China’s 15th Five-Year Plan, covering 2026 through 2030, frames its core ambition in the language of innovation and development. Read structurally, it is something more specific: a document organized around the elimination of Chinese dependency on the United States, Europe, and Japan in every sector that would be decisive in a sustained great-power confrontation.

The plan identifies by name the areas where China remains reliant on foreign technology and supply chains—aircraft, agriculture, advanced equipment, energy systems, gas turbines, and semiconductors—and treats that reliance as the primary problem to be solved. This is not a normal industrial development agenda. Normal industrial development seeks comparative advantage. This agenda seeks independence from the countries it regards as the most likely sources of economic coercion in a conflict scenario.