CHINESE President Xi Jinping has called on all Communist Party committees, ministries and governments at all levels to engage with the 3,110,000 proposals submitted by the public online for China’s next five-year plan.

The 15th plan will run from next year to 2030, and an online campaign urged citizens to contribute ideas from May 20. President Xi said the public consultation was part of China’s “whole-process people’s democracy.”

China uses five-year plans to plot its economic development, setting economic and social targets.

The 14th plan, adopted at the tail-end of the first Donald Trump presidency in the United States, emphasised the need for supply chain resilience and domestic technological innovation in response to increased US hostility to free trade. It also called for an accelerated green transition and reducing carbon emissions.

China’s strides forward in fields including battery technology, space exploration and artificial intelligence (AI) indicate good progress towards those goals, while Chinese carbon emissions fell by 1 per cent in the last year despite rising power demand — a consequence of its huge investment in renewables, with the country installing more solar power capacity last year alone than the total solar power capacity of the United States. The fall, though modest, suggests China has hit peak emissions five years ahead of its own target.

The 15th plan will be thrashed out in more detail at the next meeting of the Communist Party’s central committee in October. The party has identified an AI strategy known as “AI plus,” raising domestic consumption and a continued push for mastery of cutting-edge technology as priorities.