Beijing has expanded export-control regimes to cover more rare-earth elements, adding licence requirements and new compliance rules that give it finegrained leverage over global supply.
It is a war plan for a war the United States is not fighting because it is too busy fighting the wrong one.
While Washington pours billions into fighting Iran and global headlines track oil prices and missile trajectories, Beijing has quietly released a document that could shape the balance of power for decades. China’s 141-page 15th Five-Year Plan, unveiled at the National People’s Congress on March 5, lays out an ambitious strategy to dominate the technologies, materials and industries expected to define the next generation of economic and military strength.
“Nobody is paying attention. That is the point,” writes investment analyst and author Shanaka Anslem Perera in a post on X.
The blueprint reads less like a routine economic policy document and more like a national technological mobilisation.
Artificial intelligence is threaded through the text, with Beijing signalling a push to embed AI across the bulk of its economy over the next decade.
Humanoid robotics has been designated a pillar industry, with production expected to double within five years. The plan also commits China to building space-Earth quantum communication networks, accelerating nuclear-fusion research and advancing brain-computer interface technologies.
The economic ambition is equally striking. AI-related industries alone are expected to exceed 10 trillion yuan in value over the plan period, roughly 1.4 trillion dollars at current exchange rates. The scale resembles a coordinated national industrial push that links frontier technologies with manufacturing and state policy to build long-term economic strength rather than short-term battlefield advantage.
Perera argues that the breadth of the strategy is what makes it strategically significant. “This is not an economic plan,” he wrote. “It is a war plan for a war the United States is not fighting.”
Washington’s main answer to China’s technological rise so far has been the CHIPS and Science Act, signed in 2022. The law committed 52.7 billion dollars to strengthen domestic semiconductor manufacturing, including 39 billion dollars in direct grants and generous tax incentives. It has triggered hundreds of billions of dollars in private investment across more than 140 announced projects and created large numbers of high-skilled jobs across the United States.
It is not about the Chips
But the effort is focused largely on one critical sector: chips.
China’s strategy spans far wider territory. Artificial intelligence is intended to spread across the entire economy, from heavy industry to services. Robotics is meant to anchor industrial production.
The plan pushes parallel investment in quantum computing, space infrastructure and, crucially, the raw-material and processing capacity that underpins advanced electronics-especially rare earths.
Perera sums up the contrast in simple terms: “The CHIPS Act is a rifle. The Five-Year Plan is an arsenal.”
Rare-earth minerals sit at the centre of that arsenal. China currently processes the overwhelming majority of the world’s rare-earth elements, materials essential for everything from electric vehicles to guidance systems and cutting-edge radar. Each F-35 fighter jet requires hundreds of pounds of rare-earth metals in its engines, sensors and weapons systems. Missile-defence batteries, electronic-warfare suites and precision-guided munitions rely on them as well.
In recent years Beijing has steadily tightened its grip. It has expanded export-control regimes to cover more rare-earth elements and processing technologies, adding licence requirements and new compliance rules that give it fine-grained leverage over global supply. At the same time, US defence procurement rules are moving in the opposite direction: from January 2027, Pentagon contracts are supposed to phase out Chinese rare-earth content, forcing US suppliers to find or build alternative sources.
That leaves what analysts describe as a vulnerability window measured in years, if not a decade. During that period, the United States is simultaneously burning through rare-earth-heavy munitions in conflicts like the Iran campaign and trying to stand up new mines, processors and magnet plants that do not yet exist at scale.
“The Iran war is consuming the interceptors,” Perera wrote. “China is tightening the supply chain that builds the interceptors.” The Five-Year Plan is the document that turns that tightening into national strategy.
Xi Jinping’s 141-page roadmap is aimed at ensuring that many of the materials required to deliver that fire and fury remain under Chinese control for the next fifteen years. If China, analysts say, succeeds in locking the materials, robotics and AI stack into a single state-directed system, the contest over the next global superpower may not be decided in dogfights over the Gulf but inside supply chains and factories, long before an F-35 ever takes off.
