Luciano Pietronero Photo: Ma Jingjing/GT

China's major goals for the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30) are anticipated to be reached given the positive momentum in the country's economic and social development, Luciano Pietronero, Emeritus of the Enrico Fermi Research Center in Italy, newly appointed Distinguished Professor at the Complexity Centre of Behang University in Hangzhou and a member of the Academia Europaea, told the Global Times in an interview during the Annual Conference of Financial Street Forum 2025.

"A month ago, I was in Beijing with a group of experts for a meeting on China's five-year planning, and we made specific analysis of the 15th Five-Year Plan. I would say China's innovations have been positive up to now, and China continues on this path. It will be the best that one can do," Pietronero said, noting that his team's mathematical analysis at the moment is aligned with China's 15th Five-Year Plan.

Some 10 years ago, China's five-year plan was about five new technologies where China was not very strong and where the US and Europe were much superior to China. "At that time, we checked with our methodology that this was not too probable. The probability was just medium because it was a big achievement like a leap frog. But China managed to achieve improvements in these top technologies very well in a past decade," Pietronero said.

China aims to achieve greater self-reliance and strength in science and technology and steer the development of new quality productive forces in the next five years, according to the fourth plenary session of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.

To sustain economic growth, China has to consider which are the elements that are realistically possible, and then try to push them forward as much as possible. The breakthroughs made by Chinese firms such as DeepSeek have made headlines this year. China is doing very well in artificial intelligence (AI), and more efforts are needed to move from medium technology to the high-tech and then to the highest level, Pietronero said.

"It's not easy to make a prediction on China's GDP growth rate for the next five years, but we would say China is in a good situation, the scholar said.

The way we analyze the success of China is to have a more realistic, mathematical and scientific approach. In this vision, the concept of Economic Fitness seems to be a good indicator that explains China growth, Pietronero said. 

For example, some American economists claimed in 2014 a substantial growth slowdown in China's economic growth. However, from our methodology, we replied that China will not stop growth, and instead it will stay high up. This has been realized, he said.

What happens now is very clear: the growth of 10 percent that China had for many years cannot be realized anymore at this moment. But still, we would say China is reasonably competitive. Its growth of around 5 percent is realistic, and this implies a continuous upgrade. So, now China has to make efforts to move from medium to high-level sectors, and then to top level sectors, he added.

Electric car is one big success of China. Around 2017, I came to China with a delegation of the World Bank to analyze the electric vehicle (EV) situation. In our opinion, the situation was pretty competitive for China. And in fact, China got EVs developed a lot, the expert said.

Battery is key for winning in the EV sector. Who will be able to make the best batteries will be the winner in the EV car market, because the problem is autonomy there. As far as I know, China is rather competitive, because they bet on batteries already since many years ago.