China’s 15th Five-Year Plan does not treat the United States as a partner, a model, or a neutral variable. It treats US trade and technology policy as an active constraint on Chinese development — one that requires deliberate countermeasures. The plan assesses that US policies are challenging the global trade order and constraining China’s economic prospects. That assessment drives the entire self-reliance agenda.

For Washington, the plan presents a document-level confirmation of what US export control and investment screening policy has already assumed: that Chinese industrial policy and Chinese S&T development are inseparable from Chinese strategic competition with the United States, and that the civilian-military distinction that US regulation relies on does not reflect how the Chinese system actually works.