"Staying in Dialogue with China - "Recording of Webinar #3 with XIE Danxia on "The long view - 10-year outlook imagining China in 2035 as the next key modernization milestone" (June 20, 2025) #CMG-pub
- China Macro Group (CMG)
- Jul 2
- 3 min read
June 2025 | In our third webinar of the 2025 edition of the “Staying in Dialogue with China” webinar series which is this time dedicated to the theme of China’s next and upcoming 15th Five-Year-Plan (2026-2030), we talked to XIE Danxia, Associate Professor at the Insitute of Economics at Tsinghua University.
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.
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 was moderated by Markus Herrmann Chen, Co-Founder and Managing Director of CMG.
Prof. XIE Danxia is currently a tenured associate professor in Economics at Tsinghua University.
Prof. Xie holds a PhD degree in Economics from the University of Chicago, a Master Degree in Public Policy from Harvard University, and a Master Degree in Computer Science from Duke University.
Prof. Xie’s teaching and research focus on digital economics, Law& Economics, Macroeconomics, and finance. He has worked at Peterson Institute for International Economics, a top think tank at Washington DC. His papers have been published in top journals, such as PNAS, American Economic Review, Management Science, et al. He was the first to put forward the “Data Innovation Endogenous Growth Theory”, “Turing Growth Theory” and “Regulatory Growth Theory”, and published an English monograph in the field of digital economy (by Springer-Nature). He has presided over several projects of the National Science Foundation of China (NSFC), and participated in policy and legal drafting at the national level.
Watch the webinar recording here:
