For close watchers of Chinese politics, the country’s annual parliamentary meeting this year sent an important message: Beijing plans to boost investment in high technology, support the flagging economy and steel itself for a more hostile geopolitical environment.
The week-long session of the rubber stamp National People’s Congress, which wrapped up this week, was characterised by rhetoric painting China as an island of stability in a chaotic world while also celebrating artificial intelligence breakthroughs by Chinese companies such as DeepSeek.
“This is the ‘DeepSeek congress’,” said Kerry Brown, director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College, London.
Brown said the timing of the NPC session, coming just as American President Donald Trump’s rapidly changing trade and foreign policies threatened to unleash international chaos, had put extra pressure on Chinese leaders to differentiate themselves from the US.
For Beijing, “It was: ‘Oh my God, we’ve been talking for years about a complicated global situation and now it has really hit and we’ve got to sound like adults because everyone else is going nuts’,” he said.
At a press conference at the NPC, foreign minister Wang Yi stressed China’s stable approach.
“The world today is interwoven with turmoil, and certainty is increasingly becoming a scarce resource globally,” Wang said. “Chinese diplomacy will stand steadfastly on the right side of history and the side of human progress. We will provide certainty to this uncertain world.”
Each spring, about 5,000 delegates and members gather in Beijing for the meetings of the NPC and advisory Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, which are together known as the “Two Sessions”.
The sessions are closely watched by investors for signals of Beijing’s economic and strategic goals, with analysts closely parsing the Communist party-speak of official speeches and documents.
Beijing has in recent years prioritised national security over “development” — often a byword for economic growth, analysts say. But last September, with GDP growth slowing sharply due to a long-running property sector crisis, leaders switched their emphasis to boosting consumption, announcing a monetary stimulus and later trying to reinvigorate the private sector.
In his “work report”, an annual account of the government’s achievements and goals delivered at the opening of the NPC session, China’s second-ranked leader Premier Li Qiang this year again stressed the need to “better ensure both development and security”.
But he increased the emphasis on boosting domestic demand, using the word “consumption” 32 times in the work report, up from 21 times in 2024 — and more even than his frequent references to “technology”, which were little changed at 29 mentions.
Li also introduced into the work report lexicon for the first time the term “embodied AI”, meaning AI-powered robots or machines.
The central government budget for 2025, announced during the NPC session, set out an 8.3 per cent year-on-year increase in spending on the technology sector — nearly twice the rise for general fiscal spending and higher than for social welfare.
Delegates enthusiastically embraced Li’s emphasis on tech, with several interviewed by the Financial Times espousing “embodied AI” and the need to double down on semiconductor investment.
“Humanoid robots have a promising future,” said delegate Jiang Yuanxun at the closing session of the NPC in the Great Hall of the People, the sprawling Mao-era political complex on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. “DeepSeek is changing our lives,” he added.
Zhang Yunquan, a CPPCC member and expert at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said “the American technology chokehold” meant local AI pioneers such as DeepSeek faced problems accessing adequate computing power.
“China will definitely invest more funds, talent, and teams into developing its own high-end computing chips,” Zhang said. “Sooner or later we will break through the computing power bottleneck.”
In side meetings with delegations from China’s provincial delegations, senior leaders took pains to warn cadres that the overall economy and global environment were difficult.
They repeatedly used the phrase “a complex and severe situation of increasing external pressure”, said Manoj Kewalramani, author of a newsletter that provides daily interpretations of the Communist party’s flagship People’s Daily newspaper.
“They were conveying to everybody that things are going to be difficult . . . and we just have to learn to live with it,” he said.
For some NPC delegates, China’s weak domestic economy, which is suffering from deflationary pressures, was a more pressing issue than global turmoil.
“Consumer spending is indeed poor this year, even worse than last year,” said one delegate, Li Dexiang, who is also chair of retailer Guizhou Heli Supermarket Group. “I feel that ordinary people are increasingly reluctant to spend money.”
On property, Premier Li for the first time used straightforward language in the work report to describe the current slump, saying the government would “stem the downturn and restore stability in the real estate market”. A year earlier, he had said only that it would “defuse risks in real estate”.
The work report was also more frank about the government’s problems with foreign direct investment, which has suffered record falls in recent years. This year it talked of “stabilising” FDI, while in 2024 it spoke only of “attracting” more foreign investment.
There was also some discussion at the NPC session of worries about social stability — an issue that flared last year when there were several unexplained, apparently random, acts of mass murder by individuals.
The work report of the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, also submitted to the NPC, specifically mentioned by name two men convicted of mass killings in southern China’s Zhuhai city and eastern Wuxi city.
Kewalramani said a meeting between President Xi Jinping and the delegation from the People’s Liberation Army had also sent an important message. At the meeting, Xi, who has been pushing a broad anti-graft crackdown on the PLA, demanded “the establishment of a sound and effective oversight system to thoroughly investigate and address corruption” in the armed forces.
King’s College’s Brown said that while the NPC session conveyed “relatively friendly language about foreign investment and China being an internationally responsible player”, it said little about how Beijing might exploit opportunities created by Trump’s bruising approach towards third countries.
Foreign minister Wang’s press conference did give a possible hint of Beijing’s thinking, however. Wang touted a plan to expand the Brics group of emerging nations and hinted at China’s hopes for the “global south” — the mass of unaligned developing countries that Beijing has been courting in part to undermine US global influence.
“We will continue to expand equal, open and co-operative global partnerships,” Wang said, saying Beijing hoped to “write a new chapter of unity . . . with the global south”.
Additional reporting by Wenjie Ding in Beijing
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