On 12 March 2026, China’s National People’s Congress approved the 15th Five Year Plan (2026-2030). The Plan warns against a global environment in which supply chain vulnerabilities are being weaponised, trade routes are blocked, and market access is shrinking. In this context, China’s 15th Five Year Plan treats self-reliance in science and technology (S&T) as a main objective that should yield rapid breakthroughs in “key core technologies in major fields.” The centrality of technological self-reliance in the 15th Five Year Plan represents a gradual continuation of an established trajectory adopted by the Chinese Communist Party (CPC), which emphasises decisive leadership in the field of S&T in relation to adversarial countries. The 14th Five Year Plan and the 2025 White Paper on National Security have laid a foundation for the emergence of science and technological self-reliance as a major area of focus in China’s planning and modernisation agenda. They indicate a shift from globalisation-powered economic growth towards systemic national resilience and technological independence.

 Evolution of the Policy Trajectory

China’s claims of a hostile global environment must be read alongside its own conduct, which increasingly demonstrates a securitised orientation. Through the expansion of state-supervised industrial policies, restricted market entry, and export controls, Beijing has embraced practices of protectionism and economic coercion. This posturing extends to an important component of China’s aim to enhance its economic position and modernise its military: technological capabilities. China’s focus on scientific and technological modernisation is not a recent phenomenon. Self-reliance in technological progress has been an important national priority for decades. However, a range of factors have led to the evolution in Beijing’s approach towards achieving self-reliance in critical and emerging technologies.

The 14th Five Year Plan (2021–2025) set a binding commitment for innovation, raising R&D spending by more than 7 per cent annually. It emphasised building an independent and controllable industrial and production system. The Plan also called for establishing an “S&T powerhouse” and “accelerate progress in a range of major foundational technologies.” Vision 2035 linked scientific capacity directly to comprehensive national power, with the goal of becoming “one of the most innovative nations in the world.”

The 2025 White Paper on National Security explicitly calls to “accelerate the achievement of high-level scientific and technological self-reliance,” acknowledging technology dependency on foreign sources, and that the country must overcome “bottleneck” technologies in important fields. The White Paper cautions against external pressure by asserting that the country “firmly opposes the abuse of export controls” and characterises sanctions by foreign countries as “long-arm jurisdiction,” denoting perceived violations of international trade norms. Further, it argues for the construction of monitoring, early warning, and response systems for S&T risks, thereby treating technology dependence at par with other national security risks such as separatism, weather disasters, and transnational pandemics.

The 15th Five Year Plan further builds on the objective of scientific and technological self-reliance by predicating it on two requirements. The first is to achieve major breakthroughs in frontier sciences and fundamental theories and technologies. This essentially means undertaking R&D to ensure original and landmark discoveries or inventions in unexplored areas in major S&T fields so that the country attains a “leading or co-leading position globally.” Such a mandate is consistent with China’s stated objectives of becoming a “zero to one” civilisation that creates entirely new disciplines and intellectual property rather than mere replication and deployment of existing technologies at a mass scale. The second requirement is the development of production capacity and full supply chain security through the creation of a national strategic hinterland and back-up capacity for key industries, and advancement of risk assessments and response mechanisms. Leveraging competitive advantages in critical rare earth minerals and metals is also a key priority.

The 15th Five Year Plan’s emphasis on technological self-reliance is premised on technology access being leveraged as bargaining chips by foreign rivals, particularly the US and the EU. Export controls have reinforced China’s belief that dependence on foreign technology is an existential liability. First, the access to critical technologies with foreign origin cannot be treated as a stable, reliable input in long-term production because such access can be revoked unilaterally. Second, the extension of control beyond finished products to upstream inputs, such as Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines, has demonstrated that dependency can be exploited at multiple points across the industrial life cycle, not solely at the point of final assembly. Third, the increasing willingness of allied states to coordinate restrictions multilaterally, as seen in the Dutch and Japanese concurrence with US semiconductor equipment controls, threatens the plausibility of circumvention through alternative suppliers. Thus, China recognises the primacy of technological self-sufficiency across the entire production chain: from raw material sourcing to manufacturing hardware such as processing units and integrated circuits.

Chip restrictions imposed by Washington have proved to be counterproductive, resulting in accelerated efforts by Beijing to create homegrown, domestic substitutes that facilitate the long-term development of a competitive semiconductor industry. Amidst the short-term unavailability of such hardware infrastructure, Chinese firms have created efficient software algorithms to extract maximum output from fewer, less powerful processors. AI labs in China are allegedly training smaller domestic AI models on the output data of models created by OpenAI and Anthropic to mimic high-level reasoning at a lower cost. These actions have invited accusations of intellectual property theft from the US government.

China no longer views technological interdependence as a source of stability but rather a vulnerability that needs to be neutralised. To achieve this self-sufficiency, Beijing is placing its bets on innovation, while simultaneously indulging in data pilferage and model distillation. By employing such strategies, the CPC is rapidly moving towards building a secure and self-sufficient S&T ecosystem.

Swati Sood is a Research Intern with IPCS’ China Research Programme (CRP).