The plenum of the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) is in effect its annual policy gathering. This year's event, held on 26-29 October, focused on the party's thirteenth "five-year plan". This underlines one of the great modern anomalies – that the world’s second largest economy still nominally operates according to a central plan (and has done so in twelve consecutive cycles since the party came to power in October 1949). State direction and central edict in economic issues may have been discarded elsewhere, but in China they remain a viable way of doing things.
Why bother having such plans? In another plenum two years ago, the CPC celebrated what it grandly called "the perfecting of the market". But if this were being achieved, why does the central government need to continue issuing a quinquennial plan? After all, it is doubtful if any government today can exercise such comprehensive, long-term control - even less so when the territory and economy concerned is as vast and varied as China's. There are also questions about continuity. China is a different place even compared to 2011,when the twelfth five-year plan was launched. It has a new leadership, and its growth is now set at a figure much lower than the one then envisaged.
The implication of the plan, that the central government has total command, is obviously not the case. This is hardly surprising. Shanghai has a wholly different economic model – more services, finance, consumption – than somewhere like Xinjiang. How can a single plan meaningfully cover such diverse areas? In addition, long-term plans carry an innate vulnerability. Even announcing them offers many hostages to fortune: it raises promises that can at best be only partially kept, and perhaps completely missed.
