The Fourth Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee of the Party explicitly stated that during the 15th Five-Year Plan period, economic and social development must uphold the Party’s overall leadership. The 15th Five-Year Plan period is a critical phase for laying a solid foundation and making comprehensive efforts toward basically achieving socialist modernization. At its Fourth Plenary Session, the 20th Central Committee of the Party formulated proposals for the 15th Five-Year Plan, providing an action guide for economic and social development over the next five years. To achieve major breakthroughs in strategic tasks crucial to China’s path toward modernization and ensure the smooth realization of the goal of basically achieving socialist modernization, it is essential to deeply integrate the Party’s leadership into every aspect and the entire process of economic and social development.

The Party's leadership is the fundamental guarantee for economic and social development.

General Secretary Xi Jinping profoundly pointed out: “Whether we can effectively steer the world’s second-largest economy and sustain its healthy economic and social development fundamentally depends on how well the Party fulfills its core leadership role in economic and social development.” The Party’s leadership has consistently run through every stage of the nation’s development, providing the fundamental direction, stable safeguards, and source of strength for economic and social progress.

The Party’s leadership is comprehensive, systematic, and holistic, and it determines the fundamental direction of economic and social development. From the perspective of its scope, the Party’s leadership covers all areas—including economic development, social development, and ecological civilization—leaving no “blank spots.” By establishing and perfecting a Party leadership system that oversees the overall situation and coordinates all parties, we ensure that development in every field remains fully aligned with and resonates with the nation’s strategic goals. From the perspective of implementation, the Party’s leadership permeates the entire chain—from planning and formulation to policy execution and supervision and evaluation. Through fully promoting democracy and pooling collective wisdom, the Party Central Committee achieves an organic integration between top-level design and grassroots practice, ensuring that the direction of development never deviates from the essential requirements of socialism. This comprehensive and systematic leadership fundamentally guarantees that economic and social development will always advance along the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

The Party’s leadership is the “stabilizing anchor” that enables us to overcome all difficulties and risks, determining the future and destiny of economic and social development. At present, China’s development environment is undergoing profound and complex changes, with both strategic opportunities and risks and challenges coexisting, and an increasing number of uncertain and unpredictable factors. Only by upholding the Party’s leadership can we take the initiative amid this complex situation. The Party’s leadership boasts extraordinary organizational mobilization capabilities, coordinated planning and coordination skills, and strong implementation capacity, enabling it to fully leverage its unique advantage of pooling resources to accomplish great things. Faced with external suppression and containment, the Party has integrated development and security, fostering new opportunities amid crises. In confronting deep-seated contradictions in our development, the Party has led a social revolution through self-revolution, breaking down institutional and systemic barriers via comprehensive deepening of reform. It is precisely the Party’s leadership—manifested most prominently in its ability to respond effectively to risks—that has laid a solid safety foundation for economic and social development.

The Party’s leadership is the core that unites the people’s strength and achieves common prosperity, determining the ultimate success or failure of economic and social development. The people are the main actors in economic and social development, and the Party’s leadership provides the central link for rallying their collective strength. The Party has always upheld the principle of putting the people first, respecting their status as the masters of their own affairs, and adhering to a development philosophy centered on the people. By soliciting advice from the people and understanding their needs, the Party has channeled the wisdom and energy of the masses into the practice of reform and development, thus forging a powerful synergy that drives development with one heart and one mind. At the same time, the Party ensures that the fruits of development are shared by all through institutional safeguards—by improving the distribution system and promoting coordinated regional development—and thereby advancing substantive progress toward common prosperity. As emphasized in the Decision adopted at the Third Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee of the Party, we must “ensure that the achievements of modernization benefit all the people more equitably.” It is precisely this leadership capacity—capable of uniting the hearts and pooling the strength of the people—that lies at the very foundation of our success in economic and social development.

The key to the success behind creating “two great miracles” lies in the leadership of the Party.

Development is the foundation and key to solving all of China’s problems, and strategic certainty is the core guarantee that ensures development stays on course. Looking back over the past 70-plus years since the founding of New China, under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, our country has created “two great miracles”—rapid economic growth and long-term social stability—and achieved a historic leap from being one of the world’s poorest nations to becoming the world’s second-largest economy. Underlying this remarkable transformation has always been a clear guiding thread: taking the Party’s leadership as the fundamental guarantee, translating the Party’s strategic plans into nationwide action through five-year plans, converting institutional advantages into effective governance, and drawing up a blueprint for national development through sustained efforts.

By anchoring ourselves firmly in the people’s standpoint, we ensure that the miracle of development continues to benefit all members of the population. The people’s standpoint is the Party’s fundamental political stance, and every five-year plan has always taken this as both its starting point and ultimate goal. The First Five-Year Plan focused on improving people’s livelihoods and laying the foundation for an industrial system; the Thirteenth Five-Year Plan made poverty alleviation the core objective, achieving a historic resolution of absolute poverty; and the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan explicitly sets the task of enhancing people’s well-being and promoting common prosperity. Under the Party’s overall coordination, livelihood goals have been transformed from “blueprints” into “reality.” In the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan, quantified targets such as “creating more than 60 million new urban jobs” and “raising the participation rate in basic old-age insurance to 95%” have been put into practice. Meanwhile, measures like the “double reduction” policy in education, the decentralization of medical resources, and the renovation of old residential communities precisely address the urgent needs and concerns of the masses, truly ensuring that “the fruits of development are shared by the people.”

Uphold strategic resolve and ensure that “one blueprint is carried through to the end.” General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out: “Scientifically formulating and continuously implementing five-year plans is an important experience of our Party in governing the country and administering state affairs, and also a significant political advantage of socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Unlike the shortcomings of frequent policy swings in the West, our Party adopts a long-term perspective in planning development and achieves continuous goal-setting and stable deployment through five-year plans. From the “three-step strategy” to the “Two Centenary Goals,” each five-year plan serves as a “phase-specific roadmap” for our long-term strategy: The Ninth Five-Year Plan through the Eleventh Five-Year Plan advanced industrialization and urbanization; the Twelfth Five-Year Plan through the Thirteenth Five-Year Plan focused on transformation and upgrading; and the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan anchors itself on achieving scientific and technological self-reliance and carbon peak and carbon neutrality, linking up with the vision for 2035. This steadfast commitment—“each term follows seamlessly upon the last”—avoids short-termism and the impulse for quick political achievements, enabling China to steadily move forward in the right direction over several decades and turn small victories into great ones.

Adhering to a problem-oriented approach, we focus on key breakthroughs to overcome development bottlenecks. The Party has consistently grasped the principal contradictions in economic and social development and adopted targeted measures through five-year plans. In the early days of reform and opening-up, addressing the weak infrastructure, the Sixth and Seventh Five-Year Plans promoted energy and transportation projects, resulting in the construction of the Daqin Railway and the Gezhouba Hydropower Station. In the new era, confronted with imbalanced regional development, the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Five-Year Plans have driven coordinated development of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region and integrated development of the Yangtze River Delta. To tackle the critical “bottleneck” challenges in science and technology, the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan has made innovation-driven development the top priority, boosting annual average growth of R&D expenditure across society by more than 8%. Breakthroughs have been achieved in fields such as quantum information and biopharmaceuticals. Meanwhile, through dynamic adjustments to policies at the Central Economic Work Conference, we have established a closed-loop system of “problem—countermeasure—effectiveness,” ensuring that the plans are effectively implemented.

We must uphold integrated and coordinated approaches to build synergy for development. Through the “national unified chessboard” mechanism, the Party has broken down governance barriers. The "Opinions of the CPC Central Committee and the State Council on Unifying the Planning System to Better Leverage the Strategic Guidance Role of National Development Plans" established a unified planning system, fostering synergistic planning efforts. The Outline of the 14th Five-Year Plan is accompanied by more than 20 specialized plans, while each province has formulated its own local plans, thus creating a pattern of "a nationwide unified blueprint with precise implementation at the local level." At the same time, we are promoting coordination among planning, fiscal, financial, and industrial policies: fiscal resources are tilted toward people's livelihoods and strategic industries, and monetary policy supports scientific and technological innovation as well as green development. By coordinating planning across eastern and western regions and engaging society in the process, we have harnessed the tremendous power of nationwide mobilization, demonstrating the institutional advantage of the Party’s ability to concentrate its strength on accomplishing major undertakings.

The practice of integrating Party leadership throughout all aspects and the entire process of economic and social development.

Ensuring that the Party’s comprehensive leadership is fully implemented across all fields, aspects, and stages is the fundamental guarantee for advancing reform and development in the new era. As reform enters deeper waters, the greatest challenges lie in breaking through ideological barriers and overcoming entrenched interests. As the Party’s powerful “central hub” of leadership, it must not only take the lead in formulating the overall design for reform and coordinating among various forces, but also closely monitor and drive the comprehensive advancement of reform throughout its entire process, and ensure that policies are effectively implemented and yield tangible results—thus preventing reform from deviating from its intended course or losing its original intent.

Upholding the Party’s overall leadership requires integrating it into all aspects of economic and social development at an even higher standard. We must focus particularly on key areas such as innovation-driven development, building a new development paradigm, promoting rural revitalization, and fostering harmonious coexistence between humanity and nature. By grasping the core framework of economic and social development in the new era, we should coordinate and advance the “Five-in-One” overall layout, ensuring that economic and social development steadily progresses in the right direction. In the economic sphere, we must continue to use the Five-Year Plans as a guiding compass for development, refine the decision-making and deployment mechanisms of the Central Financial and Economic Commission and the coordinated scheduling mechanisms of the Central Economic Work Conference, optimize the synergistic system of “national development planning as strategic guidance and fiscal and monetary policies as primary tools,” and promote high-quality development with enhanced quality and efficiency. In the political sphere, we need to deepen the practice of “developing whole-process people’s democracy,” improve the institutional framework covering the entire chain—from democratic elections and consultation to decision-making, management, and oversight—and more concretely integrate the principle of the people being masters of their own affairs into every stage of legislation, decision-making, and governance, thereby ensuring that national governance continues to deepen along the socialist path. In the cultural sphere, we must further strengthen the responsibility system for ideological work, refine the study systems of Party committees (Party groups)’ theoretical study centers, build robust four-level integrated media centers spanning the central, provincial, municipal, and county levels, promote the creative transformation of China’s outstanding traditional culture, and consolidate our shared ideological foundation. In the social sphere, we need to deepen Party building-led grassroots governance, optimize the “list of practical projects for people’s livelihoods,” improve mechanisms prioritizing employment, tiered medical care, and nationwide unified pension insurance, and effectively address the urgent, difficult, and concerning issues faced by the masses. In the field of ecological civilization, we must continuously strengthen the central environmental protection inspection system, rigorously implement the principle of “Party and government sharing responsibility and each official bearing dual responsibility,” ensure the effective implementation of carbon peak and carbon neutrality goals, refine mechanisms such as ecological compensation, the river and lake chief system, and the forest chief system, promote the widespread adoption of green production and lifestyles, and solidify our ecological security barrier.

Guiding economic and social development with medium- and long-term plans is an important approach adopted by our Party in governing the country and administering state affairs. Faced with the complex international environment and the domestic demand for high-quality development during the 15th Five-Year Plan period, it is imperative to integrate the Party’s leadership into every stage of economic and social development planning—planning, design, implementation, and evaluation—and to build a systematic, comprehensive, scientifically sound, and highly efficient institutional framework. In the strategic planning phase, establishing a sound and seamlessly connected system of national economic and social development plans is a key support. We must highlight the overarching guiding role of the national development plan, building a planning system that features “accurate positioning, clear boundaries, complementary functions, and unified coordination.” Through the alignment of indicators and the breakdown of tasks, we should establish a mechanism that ensures seamless communication between different levels. We also need to accelerate the legislative process for the National Development Planning Law, using the rule of law to strengthen the binding force of planning. In the policy design phase, the core task is to refine the Party’s leadership institutional framework. Grounded in the “Five-in-One” overall layout and the “Four Comprehensive” strategic layout, we must improve decision-making and advisory mechanisms, set up cross-departmental coordination teams, and incorporate social stability and ecological protection into policy risk assessments. This will ensure that policy designs reflect the Party’s coordinated requirements and enhance the consistency of policy orientations. In the implementation and promotion phase, the focus should be on strengthening the effectiveness of institutional implementation. We need to clearly define the responsibilities of each department, establish a fully-covering supervision mechanism, coordinate various supervisory forces, refine accountability mechanisms, and integrate institutional enforcement capabilities into cadre evaluations. By bolstering institutional rigidity through legal support, we can ensure that the Party’s decisions and deployments are implemented efficiently. In the evaluation and feedback phase, perfecting the supervision and assessment mechanisms is essential for closing the loop and providing guarantees. Centered on the Party and state supervision systems, we must implement the responsibility system for comprehensively enforcing strict Party governance, give full play to the leading role of intra-Party supervision, strengthen the specialized oversight functions of the Commission for Discipline Inspection and the Supervisory Commission, and promote synergistic efforts among various supervisory bodies, thereby providing solid safeguards for the implementation of the plans.