Helga Zepp-LaRouche Photo: Courtesy of Helga Zepp-LaRouche

 

China's Central Economic Work Conference in December offers an essential mechanism to analyze the economic performance of the past year, identify newly emerged challenges, and provide clear guidelines for the next stage of the economic orientation. It serves as an important regulatory checkpoint to establish a clear understanding of the policy direction for all levels of the economic process.

The conference also serves as an institutional mechanism where short-term regulations are integrated with long-term planning. This approach effectively supports stable, sustained growth and high-quality development by ensuring the continuous integration of cutting-edge scientific and technological breakthroughs, thereby fostering ongoing innovation. This innovation, in turn, serves as the foundation for steadily improving people's living standards. Such a hands-on strategy has clearly enhanced the resilience of the Chinese economy, enabling it to better withstand external shocks in an increasingly turbulent global environment.

The Central Economic Work Conference stressed that the country must tap new space for demand growth to strengthen the domestic circulation, promote the deep integration of scientific and technological innovation with industrial innovation to develop new quality productive forces, and unswervingly deepen reform and expand opening-up so as to unleash the momentum and vitality for high-quality development.

China has recognized the revolutionary effect of the continuous injection of qualitative innovation and the effect of adequate disruptive technologies on the production process, therefore, the country will put a lot of emphasis on developing emerging industries in the coming five-year plan , such as new forms of energy, new materials, aerospace, artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing, smart processes and digitization, as well as robotics in industrial production.

China is now a global leader in many fields of frontier technology. According to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Global Innovation Index (GII) 2025 report, China has risen to the 10th position in the global innovation ranking for 2025, up one spot from the previous year, marking its first entry into the top 10.

It is expected that the country will further accelerate the development of new quality productive forces next year. This progress is expected to benefit all countries engaged in economic cooperation with China—both advanced industrial nations and developing economies alike.

Opening-up efforts

Chinese economy is poised for steady improvement, which will bring more development dividends to the world. For instance, efforts to deepen cooperation among Global South countries through multilateral institutions such as BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) are likely to yield positive results. Similarly, the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Global Development Initiative are expected to generate a synergy effect, potentially achieving qualitative leaps in productivity and output on a global scale.

In the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30) period, China is on a trajectory to further continue opening-up, promote trade expansion and cooperation, emphasize two-way investment and cooperation, and in this way allow the rest of the world to benefit from the Chinese economy's role as a motor of the world economy. The undeniable success of the Chinese model of economy and the advantages for other countries to cooperate with this global growth engine will be an incentive for most countries in the world to continue on that road.

Apart from the turbulence induced by geopolitical tensions, every country should prepare for potential shocks to the international system stemming from excessive speculative activity in Western nations. The sustained success of the Chinese economy will remain a pivotal factor in addressing all such challenges, as even its harshest critics cannot overlook the undeniable evidence that China is evidently doing something right.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche is the founder of the German-based think tank Schiller Institute