Visitors salutes in front of a portrait of former Chinese leader Mao Zedong at Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Communist Party leaders have gathered for a plenum in the city Oct. 20-23. Photographer: Na Bian/Bloomberg

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A gathering of more than 200 top leaders of China’s Communist Party in Beijing this week will likely highlight how technology advance has emerged as one of the country’s top goals, long-time China expert Ken Jarrett said in an interview.

The meeting of the party plenum on Oct. 20-23 will also review the broad outlines of the country’s next five-year economic plan to be finalized in the first half of 2026, said Jarrett, a senior advisor at Washington-based DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group with decades of business and diplomatic experience in China and across East Asia.

In the announcing the meeting, the party already “did mention that the plan should focus on high-quality development as well as developing new-quality productive forces in light of local conditions. This is code for a focus on high-technology innovation as well as cutting-edge technologies,” Jarrett said.

“These are areas of emphasis that have been shaping policymaking for the last few years as China is looking to restructure its economy to focus on more technologically and innovative products, as well as to move to higher-quality products, greener products and products that will insulate China from geostrategic tensions such as its competition with the United States, which is reducing China’s accessibility to U.S.-provided technology,” he said.

“So at this upcoming review, we should all pay attention to what is said about high-quality productive forces and new areas of technology that might be in for additional emphasis, such as artificial intelligence as well as anything the five-year plan reveals about further intent to localize production of high-technology items, so that China is not exposed to changes in U.S. policy that might result in the lack of availability of certain products. “The two countries have been in a high-profile disagreement of late over Chinese access to state-of-the-art U.S. semiconductors and mainland-controlled rare earth minerals.

This week’s meeting is being held against a backdrop of a Chinese economic growth rate likely to meet the government’s target of approximately five percent. China’s official Xinhua News Agency noted in a commentary on Monday the gathering “is poised to shape the direction of the 15^th Five-Year Plan that will steer the world’s second-largest economy from 2026 to 2030, a defining phase on China’s path toward basically achieving socialist modernization by 2025.”

“Five-year plans tend not to differ dramatically from plan to plan since it touches on all aspects of China’s economic and social development,” Jarrett observed. “There is a lot of continuity in policymaking, and I would argue that will be true in the upcoming 15^th five-year plan,” he said.

“I’d note that the plenum itself will speak in generalities about the plan, and we’ll have to wait until March before we are able to see more specifics about how the overall objectives articulated at the party plenum will be implemented in actuality,” Jarrett said.

On other topics, Jarrett – a former president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai – said that organization’s recent membership survey showing a decline in optimism among members actually had “mixed messages.”

“The survey has mixed messages, and it really depends on which message you want to emphasize – whether it’s half empty or half full,” he said. The decline in the five-year outlook is “noteworthy,” and reflects concerns about the economic growth outlook, global politics and rising domestic competition. “Local companies are more effective and more competitive; this is a bigger worry for (U.S.) companies,” he said.

But in terms of business performance among its membership, there was improvement. Profitability was up: 71% were profitable versus 66% in the previous year. “There was a turn in the fight direction,” Jarrett noted.