Former planning officials on how to optimize China's local five-year plan
Dong Yu's policy advice on planning text, target, task, implementation and wording at primary-level China.
China's provincial "Two Sessions" are now under way. With the 15th Five-Year Plan cycle (2026–30) about to kick off, local five-year plans are a major talking point this year.
In a compact, hard-edged set of policy recommendations, Dong Yu董煜 argues that primary-level planning still has plenty of room for improvement.
A veteran "scholar-official" with two decades inside China's state apparatus and direct experience drafting recent Five-Year Plans, Dong previously served at the National Development and Reform Commission and later at the Office of the Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission, and is now executive vice-president of Tsinghua University's China Institute for Development Planning.
This is a serious policy memo intended for the authority. For the rest of us, it requires reading between the lines. In Chinese policy discourse, advice is often a mirror of reality. And a useful way for China watchers to read policy advice like this is to read it "backwards."
For example, when Dong writes,
Where funds are being sought through different sectoral channels but will ultimately be used for multiple projects within the same area, stronger overall coordination is needed to raise the efficiency of fund use.
he is signalling that the funding is fragmented and inefficient;
When he says,
In terms of language, planners can use wording that is closer to everyday speech — plain, warm, and easy to understand — and cut back on stiff, formulaic phrasing.
he is implying official reports remain plagued by hollow, formulaic bureaucratese.
This piece was first published on Prof. Dong's personal WeChat public account. Please note the following translation is my own and has not been reviewed by him.
基层五年规划如何做出新意
How can primary-level Five-Year Plans bring something new?
Over the years, governments at every level have worked to improve how they draft provincial, municipal, and county plans, building up a substantial body of practical experience. Yet many long-recognized problems in the planning field remain unresolved, and changing development conditions have set higher standards for how plans are prepared. Based on long-term observation and first-hand involvement in Five-Year Plan work, this article offers thoughts and recommendations for strengthening Five-Year Plans at the primary level.
I. Problems in Primary-level Five-Year Plans
After the nationwide drafting of the 14th Five-Year Plans (2021–2025) was completed, we conducted a systematic comparative review of local planning documents, with particular attention to problems in the formulation and implementation of county-level plans.
From the texts themselves, "matryoshka" (nesting-doll) plans are still common. While local governments are placing increasing emphasis on Five-Year Plans — so much so that too many plans has become a problem in its own right — many individual plans still end up as little more than exercises in writing.
Standard templates are recycled, genuine breakthroughs are rare, and homogenization is widespread. This is especially pronounced at the primary level, where copying and pasting from higher-level plans is commonplace. A cross-county comparison reveals striking similarities: it is easy to pull out large numbers of interchangeable phrases, many of them lofty slogans untethered from local realities — impressive-sounding, but thin on substance.
Because many plans follow the same top-down structure and broad framing, they may run to many pages while offering little that is truly place-specific. The number of "hard facts" one can extract is limited, and to the public these documents can look less like practical roadmaps for action than ornate, word-built "bonsai" meant for display.
From the perspective of planning targets, indicator systems have become more rational, but their overall design still needs work. Compared with earlier Five-Year Plans, most localities took a more cautious approach in setting economic growth targets for the 14th Five-Year Plan period, and the previous tendency for targets to be successively "ratcheted up" at each level (层层加码) has eased.
Local governments have also put more effort into updating their indicator systems — for example, by adding new categories and specific metrics. Structurally, however, most adjustments are still concentrated in indicators related to economic development and innovation. Indicators on people's well-being, the environment, and safety and security account for a smaller share than in the national outline, and many are simply carried over from the national plan without localization. Overall, there is still a lack of deep, systematic research into the internal logic of planning assumptions and baseline conditions, and into how goals, tasks, and policy measures interact and reinforce one another.
From the perspective of planning tasks, coverage is generally comprehensive, but there is little that feels new. Plans tend to present tasks in a plain, narrative style, with limited emphasis on key priorities, distinctive features, or innovative initiatives.
Project lists, meanwhile, often fall into the trap of creating "special sections" simply for the sake of having them. In some cases, these boxed project columns even overpower the main text, leaving the core document thin and hollow.
In most places, project lists are compiled and "balanced" by the planning department and then inserted into the plan. Yet key details, such as investment focus, funding shares, and project siting, are still largely arranged according to established routines, rather than being closely anchored to the plan's own demand forecasts.
This misalignment is especially evident for projects aimed at securing support from higher-level authorities: the projects proposed often do not match the most pressing needs on the ground. As for spatial layout, many plans continue to rely on pre-existing spatial planning maps. They may look tidy and polished at first glance, but shifting economic conditions have made some of them unrealistic, and others still need careful scrutiny to determine whether they truly reflect current industrial patterns and development priorities.
From the perspective of implementation, weak support from key enabling factors has become a major bottleneck. The old saying in the planning community — "Plans on the wall, just drawings and that's all" — is still frequently heard among primary-level officials today, suggesting that the challenge of turning plans into reality has yet to be fundamentally resolved.
One reason is that, during drafting, the links between planned tasks and the conditions needed to deliver them are often not rigorously demonstrated. As implementation gets underway, these gaps quickly surface. In recent years, as some localities have come under mounting fiscal pressure and faced rising debt risks, the difficulty of financing planned projects has become even more acute.
In some places, mid-term assessments of the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021–2025) found that nearly half of the projects listed needed to be revised. Leadership changes and the resulting shifts in policy priorities also continue to reshape the "key tasks" set out in plans. When major elements are abruptly rewritten, it inevitably erodes the authority of the plan.
II. Key priorities for innovating county-level Five-Year Plans
Within China's planning system, local plans are formally divided into two tiers: provincial plans and municipal/county plans. In practice, however, drafting is still typically organized around three levels — province, city, and county — and coordination across tiers remains uneven.
A more workable approach is to follow the logic of "provincial-level overall coordination, municipal-level guidance, and county-level implementation." Under this framework, the province should focus on setting overall direction and providing clearer guidance for county-level plan preparation; municipalities should concentrate on coordinating, balancing, and allocating resources; and counties should put the emphasis on strengthening planning innovation.
First, refine functional zoning and strengthen fine-grained governance.
To make planning genuinely refined, it is essential to strengthen differentiated guidance and zone-specific policies, with more granular planning that improves the precision and effectiveness of policy measures.
In advancing the main functional zones strategy, we recommend that, alongside clarifying the macro-level spatial layout of productive forces, equal attention be given to micro-level governance needs.
One practical option is to establish a two-tier classification system for main functional zones at the county and township levels. More detailed functional divisions at the township level can help compensate for the limited policy precision of county-level classifications, allowing main functions to be defined more accurately across spatial scales.
This approach helps concentrate resources and sharpen priorities while avoiding a one-size-fits-all model. It also makes it easier to bridge top-down requirements with bottom-up needs, and is highly workable in practice.
Building on this foundation, plans can develop differentiated indicator systems for different types of areas, using category-specific targets and metrics to steer localities toward "staggered development" that leverages their respective strengths.
Second, planning tasks should speak to shared concerns and respond to what people actually experience. Structurally, plans do not have to follow a single standardized template. Priorities can be arranged in line with a county's basic conditions and its designated main functions. Whatever the chapter or section, the plan should keep returning to the issues that matter most to residents.
In terms of language, planners can use wording that is closer to everyday speech — plain, warm, and easy to understand — and cut back on stiff, formulaic phrasing.
For example, in one county-level plan we advised against using conventional headings such as "Develop health services" in the chapter on people's well-being. Instead, we suggested more people-centered headings like "Let every child receive a better education," "Let patients stop worrying about access to care," "Let older people be well cared for," and "Let residents live more comfortably," paired with opening lines such as: "Put an end to the days when County XX had no tertiary hospital."
Third, strengthen the link between planning and investment, and spell out practical levers for implementation. This has long been a hard problem, one that affects both how well plans are carried out and how rational investment decisions are.
When drafting Five-Year Plans, more attention should be given to building a coherent "project portfolio" so as to improve alignment between planning and investment. Counties should be encouraged to focus on the strategic priorities and core tasks laid out in their Five-Year Plans, and to develop a package of key investment projects with clear timelines and roadmaps. This helps translate development tasks into specific actions and improves both precision and executability.
The allocation of funding and other critical inputs for major county-level investment projects should also be further optimized. For projects seeking support from higher-level authorities, decisions on site selection, service capacity, and catchment areas should closely match the spatial layout and development priorities set out in the Five-Year Plan, so that funding needs can be assessed on a more rigorous basis.
Where funds are being sought through different sectoral channels but will ultimately be used for multiple projects within the same area, stronger overall coordination is needed to raise the efficiency of fund use. For counties that shoulder major responsibilities in areas such as population inflows, ecological protection, key agricultural production, or emerging industrial chains, it may be appropriate to give greater weight to their needs when allocating resources for major national strategies and capacity building in key areas, including, where applicable, through ultra-long-term special Treasury bonds.
Fourth, strengthen coordination between development planning and spatial planning so that plans can be implemented more effectively. The county level is where development plans and spatial plans converge in practice. County governments therefore need to both reaffirm the leading role of development planning within the overall system and fully leverage national territorial spatial planning as the basic framework and platform.
The key is to align economic and social development with spatial governance, and to promote integrated progress on both fronts. To that end, procedures for linking the two sets of plans should be clarified and standardized, and a whole-process coordination mechanism should be established and strengthened, covering drafting, review and approval, and implementation.
During Five-Year Plan preparation, a cross-department joint working mechanism should be set up to address spatial layout issues. Major matters, including spatial development strategy, key target indicators, spatial structure optimization, the placement of major productive forces, and the siting of major projects, should be fully deliberated and agreed upon, then incorporated into the plan to ensure smooth, consistent linkages.
National territorial spatial planning, in turn, should coordinate and balance the land-use needs of various sectoral plans. In light of new requirements for comprehensive land consolidation and local conditions, it should further optimize and refine permanent basic cropland. On the premise of safeguarding food security, it should also promote more integrated optimization and consolidation of spatial resources across the county.
Fifth, planning should break out of its traditional boundaries and become more inclusive. In how plans are presented, local governments can be encouraged to experiment with layered, youth-friendly formats that make planning more vivid and multi-dimensional.
For example, conventional development plans can be enriched with spatial information, so that economic and social goals are not just words on paper but are anchored in a concrete territorial layout, giving the plan a real footprint in space. Plans can also anticipate technological change by incorporating tools such as artificial intelligence and cloud computing to overcome physical constraints, support industrial upgrading, and add a new technology-driven dimension to planning.
Throughout the drafting process, greater emphasis should be placed on systems thinking and cross-sector collaboration, breaking down professional and departmental silos.
At the same time, plans need a sense of "stagecraft": the goal is something close to a holographic plan. When people read a plan, they do not want to wade through a dry document; they also want to see a story unfold visually, and even feel a sense of rhythm in it.
Different systems have their own symbolic languages, and those symbols should be designed so that different audiences can understand them. Drafting a plan should be more like conducting a symphony, with different sections and "instruments" working in harmony. And planning must stay grounded: it should be attentive to the needs of front-line actors and everyday residents, consciously identifying and addressing the obstacles different groups face, so that everyone can genuinely feel the plan is connected to daily life.
III. Strengthening national-level guidance for local planning
For localities to truly innovate in their Five-Year Plans, stronger national-level guidance is essential. This means encouraging proactive experimentation by local governments, promptly summarizing and scaling up effective practices, and systematically raising the overall quality of local plan drafting.
First, encourage localities to develop their own planning guidelines. Many longstanding problems in local development planning stem from weak planning capacity at the primary level and the absence of standardized procedures. As local governments increasingly value both the substance of plans and the process of preparing them, standardization is steadily moving to the forefront of the agenda.
During the drafting of Five-Year Plans, it would be helpful for the national level to provide reference templates while allowing each locality to formulate detailed drafting rules suited to its own circumstances. In this way, the content and procedures of plan preparation, from the central level down through provinces to cities and counties, can be improved through a coordinated, top-down approach. Greater standardization along these lines will help improve the quality of plans across the board.
Second, strengthen guidance that is tailored to local conditions. In local Five-Year Plans, "new quality productive forces" are likely to become a key theme that requires early coordination. But not every locality is well placed to pursue the newest or most cutting-edge sectors. While guiding all regions to accelerate high-quality development, it is just as important to prevent everyone from rushing into the same tracks, leading to duplicated projects, redundant capacity, or even performative showboating and destructive competition.
At the national level, it would be useful to organize model demonstrations of different types of county-level development plans, emphasizing diversity of approaches rather than promoting one or two standard templates. Demonstration areas could also be encouraged to experiment boldly with more innovative planning language, formats, and communication methods, reinforcing the idea that "explaining and communicating the plan is as important as drafting it." This would extend planning work beyond writing into implementation and public outreach, and help raise public awareness of, and confidence in, the plans.
Third, systematically study what local governments need from national plans. In the past, plan preparation largely followed a one-way, top-down logic: lower-level plans existed mainly to implement higher-level ones. Going forward, the underlying philosophy and methods need to evolve. Local governments should be treated as key actors on the "demand side," and new plans should be drafted with a clearer demand orientation, strengthening two-way communication and feedback between the national and local levels.
That means taking a comprehensive view of local needs: Which parts of the plan matter most to them? Which formulations are they most sensitive to? Where do trade-offs need to be better balanced? Where should regional layouts be reinforced? Bringing these questions into the planning process offers a fresh perspective, reduces top-down assumptions, and pushes planners to think from the standpoint of those who must implement, and live with, the plan. Ultimately, this can help achieve a more dynamic, higher-level balance between the "supply" and "demand" sides of planning. Enditem