"China's five-year plans have profoundly impacted US businesses," a finance professor at Emory University said in her recently released "quantitative analysis" on the plans. She pointed out that between 2001 and 2020, when China backed an industry through its five-year plans, US factories in the same sector shed about 5 percent of jobs and around 6 percent of investment, while the probability of factory closures in that industry rose by 1 percentage point. The gap between this conclusion and both logic and facts is far more than marginal.
First, as a key model for China's economic and social development, the Five-Year Plan is by no means a post-2001 invention. In 1953, the newly established People's Republic of China formulated its first Five-Year Plan for the development of the national economy. This blueprint was designed to ensure that large-scale construction projects were carried out under sound planning guidance, thereby avoiding potential recklessness.
Decades have passed, and despite dramatic changes in the external environment, China has consistently adhered to this governance model to promote the sustained development of its economy and society. It is precisely because of this framework that China was able to swiftly fulfill its WTO accession commitments after joining the WTO in 2001, unlocking tremendous development opportunities and cementing stable trade ties for members of the multilateral economic and trade system.
Second, China's Five-Year Plans are...
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