Fifteenth Five Year Plan (China) | Hacker News Reader

Fifteenth Five Year Plan (China)

english.www.gov.cn

6 pointsAnimats8 comments

The fifteenth Five Year Plan is out. This is worth a read.

It's less specific than the Fourteenth Five Year Plan, which is just finishing up. That was the one which contained "Made in China 2025", calling out specific industries that needed to catch up. Most of those goals were achieved. The fifteenth plan has less of that. It calls for a consolidation phase.

There's much political boilerplate, but read carefully and you'll see specific goals called out. Note policy on Taiwan, and on Hong Kong and Macao. The Taiwan plan seems to be to use soft power to tie Taiwan closer to the mainland.

China has a social security problem as the population ages, and there's quite a bit on that.

"We should implement a system for collective wage bargaining" - that's a surprise. I doubt they meant labor unions. Any comments on that?

"Young scientists and engineers should receive support to pursue innovation or start their businesses." - venture capital with a socialist touch?

The various ministries and provincial governments will now turn out specific goals consistent with the five-year plan. That's when the specifics appear.

On labor unions - maybe it’s because of rising unrest and dissatisfaction. People who aren’t rich are getting increasingly disillusioned with the promise of a new China, from what I’ve heard. But it’s hard to say what the truth is when social media is manipulated and censored.

It's hard to tell. China seems to have reached the point where the educational system can produce more trained people than the job market can provide middle class jobs. This is is sometimes called "elite overproduction". The underlying problem is that manufacturing in China got so productive that most domestic and export markets are saturated.

There's the "lying flat" movement, where young people just give up the rat race and move to some low-cost place.

Potential citation:

The True Cost of China's Falling Prices - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45876691 - November 2025

It appears that there is simply never going to be enough domestic demand for supply capacity, and China needs to lean into its export play where ever possible to the global market to soak up domestic production capacity until natural decline due to structural demographics.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/americas-self-d...

> In 1995, China accounted for less than five percent of global manufacturing output. By 2010, that number had jumped to around a quarter, and today it stands at nearly a third.

It’s impressive how competent Chinese governance has been overall. Their plans are largely met because they govern with all these goals in mind. It makes me wonder if western political systems should learn something from China.

Western political systems, by design, are aiming to make government incapable and gridlocked, in order to prevent dictatorship, and usually do the job quite well - as it seems from the last by-elections, even a very determined would-be dictator with a wide support base, is failing at that.

This is what we want from the government - fuck off, and not get in the way. Sure, it has to tax us in order to keep the serfs from revolting, we understand this danger so are willing to chip in, but that's about it.

That was genuinely some of the worst analysis I’ve read in a long time. Almost every single point you made is fun house mirrors.

> It makes me wonder if western political systems should learn something from China.

Like what? We're not copying the communist planned economy, nor will we ever facilitate a total autocracy. The West will never out-China the Chinese.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com