The China-watching community has been busily decoding the communiqué of the Fourth Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China that was released mid-week. These statements have typically provided us a good guide for the government’s key longer-term economic priorities, which become embedded in the country’s Five-Year Plans. The upcoming 15th Five-Year Plan for the 2026-30 period will be officially unveiled in March. Although most China-watchers seem to have concluded (and perhaps rightly so) that the statement did not provide any new groundbreaking insights on measures that Beijing ... (full story)