China's new five-year plan calls for AI throughout its economy, tech breakthroughs

China's tech focus comes amid its rapidly ageing workforce, looming demographic crisis and fierce battle with the United States for supremacy in core technologies.

BEIJING: China's new five-year policy blueprint laid out its ambitions to aggressively adopt artificial intelligence (AI) throughout the world's second-biggest economy and dominate emerging technologies such as quantum computing and humanoid robots.The country will "seize the commanding heights of science and technological development" and seek "decisive breakthroughs in key core technologies", according to the plan released on Thursday (Mar 5) to coincide with the opening session of the National People's Congress.A separate report by the country's state-planning body also asserted that China was outpacing rivals in AI research and development as well as other key areas."China now leads the world in research and development and application in fields such as AI, biomedicine, robotics and quantum technology, and new breakthroughs were made in the independent R&D of chips," it said.

The 141-page five-year blueprint, which covered a wide range of socio-economic targets and policies, mentioned AI more than 50 times and included a sweeping "AI+ action plan".The focus on tech reflects China's need to grapple with its rapidly ageing workforce and looming demographic crisis, its fierce battle with the United States for supremacy in core technologies, as well as dramatic progress made by Chinese AI model developers such as DeepSeek.Specific measures in the plan include experimenting with robots to perform jobs in sectors suffering from labour shortages and deploying AI agents that can perform tasks with minimal human guidance."Beijing's goal is to use AI and robotics to boost productivity and performance in a wide range of sectors, from manufacturing and logistics to education and healthcare," said Kyle Chan, fellow in Chinese technology at the Brookings Institution think tank.

The government also highlighted its commitment to technology - an area it calls "new quality productive forces" - in the opening paragraphs of the main government work report presented by Premier Li Qiang. That was far more prominent than last year's report.China's reliance thus far on US tech such as chips and planes has been a major source of frustration as trade tensions soared. Their tech war has seen both sides place export controls on some key products and resources - advanced chips most notably in the case of Washington and rare earths and critical minerals in the case of Beijing.

The government work report and five-year blueprint outlined plans to increase investment in quantum computing, 6G, embodied AI - the tech that powers humanoid robots - and areas at the cutting-edge of science, like machine-brain interfaces.The five-year plan also pledged to achieve "key breakthroughs in nuclear fusion technologies", develop a reusable heavy-load rocket, construct an integrated space-earth quantum communication network, develop scalable quantum computers, and demonstrate the feasibility of building a lunar research station.It also emphasised China's goal to become a world leader in frontier R&D by "accelerating breakthroughs in basic theories and foundational technologies" and investing in basic research and cultivating a world-class talent base in science and tech.The Chinese government also promised to build out "hyper-scale" computing clusters supported by cheap and abundant electricity and also support the building of AI open-source communities."Open source wasn't mentioned in previous reports, and this is also a key difference between the Chinese and American AI approaches," said Tilly Zhang, technology and industrial policy analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics."I believe China has studied this very carefully and decided to make open-source AI a flagship strategy and a competitive advantage against the United States."