The Sectors China Is Betting On: 15th FYP Industrial Priorities
China’s 15th Five-Year Plan is specific about where state money and policy support will flow. The document’s industrial priority table is worth working through sector by sector, because it tells you what the Chinese state believes it needs and what it intends to build.
Advanced Materials — Specialty steel, high-temperature alloys, ultrahigh-purity metals, advanced ceramics, high-performance fibers, and rare earths. Materials independence underlies every other manufacturing goal on this list.
Aerospace — Large civilian aircraft with Chinese-made engines and composites; the BeiDou satellite system expanded into a global positioning and infrastructure platform; deep space defense projects.
Agriculture — Corn, cotton, grain, and soybean production targets; synthetic biology for pork and beef; a goal of 85% seed self-sufficiency. Food security as strategic priority.
Artificial Intelligence — Robotics, autonomous vehicles, drones, industrial machinery, and brain-computer interfaces. AI as an industrial input, not just a consumer product.
Digitalization — 6G, national computing infrastructure, blockchain, quantum technology, and AI model deployment at scale across the economy.
Energy and Critical Minerals — Solar cells, batteries, green hydrogen, nuclear fusion research, and overseas resource access to secure mineral supply chains.
Semiconductors and Software — Mature-node chips, advanced chips, optoelectronic chips, and self-reliance in the software and equipment used to design and fabricate them. This is the most strategically loaded item on the list.
Marine Economy — Deep-sea engineering, distant fishery, shipping services, and navigation infrastructure. Maritime ambition runs through this plan in ways that connect economic and military goals.
The breadth of the list is deliberate. The plan is not choosing between sectors — it is building a state-coordinated industrial system that treats all of these as interconnected national capabilities.