy contributes equally to all national objectives.
The centenary goal is also relational without being reducible to a race. China’s prosperity depends significantly on international demand, standards, technological exchange and the stability of transport and financial systems. Other countries’ development can underpin or expand opportunities for China rather than diminish them. Conversely, a world in which China gains relative economic weight because its partners suffer stagnation may offer a less favourable environment for China’s development.
The relevant question is therefore not simply whether China becomes larger or stronger. It is whether its institutions can sustain an economy that is more productive, socially secure and adaptable while remaining connected to an international system it cannot unilaterally control.
4. Domestic Headwinds: From Investment Capacity to Household Prosperity
4.1 Demography and the changing sources of growth
Population ageing constrains development through several channels: labour supply, pension commitments, healthcare demand and the allocation of household savings. China’s National Bureau of Statistics reported an end-of-2025 population of approximately 1.405 billion, a decrease of 3.39 million from the previous year. People aged sixty and above accounted for 23 per cent of the total. These figures establish the scale of the demographic transition without implying that demographic decline automatically determines economic decline (NBS, 2026).
The developmental consequences depend on policy and productivity. A smaller workforce can produce more if workers have better skills, technologies and organisational support. Later retirement, where compatible with health and occupational conditions, can moderate labour-supply pressures. Better childcare and reduced discrimination can improve participation. Nevertheless, automation is not a perfect substitute for every form of labour, particularly in care services. A strategy centred exclusively on industrial robotics would leave important social and employment requirements unresolved.
The IMF identifies the gradual increase in retirement age as one measure that can mitigate the drag from a contracting workforce. Its broader recommendations emphasise that stronger social protection and more effective resource allocation are also necessary. This combination suggests that demographic adaptation should be understood as institutional transformation rather than simply a technological response (IMF, 2026b).
4.2 Property adjustment, indebtedness and confidence
A second challenge arises from the interaction of housing, local public finance and household expectations. The IMF’s 2025 Article IV report links prolonged property-sector adjustment to weaker local-government finances, subdued domestic demand and deflationary pressure. It also warns that state-led, debt-financed investment can generate financial vulnerabilities and excess supply when capital is allocated without adequate discipline (IMF, 2026a).
These relationships make policy sequencing important. Allowing inefficient investments to exit can improve long-term productivity, but disorderly adjustment may damage household wealth and confidence. Conversely, indiscriminate support can preserve weak balance sheets while postponing necessary restructuring. The appropriate distinction is between protecting essential social and financial functions and guaranteeing investments against loss.
A credible restructuring process would identify losses, allocate them transparently and protect basic public services. Central support could help prevent local fiscal stress from undermining education, health and social protection. However, support should be accompanied by changes to financing incentives; otherwise, debt relief may encourage a repetition of the same investment model. The objective should be to restore the capacity for useful expenditure rather than recreate dependence on continuously rising land and property values.
4.3 Consumption as a structural outcome
Consumption-led development does not mean abandoning manufacturing. It means ensuring that productive success generates sufficient household income and security to sustain domestic demand. The World Bank’s July 2026 assessment projected growth of 4.4 per cent in 2026 and 4.3 per cent in 2027, while highlighting cautious consumption and continuing housing adjustment. It identified stronger social protection, broader coverage and access based on residence as important instruments for reducing precautionary saving (World Bank, 2026a).
The policy implication is deeper than temporary purchasing incentives. Durable consumption depends on expectations about future earnings and expenses. If households remain uncertain about medical costs, retirement or children’s opportunities, one-off transfers may have limited effects. Reliable provision can change those expectations and release spending over a longer horizon.
The World Bank’s accompanying report argues that expenditure composition matters alongside the overall fiscal stance. It identifies scope to redirect resources towards social protection while improving the fiscal framework that supports local service delivery. This provides a basis for treating household welfare as productive economic infrastructure rather than as a residual use of revenues generated elsewhere (World Bank, 2026b).
The proposed interpretation of common prosperity follows from this relationship. Redistribution and productivity should not be treated as automatically antagonistic. Well-designed education, healthcare and social insurance can improve labour mobility, human capital and willingness to undertake entrepreneurial risks. Equally, social programmes must be financed and administered effectively. The relevant distinction is not between spending and asterity, but between arrangements that expand long-term capabilities and those that create commitments without reliabnle delivery.
China’s domestic challenge is thus to make the household economy a stronger foundation of national resilience. Industrial capacity cannot indefinitely compensate for weak consumption, and external demand cannot absorb every imbalance generated at home.
5. Industrial and Technological Strengths: Capabilities and Conversion Problems
5.1 Research leadership and economic performance
China’s expanding research capacity is a major developmental asset. ASPI’s March 2026 update reported that China led the production of highly cited research in sixty-nine of the seventy-four technologies tracked over 2021–2025. However, the tracker measures a defined category of research output; it does not establish comprehensive commercial, operational or military superiority. Bibliometric leadership should therefore be interpreted as evidence of a strengthening knowledge base rather than proof that all downstream bottlenecks have disappeared (Wong-Leung, 2026).
The conversion problem is central. Research must move through experimentation, engineering, reliable manufacture, market adoption and organisational change before it produces broad productivity gains. Each stage requires different institutions. A country can publish extensively while retaining weaknesses in specialised equipment, quality assurance or software ecosystems. It can also manufacture sophisticated products without distributing their productivity benefits evenly across smaller firms and service industries.
Artificial intelligence illustrates both opportunity and caution. The DeepSeek-R1 research paper reported advances in reinforcement-learning-based reasoning and released model resources intended to support wider experimentation. Such developments demonstrate that Chinese firms can contribute to important methodological advances. They do not, by themselves, establish achievable economy-wide productivity gains or settle questions about deployment costs, reliability and access to computing infrastructure (DeepSeek-AI et al., 2025).
A development-oriented innovation strategy should therefore evaluate diffusion as well as frontier achievement. Useful indicators would include adoption by ordinary enterprises, improvements in service quality, reduced resource use and the creation of sustainable employment. National prestige projects may have strategic value, but their existence cannot substitute for evidence that technological capabilities are raising living standards.
5.2 External restrictions and the limits of self-reliance
American export controls introduced in October 2022 targeted advanced computing and semiconductor-manufacturing capabilities in China. The policy illustrates how technological interdependence can become an instrument of strategic competition. It also clarifies why Beijing places increasing emphasis on reducing exposure to selected external bottlenecks (US Department of Commerce, 2022).
Nevertheless, technological self-reliance should be selective and economically informed. Complete duplication across every segment of an advanced supply chain may be costly and slow. The strategic question is which dependencies create intolerable risks, which can be managed through inventories or diversified suppliers, and which are best addressed through continued cooperation.
Restrictions may stimulate substitution, but it should not be assumed that they strengthen the targeted economy overall. Resources devoted to overcoming an imposed constraint have opportunity costs. Conversely, treating restrictions as sufficient to arrest Chinese innovation would underestimate adaptive capabilities. The likely result is uneven adjustment: progress in some activities, persistent disadvantages in others, and higher costs across parts of the international system.
5.3 Clean technologies and industrial interdependence
Clean energy is a particularly important source of Chinese capability. The IEA estimated that China’s clean-energy investment exceeded US$625 billion in 2024 and noted that the country reached its 2030 wind-and-solar capacity target six years early. Yet the same assessment highlighted transmission limitations, renewable curtailment and continuing investment in coal. Rapid green energy installation therefore coexists with difficult questions about system integration and emissions outcomes (IEA, 2025a).
The IEA’s 2026 technology assessment also identifies China as the largest producer across solar manufacturing stages, while noting excess capacity and efforts elsewhere to diversify supply. For China, low-cost production can expand global access to clean technologies, but sustained industrial success requires profitable innovation rather than permanently expanding volume into constrained markets (IEA, 2026).
Materials processing adds another strategic advantage. The IEA’s 2025 critical-minerals assessment identified China as the dominant refiner for nineteen of twenty minerals examined in its broader strategic-minerals analysis. Such concentration provides industrial advantages, but it also encourages customers to seek substitutes and alternative suppliers. The long-term value of centrality may consequently be greater when China is regarded as a reliable commercial partner than when dependence becomes a recurring source of coercive bargaining (IEA, 2025b).
The broader conclusion is that China’s industrial strengths are substantial but not self-sufficient. Their developmental value depends on market discipline, international acceptance and the capacity to convert sectoral success into wider prosperity.
6. International Connectivity Beyond Binary Decoupling
China’s rise has been closely associated with participation in international economic institutions. Its accession to the WTO on 11 December 2001 is a particularly clear institutional watershed. Present-day arguments for resilience should therefore avoid retrospectively treating international integration as peripheral to China’s development (WTO, 2001).
The contemporary challenge is to preserve the benefits of connectivity under more restrictive conditions. Diversification towards Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America can reduce reliance on individual markets, but bilateral trade statistics do not fully reveal how production networks are changing. Goods exported from a third country may contain Chinese inputs, be produced by Chinese-invested enterprises, or reflect genuinely expanded domestic capabilities.
Schulze and Xin’s research makes a useful distinction between trade rerouting and trade reallocation. Their analysis found evidence that Vietnam’s increased exports in strategic sectors involved greater domestic content rather than simply large-scale transshipment of Chinese goods. This cautions against interpreting all supply-chain relocation either as successful Chinese circumvention or as straightforward exclusion of China. Production can become more geographically distributed while retaining important Chinese connections (Schulze and Xin, 2025).
For China, the more durable strategy is to support partner-country value creation. Local employment, supplier development and credible technology transfer can create constituencies for continued cooperation. By contrast, arrangements perceived primarily as devices for bypassing restrictions may attract countermeasures without generating lasting economic and political benefits.
Regional institutions can assist this process. RCEP provides arrangements covering rules of origin, customs procedures and trade facilitation. These mechanisms matter because they reduce practical frictions across production networks. Their significance is not confined to headline tariff reductions. They demonstrate how institutional cooperation can sustain integration among countries that do not share identical strategic preferences (ASEAN, 2020).
The Belt and Road Initiative should be assessed through a similarly practical lens. The World Bank’s research identifies potential gains from improved transport connectivity while emphasising that outcomes depend on complementary reforms and the management of fiscal, governance and environmental risks. Infrastructure can reduce trade costs, but construction alone does not guarantee productive use or sustainable debt servicing (World Bank, 2019).
A stronger connectivity model would consequently prioritise project quality over aggregate commitments. Commercial feasibility, transparent procurement, maintenance capacity and local partnership should be treated as strategic requirements. Projects that produce manageable returns and visible local benefits are more likely to survive political turnover than projects justified principally through geopolitical symbolism or short-term financial gains.
The same logic applies to relations with advanced economies. Diversification should not become an assumption that Europe, North America and other high-income markets are dispensable. Their firms, research institutions and consumers remain very important partners in innovation and demand. A multiplex strategy seeks multiple workable relationships rather than replacing one exclusive dependence with another.
China’s external resilience will therefore depend less on the number of countries formally associated with its initiatives than on the depth, reciprocity, adaptability and global implications of those relationships.
7. Financial Resilience Without Monetary Triumphalism
Financial resilience is another area where developmental objectives should be distinguished from claims of China’s destined geopolitical succession. Greater international use of the renminbi can facilitate particular transactions and reduce some exposures. It does not automatically imply that the currency will displace the dollar across reserves, capital markets and international invoicing.
The Federal Reserve’s 2025 assessment found that the dollar’s overall international usage had changed little over the preceding five years despite repeated predictions of accelerated displacement. Its findings suggest that currency hierarchies depend on a broad institutional ecosystem rather than simply the scale of merchandise trade. Confidence, liquidity and access to financial assets cannot be replaced by technological payment infrastructure alone (Bertaut, von Beschwitz and Curcuru, 2025).
Digital settlement nevertheless creates useful possibilities in terms of speed and transaction costs. In June 2024, the Bank for International Settlements announced that Project mBridge had reached a minimum viable product stage through cooperation involving several monetary authorities, including the People’s Bank of China’s Digital Currency Institute. The project demonstrated progress towards alternative cross-border settlement arrangements. Its existence should not be interpreted as proof of a fully operational substitute for the wider dollar-based financial system (BIS, 2024).
The relevant distinction is between payment efficiency and monetary attractiveness. A transaction may become faster or cheaper without changing the currency in which participants prefer to hold wealth or incur long-term liabilities. International currency use also generates obligations: foreign holders require confidence that they can obtain liquidity, manage risk and move funds across jurisdictions under predictable conditions.
China consequently faces choices rather than a frictionless path to its currency’s internationalisation. Measures that preserve domestic control can limit international convenience. Measures that increase foreign participation can expose the domestic system to additional volatility. Neither objective is inherently illegitimate, but the trade-off should be acknowledged.
A pragmatic approach would develop renminbi use where it meets genuine commercial needs, deepen reliable financial services and maintain diversified international financial relationships. Alternative payment options may improve resilience even if they never become globally dominant. Likewise, carefully managed openness may strengthen confidence more effectively than politically announced ambitions for monetary replacement.
For centenary development, the priority is a financial system capable of directing savings towards productive uses, supporting household security and maintaining stability under stress. International currency acceptance should be treated as a possible consequence of those achievements, not as their substitute.
8. Geopolitical Risk and the Developmental Value of Restraint
8.1 Taiwan: capability, intention and consent
Taiwan presents a particularly serious risk because political objectives, military planning and economic interdependence intersect. Beijing’s 2022 white paper presents peaceful reunification as its preferred approach while explicitly retaining the possibility of force. The document should therefore not be read either as an unconditional commitment to peaceful methods or as evidence that a military decision has already been made. It also does not establish a specific 2049 invasion deadline (Taiwan Affairs Office and SCIO, 2022).
Similarly, the frequently discussed 2027 date is all about readiness to deter undesirable outcomes rather than proof of an invasion timetable. A Congressional Research Service account records the distinction between preparing the capability to conduct an operation and deciding to undertake it. Its discussion also explains that the Taiwan Relations Act provides for defensive support and maintaining American capacity to resist coercion without specifying an automatic military response in every contingency (Lawrence, 2024).
These distinctions matter because deterministic interpretations can become destabilising. If one side treats another’s capability development as conclusive evidence of imminent attack, incentives for pre-emption and accelerated military preparation may increase. Conversely, confidence that economic interdependence makes conflict impossible can encourage complacency.
From a developmental perspective, avoiding war is not merely desirable background stability. It is a central developmental requirement. A major conflict could disrupt trade, investment, technological exchange and household expectations simultaneously, let alone national image. The possible costs would extend well beyond the immediate theatre.
Any durable peaceful settlement would also have to address the preferences and security of the people directly affected. Economic integration and cultural exchange may support communication, but they cannot be assumed to produce political consent. A credible strategy of restraint would preserve dialogue, reduce miscalculation and avoid allowing symbolic deadlines to override the broader requirements of cross-strait relations.
8.2 Wider conflicts and selective engagement
Conflicts beyond East Asia test China’s capacity to protect economic interests without assuming unlimited security commitments. UNCTAD’s 2025 maritime assessment documented the costs of rerouting, port disruption and volatile freight markets. Such evidence demonstrates that distant instability can affect domestic development through transport costs and supply reliability, even where China is not a direct belligerent (UNCTAD, 2025).
China’s role in facilitating the March 2023 Saudi-Iranian agreement offers an example of diplomatic engagement with practical economic relevance. The joint statement recorded the parties’ agreement to restore diplomatic relations and acknowledged earlier dialogue hosted by Iraq and Oman. The episode is best understood as a contribution to a wider diplomatic process in an uncertain world, rather than proof that China could independently guarantee regional security (PRC, Saudi Arabia and Iran, 2023). The ongoing US-Iran war with regional and global disruptive spinoffs is a case in point.
The same caution should govern assessments of Ukraine, the Korean Peninsula and wider Middle Eastern crises. Another power’s strategic difficulties do not automatically benefit China if they raise energy costs, weaken markets or intensify sanctions and military competition. The appropriate test is whether a policy improves China’s developmental environment and supports defensible international principles.
Selective engagement can therefore be a strength when it combines realistic commitments with useful diplomacy. It becomes a weakness when reluctance to incur costs prevents a state from addressing threats to the very international stability on which its prosperity depends.
9. Global Governance, Legitimacy and Institutional Credibility
China’s international initiatives seek to connect its growing capabilities with a broader account of global order. The Global Governance Initiative’s September 2025 paper emphasises sovereign equality, international law, multilateralism, people-centred development and practical results. These commitments offer a declared framework for reforming rather than simply replacing existing international institutions (MFA, 2025).
Their significance, however, depends on implementation. In a multiplex system, states will assess proposals through their own interests and experiences. Support for particular Chinese initiatives need not imply acceptance of China’s political model or alignment across unrelated disputes. Equally, disagreement on security or governance need not preclude cooperation on climate, infrastructure or public health.
This makes consistency an important strategic resource. Appeals to sovereign equality are more persuasive when smaller partners retain meaningful bargaining autonomy. Support for international law is more credible when legal constraints are treated as reciprocal. Development cooperation is more durable when benefits are visible beyond national elites.
Legitimacy also cannot be inferred solely from economic outcomes. The UN human-rights office’s 2022 assessment raised serious concerns about practices in Xinjiang, including findings that abuses might constitute “crimes against humanity”. China strongly rejected the assessment and characterised it as politically motivated.
The disagreement illustrates that international perceptions involve contested questions of rights and accountability as well as infrastructure provision and growth (OHCHR, 2022; MFA, 2022).
For analytical purposes, neither dismissing all criticism as containment nor treating all Chinese cooperation as politically illegitimate is satisfactory. Policies and claims should be evaluated on their specific evidence. A development strategy that depends on external trust must recognise that confidence is shaped by conduct, transparency and opportunities for independent scrutiny.
It’s instructive that China has recently extended visa-free visits to various parts of China, including Xinjiang, for up to 30 days to 75 countries including a host of Western nations, to allow visitors to witness the situation on the ground.
The most promising Chinese contribution to a multiplex order would therefore combine material public goods with institutional restraint: accessible clean technologies, sustainable infrastructure, predictable commercial relationships and meaningful participation in shared problem-solving. Influence generated through demonstrable usefulness is likely to be more resilient than influence dependent on exclusive loyalties.
10. The Fifteenth Five-Year Plan: Implementation and Alternative Futures
The fifteenth Five-Year Plan offers an important opportunity to connect domestic restructuring with external adaptation. Its adoption alongside a national development-planning law in March 2026 further formalised the planning process. Yet institutionalising a timetable does not resolve conflicts among objectives or ensure accurate information about implementation (State Council, 2026b).
The planning framework announced for 2026–2030 includes substantial innovation and environmental ambitions. The government’s March 2026 presentation envisaged average annual research-and-development expenditure growth of at least 7 per cent and a 17 per cent reduction in carbon-dioxide emissions per unit of GDP over the period. Such targets can coordinate effort, but inputs and intensity measures require complementary outcome indicators: spending is not equivalent to useful innovation, and lower emissions intensity is not identical to lower absolute emissions (State Council, 2026c).
Five implementation priorities follow from the preceding analysis.
First, strengthen the household basis of growth. Social protection, portable benefits and dependable public services should be integrated with employment and fiscal policy. Success should be assessed through real disposable incomes, service access and reduced vulnerability, rather than short-lived increases in retail spending.
Second, improve capital allocation. Strategic industrial support should include transparent objectives, periodic evaluation and credible exit arrangements. National resilience does not require preserving every firm operating in a preferred sector. Allowing unsuccessful projects to end can release resources for more productive uses.
Third, make national-market integration practical. The planning agenda’s commitment to stronger domestic integration should be judged by whether firms and workers encounter fewer local barriers. Market access, procurement, professional qualifications and public-service portability are implementation questions that can determine whether scale produces competition or merely reinforces incumbency. The CPC’s fourth-plenum communiqué provides the broader policy basis for this emphasis on coordinated reform and development (CPC, 2025).
Fourth, preserve selective international openness. Security reviews should identify specific risks while avoiding unnecessarily broad restrictions on knowledge, investment and ordinary commercial cooperation. Resilience is strengthened when essential safeguards coexist with predictable opportunities for exchange.
Fifth, improve feedback and accountability. Long-term planning needs institutions capable of detecting failure early. Independent technical assessment, transparent statistics and channels through which businesses and citizens can report implementation problems are valuable precisely because ambitious policies can generate unintended effects.
These priorities can be organised into three illustrative scenarios.
In a rebalancing and cooperation scenario, household security improves, inefficient investment declines and technological gains diffuse widely. External competition continues, but major relationships remain sufficiently stable to support trade and knowledge exchange. Centenary progress then rests on improving welfare and productivity rather than maintaining historically exceptional growth rates.
In an industrial strength with domestic stagnation scenario, frontier sectors remain internationally competitive, but household demand and ordinary enterprise productivity lag. Export strength partly compensates for domestic weakness while provoking additional external resistance. National capabilities expand unevenly, and the distance between aggregate strength and lived prosperity becomes a central policy problem.
In a confrontation and fragmentation scenario, military escalation or extensive economic exclusion sharply raises development costs. Domestic substitution may preserve essential functions, but the loss of markets, capital, knowledge and confidence makes the centenary objective more difficult to attain. Resilience becomes increasingly defensive rather than prosperity-enhancing.
These scenarios are not forecasts. They attempt to identify different combinations of policy choices and external conditions. Their value is to show that China’s future cannot be inferred from present industrial rankings alone. The decisive issue is how capabilities interact with institutions and international relationships over time.
11. Conclusion
China’s centenary project remains plausible, but its achievement is neither historically predetermined nor guaranteed by productive scale. The country possesses substantial industrial, technological and organisational resources. It also confronts structural constraints that cannot be resolved solely through greater investment or stronger geopolitical positioning.
A multiplex framework clarifies both opportunity and limitation. China does not need to replace the United States to achieve advanced prosperity. It does need to function successfully among overlapping centres of authority, partners with independent preferences and networks in which dependence can be both productive and coercive.
The central developmental task is conversion: turning research into broadly diffused productivity, industrial success into household prosperity, infrastructure into sustainable economic opportunity, and international centrality into trusted cooperation. Failure in these conversions could produce a country that is strategically formidable but economically less dynamic and socially less secure than its centenary ambitions require.
The fifteenth Five-Year Plan should therefore be assessed not simply by projects launched or targets announced, but by whether it strengthens the institutions supporting adaptation. Better household protection, disciplined investment, reliable information and selective openness are not secondary to national power. They are foundations of its sustainable exercise.
Against robust headwinds, China’s strongest strategy is neither passive accommodation nor comprehensive confrontation. It is the sustained pursuit of domestic renewal within an external multiplex environment that remains sufficiently open and peaceful for development. Centenary achievement will ultimately be measured less by China’s capacity to compel deference than by its ability to secure enduring prosperity while contributing constructively to a pluralistic international order that lifts all boats.
Author: Andrew KP Leung, SBS, FRSA – International and Independent China Strategist. Chairman and CEO at Andrew Leung International Consultants and Investments Limited. He previously served as director general of social welfare and Hong Kong’s official representative for the United Kingdom, Eastern Europe, Russia, Norway, and Switzerland. He has been an Elected Member of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs and of the Governing Council of the King’s College London (2004-10); a Think-tank Research Fellow at Zhuhai Campus (2017-20); an Advisory Board member at the European Centre for e-Commerce and Internet Law, Vienna, and a Visiting professor at the London Metropolitan University Business School.
(The views expressed in this article belong only to the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of World Geostrategic Insights).
Image Source: Land Group (Shanghai-Suzhou Zero Carbon MOBO Digital Industrial Park).