Thousands of delegates will arrive in Beijing this week for China’s annual Two Sessions, one of the most important events in the country’s political calendar and a rare opportunity for the global media to see Beijing’s top lawmakers up close.
The Two Sessions” are concurrent gatherings of the National People’s Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), an advisory body.
Of the two gatherings, the NPC, China’s legislature, is more important. It has the power to amend the constitution, appoint people to political offices, enact laws and approve the budget. In 2018 it was at the NPC that amended China’s constitution to scrap term limits for the president, and in 2023 it was the NPC that subsequently elected Xi Jinping to that office for an unprecedented third term.
However, in modern China, the Chinese Communist party (CCP) is more powerful than any organ of the state, and the NPC is in effect a rubber-stamp parliament, having never voted down any item on its agenda. The real decision-making is done by the CCP at separate meetings.
Still, the opening of the CPPCC on Wednesday and the NPC on Thursday will be full of pomp and circumstance.The NPC is the forum in which the government releases its annual work report, outlining goals for the year ahead, including the GDP growth target, which this year is expected to drop below 5% for the first time.
But this year’s session is also particularly important because it marks the official launch of the 15th five-year plan, the economic planning document that outlines Beijing’s priorities for 2026-2030.
“This is going to be an unusually busy Two Sessions,” says Ruby Osman, a senior policy adviser at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.
“The Two Sessions usually tell us what Beijing wants to do over the next 12 months. This year, they’ll also set out a much bigger strategy for navigating a decisive period of geopolitical and technological change,” she says.
Osman added that there is likely to be a “mismatch” in the priorities of the annual government work report and the longer term goals of the five-year plan, which “will make clear that Beijing sees innovative capacity – and the ability to shield itself from US pressures – as China’s real structural challenge”.
The 2026-2030 window is a key time frame for China’s strategic goals. Xi wants the military to be capable of a successful assault on Taiwan by 2027, and needs an economy that is self-sufficient and resilient against potential sanctions to support that scenario. Taiwan is a self-governing island that Beijing claims as part of its territory, and it has not ruled out the use of force to “reunify” it with the CCP-ruled People’s Republic of China.
To that end, the 15th five-year plan is expected to focus on industrial self-reliance. China wants to boost its ability to domestically produce the most advanced semiconductors, blunting the force of US sanctions designed to hold back China’s technological progress, particularly when it comes to artificial intelligence and military applications.
But the spectre of recent high-level purges in the military will loom over any defence strategies. Xi recently placed his top general, Zhang Youxia, under investigation for suspected corruption, a highly unusual move that was made after years of increasing turmoil in the world’s biggest armed forces. A recent paper published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, found that more than 100 senior officers have been purged or potentially purged since 2022, a tally that researchers have described as “staggering”.
On Thursday, the NPC’s leadership body announced that it had revoked the NPC membership of nine military delegates, without providing reasons for the expulsions, according to a report published by Xinhua news agency.
“Xi’s military purges will leave empty seats where senior officers once sat – a stark reminder that political loyalty is non-negotiable and that even top generals are expendable if they displease the top leader,” says Neil Thomas, a fellow on Chinese politics at the Asia Society thinktank.
Outside of political intrigue, this year’s Two Sessions will reveal a number of economic indicators for the year ahead. The most important is the annual GDP growth target, which is expected to be about 4.5% this year, the first time that it has ever dropped below 5%. Analysts say that this reflects a shift in Beijing’s priorities towards technological self-reliance even if it comes at the expense of rapid growth.
That may be suited to what Beijing considers an uncertain geopolitical future, particularly with regards to the US. But China’s domestic problems, such as high levels of youth unemployment and an ageing society, will not be cured by a doubling down on niche, specialist sectors, while major other parts of the economy, such as real estate, continue to flail.
