Colombo, April 12
The 15th Five-Year Plan, a 141-page document, formally adopted during China's National People's Congress Two Sessions in early March 2026 appears to be a strategic blueprint for deepening Beijing's presence across the developing world, more so in South Asia, a media report said on Sunday.
The Two Sessions, which bring together the NPC and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, function as the institutional machinery through which the Communist Party converts political priorities into binding policy.
Under Chinese Premier Xi Jinping, these documents have shifted further away from high-speed growth toward technological self-reliance, national security, and state guidance of the economy, said a report in Asia News Post.
This year's sessions institutionalised that shift at scale, and South Asia is expected to feel the consequences across the next five years in ways that go well beyond conventional infrastructure lending.
China watchers have noted that Beijing is likely to leverage the overall planning process for the 15th Five-Year Plan, a 141-page document, to augment support for its Global Governance Initiative and Global Development Initiative from Global South countries, the media report added.
South Asian states except India are, for the most part, poorly positioned to resist this logic.
Their infrastructure financing needs remain enormous, their capacity to independently develop AI governance frameworks is limited, and the institutional alternatives, the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and Western bilateral lenders, move slowly and come with conditionalities that are politically costly.
Beijing's offer is quicker, cheaper to accept in the short term, and packaged in the language of South-South solidarity and shared development.
The Two Sessions and the 15th Five-Year Plan together signal that China's South Asia strategy has matured beyond the blunt instrument of loans for ports. It has become more subtle, more technology-dense and significantly harder to reverse.
"The question for Dhaka, Colombo, Kathmandu, and Islamabad is not whether they wish to engage with China, the trade and investment numbers make disengagement implausible," the media report said.
The question is whether they are building the institutional capacity to set terms on that engagement before the next five years lock in a new generation of dependencies.
On current evidence, most are not moving fast enough to answer that question confidently, the media report added.
- IANS
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