NBA China, in collaboration with China Macro Group, is hosting another webinar of the 2025 "Staying in Dialogue with China Series" - "The long view - 10-year outlook imagining China in 2035 as the next key modernization milestone" by Professor ZHANG Dandan in Economics and Vice-Dean of the National School of Development (NSD) at Peking University, which is this time dedicated to the theme of China's next and upcoming 15th Five-Year-Plan (2026-2030).

Amid China's continuously difficult post-Covid economic recovery as well as persisting structural issues such as the real estate market, industrial overcapacity and local government debt, this webinar deliberately takes the "long view", providing a 10-year outlook and imagining China in 2035 as the next key modernization milestone – the mid-term goal announced as part of the 14th Five-Year-Plan in March 2021. This has been only the second time a regular Five-Year-Plan takes a planning horizon beyond the regular five years, the previous one being the 6th Five-Year-Plan (1981-1985) which proposed goals for the four ensuing Five-Year-Plan periods until the end of the century with the goal of quadrupling China's GDP.

By 2035, and by accomplishing the goals of the 15th and 16th Five-Year-Plans, Chinese planners seek to achieve the "basic socialist modernization" (基本实现社会主义现代化), which in its core wants to – again – double China's GDP, over the period from 2020 to 2035, which assumes a sustained year-on-year average real growth of 4.7% GDP, plus increase the share of China's middle income group from 35% to 50% as some of its most important policy goals.

With leading expert on China's national development policymaking Prof. Zhang Dandan, we want to explore key questions such as:

• how to understand current economic difficulties when seen from a long-term planning and structural reform perspective?
• in hindsight, how "radical" were the decisions adopted by the CCP's "Third Plenum" in July 2024?
• which parts of the 14th Five-Year-Plan have been most effectively implemented when measured against the respective ambition level?
• how should foreign business take into account a policy planning goal for 2035?
• what are the key "make-or-break" reforms to achieve the 2035 goal such as China's demographic transition?
• NDRC stresses that "changes unseen in a century" must be duly considered in long-term planning, what long-term scenario(s) do planners use?
• what are key policy shifts and changes to be expected by the upcoming 15th Five-Year-Plan?
• referring to the 20 KPIs of the 14th Five-Year-Plan, what new set of KPIs will be the "right" ones to help guide development up to 2035?
• what role do governmental research versus societal inputs (e.g. the citizen issue collection, 政民互动问题征集) play in long-term planning?

This webinar wants to help European and foreign business to more tangibly imagine "a China in 2035", explore the key "make-or-break" reforms as risk factors and gain understanding in how mechanisms of long-term planning work to – in turn – better inform their respective corporate long-term planning and strategy design.

Against the backdrop of geopolitical tensions and rapidly evolving trade restrictions, it can be of particular importance to use the CCP's and Chinese government's own long-term planning as a referential base-case scenario and cross-check with assumptions and outcome projections from tools that MNC HQs and China subsidiaries are currently using to plan their business, e.g. geopolitical scenarios, China development scenarios, business strategies, corporate development roadmaps or simply growth numbers extrapolated from relevant downstream markets or aggregate GDP.

This webinar will be moderated by Markus Herrmann Chen, Co-Founder and Managing Director of CMG. Take the opportunity to listen in and ask your questions to Vice-Dean ZHANG Dandan.

Date: Friday, 20th June 2025

Time: 9-945am CEST / 3-345pm CST

Venue: Zoom

Registration: Please sign up via the link:

https://zoom.us/webinar/register/5417478144828/WN_sg5eaB-QSOuCdb-WI10ptQ​