I'm Robert Lawrence Kuhn and here's what I'm watching: how the Party works to achieve the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation via the regular cycles of targeted five-year plans. It is the Party's grand blueprint, it says, for optimizing the domestic and foreign environments faced by each specific historical stage, anchoring its grand goal of socialist modernization, combining strategy and operability, and clarifying priority areas and key tasks. In fact, the history of five-year plans is the story of CPC governance.

In the early days of the People's Republic of China, the five-year plans reflected the Soviet Union's approach to a planned economy and jump-started heavy industry such as automobiles, though, as the official line states, "experiencing some setbacks and taking some detours," especially during the ruinous Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution periods. Subsequent five-year plans, from the Sixth to the Ninth, facilitated the transition from the planned economy to the socialist market economy.

The "13th Five-Year Plan" (2016-2020) implemented President Xi Jinping's "new development concepts" of innovation, coordination, greenness, openness, and sharing, to achieve China's first centenary goal of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects.

The "14th Five-Year Plan" (2021-2025) is the first five years for China to comprehensively build a modern socialist country towards the second centenary goal mid-century. The 14th Five-Year Plan is based on the new development stage, and provides a comprehensive and systematic framework for China's economic and social development. It is the first five-year plan to prioritize self-reliance and self-improvement in science and technology in order to support national development. It stresses new steps in reform and opening up, in social civilization, in ecological civilization. It calls for new levels of people's livelihood and well-being, and new improvements in governance efficiency. The economic and social development of Chinese modernization during the five-year period is said to provide strong support for China's basic realization of socialist modernization in 2035.

The Party says that its overall leadership is the fundamental guarantee for the steady and long-term development of Chinese modernization. Long-term is key, because the CPC, as the perpetual ruling organization, is not the equivalent of a ruling political party in Western systems, where political parties represent only a certain group of voters and are time-bounded by election cycles.

For this reason, the Chinese Party, the CPC, has a higher and broader obligation to enhance the living standards and personal well-being of all Chinese citizens. This includes reforms, rule of law, transparency in government, public participation in governance, increasing democracy, and various freedoms (including freedoms of expression), and, of course, human rights. These are real challenges.

All political parties, all political systems, have trade-offs, and while achieving national objectives is indeed an advantage of China's Party-led system, it is not the only criterion for evaluating systems. This is why continuing reform, opening up, and system improvement are needed.

I'm keeping watch. I'm Robert Lawrence Kuhn.

Script: Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Editors: Qi Haiming, Duan Jiaxin

Designer: Qi Haiming

Producer: Wang Ying

Supervisors: Xiao Jian, Adam Zhu

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