context: The 15th 5-year plan (2026–30) strongly promotes emerging technologies, healthcare and aged-care, and anti-involution. The announcement also falls in line with multiple policy trends: setting comprehensive national standards for technology, promoting open source and shifting emerging industries’ focus from doing basic research and enhancing core capabilities toward deploying profitable applications.
MIIT (Ministry of Industry and Information Technology) held the 2026 National Conference on High-Quality Development of the Electronic Information Manufacturing Industry in Wuhan on 10 April. Vice Minister Xiong Jijun 熊继军 outlined priorities for the 15th 5-year period
- accelerate industry deployment of fifth-generation RISC-V, an open-source instruction set architecture
- promote AI-powered terminal devices
- curb involutionary competition in photovoltaics
- expand smart solutions in healthcare, aged-care and education
- achieve breakthroughs in both complete systems and components to create 'hit' products
MIIT also signalled progress on standards and regulatory frameworks
- spatiotemporal information (GPS-type services) and satellite internet: accelerate the release of policy documents
- mobile power banks: advance mandatory national standards
- phone charging interfaces: unify around a single port standard
- TV operations: continue push to simplify cluttered smart TV interfaces
MIIT also announced a plan to build a unified AI chip computing interconnection ecosystem, enabling domestic AI chips from different vendors to interoperate in shared computing clusters rather than requiring proprietary stacks.