13th Five-Year Plan for the National Economic and Social Development of the People's Republic of China (2016-2020).

This Plan is a cross-sectoral policy document. It outlines the policy framework, priorities and economic and social goals for 2016-2020, including an average annual growth rate of above 6.5 percent. The Plan sets the main goal of “finishing building a moderately prosperous society in all respects by 2020”.
The Plan, as a blueprint which charts the course for China’s development up to 2020, requires to ensure the basic self-sufficiency of cereals and improve the secured level of grain production capacity. The main measures include: Adhere to the most stringent arable land protection system and keep comprehensive delineation of permanent basic farmlands; Taking grain and other major agricultural production areas as the focus, promote farmland water conservancy, land improvement, transformation of low-yield fields and high standards of farmland the construction, etc.
The Plan, centering on the goal of finishing building a moderately prosperous society in all respects and designed to address serious issues such as unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable development, stresses the need to promote innovative, coordinated, green, open, and shared development. The Plan places heavy weight on green development, with 10 out of 25 priority targets related to the environment. All the 10 targets are binding and among a total of 13 that must be achieved by 2020. In order to encourage green ways of working and living and speed up efforts to conserve ecosystems and the environment, measures and actions shall be taken, including: to take serious action to prevent and control air, water, and soil pollution, set a red line that the country’s total area of ecological spaces should not fall below, move forward with eco-friendly projects to protect and restore mountains, waters, forests, and farmlands, and intensify ecological conservation and restoration efforts. The binding targets are set to ensure that water consumption, energy consumption, and carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP are cut by 23%, 15%, and 18%, respectively, and that forest coverage reaches 23.04% by 2020. The Plan requests also make it the country’s aim, within this timeframe, to develop and use energy and resources much more efficiently and make improvements to the quality of ecosystems and the environment. In particular, the Plan requires to strive for major progress in the control and prevention of air pollution and see to it that the air quality of cities at and above the prefectural level is good or excellent for 80% of the year.
Guided by the vision of people-centered development, the Plan seeks to continue to strengthen points of weakness in meeting basic needs for the people in order to achieve common prosperity. The key targets include: to fight hard to win the war against poverty and help lift out of poverty all rural residents falling below the current poverty line, and achieve poverty alleviation in all poor counties and areas; improved public service for both urban and rural residents; more equitable and sustainable social security systems; improved public service for both urban and rural residents; everyone has access to secondary education; the average number of years of schooling received by the working-age population increases from 10.23 to 10.8 years; etc.
Two of the priorities are making progress in new urbanization and agricultural modernization as well as in balancing development between urban and rural areas and between regions. Narrowing the gap between urban and rural areas and between regions is considered not only a key part of economic structural adjustment; it is also crucial for unleashing developmental potential. By 2020, permanent urban residents should account for 60% of China’s population, and 45% of the Chinese people should be registered as permanent urban residents. Initiatives shall be launched to develop water conservancy in agriculture, farming machinery, and the modern seed industry, encourage appropriately scaled-up agricultural operations, and promote regional distribution, standardized production, and commercial agricultural services. By 2020, the supply, quality, and safety of food crops and other major agricultural products should be better ensured, notable headway should have been made in modernizing agriculture, and fresh progress should have been made in developing the new countryside.
The Plan further seeks to increase the resilience of livelihoods to disasters, including: comprehensively improve the ability to resist natural disasters such as weather, floods and droughts, earthquakes, geology and oceans; improve disaster prevention and mitigation system, disaster investigation and evaluation, monitoring and early warning, emergency response system. Chapter 46 of the Plan concerns actively responding to global climate change. It covers, among others, focusing on both mitigation and adaptation, taking the initiatives to control carbon emissions, implementing emission reduction commitments, enhancing the ability to adapt to climate change and deep participating in global response to climate change. Except for key bending targets mentioned above on water consumption, energy consumption, and carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP, and forestry coverage, another bending target is: non-fossil fuel to account for 15 percent of primary energy consumption. In particular, Chapter 41 proposes to strengthen marine climate change research, improve marine disaster monitoring, risk assessment and disaster prevention and mitigation capabilities, strengthen the marine relief strategy pre-set, and enhance the marine emergency response capability of environmental accidents.