What happened in China In March 2026, China's National People's Congress approved the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030), formally titled the Outline of the 15th Five Year Plan (2026-2030) for National Economic and Social Development of the People's Republic of China. The document is approximately 80,000 Chinese characters long — a dense, technically specific blueprint that sets binding and indicative targets across every sector of the Chinese economy through 2030. AI is not a footnote. The 141-page document mentioned AI more than 50 times. The plan targets raising the value-added of 'core digital economy industries' to 12.5% of GDP. And this is not a plan sitting on a shelf: China launched an $8.2 billion National AI Industry Investment Fund in January 2025, more than a year before the plan was formally approved — signalling that the funding infrastructure was already being assembled before the ink was dry. The plan explicitly…