NEW HAVEN – A few years ago, I had a feeling that China’s long-standing culture of heated debates over economic policy was going to disappear. And now this has happened. This is the message conveyed by the sad end of the China Development Forum (CDF), a meeting in which I had the privilege of participating since its creation.
At least until this year. After participating in 25 consecutive CDFs – making me the longest-serving foreign delegate – I was not invited in 2026. The organizers belatedly sent me a formal note thanking me for my participation over the years, along with their wishes for “a very healthy, happy and prosperous Year of the Horse”.
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I was disappointed, but hardly shocked. In 2024, I was informed that although I would still be able to participate in the CDF, I would not be allowed to speak at any public sessions.
My views on China (and especially Hong Kong) had become more cautious, and I was told that my comments on the Chinese economy had “generated intense scrutiny and even controversy” among the Chinese and foreign press, which suggested to them that any comments I made in the CDF would be “misinterpreted and even sensationalized” by the media. The organizers were explicit that this would not be in my interest – nor in China’s.
Still, I attended the forum as a spectator in 2024 and again last year. As I wrote at the time, the goal was to continue to attend and witness the fate of the CDF.
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Although I wasn’t able to do it this year, my friends in China gave me a rundown of what the event went like. The CDF now has one day less, having been reduced from three days to two in 2024, and Premier Li Qiang gave an opening speech for the third year in a row instead of organizing an interactive dialogue at the end.
A pirated copy of the agenda reveals 13 seminars with an average duration of 90 minutes, with a total of 117 speakers. Taking into account the session moderators’ opening remarks and the grace time adjustments for eight keynote speakers, four Nobel Prize laureates, and a special keynote address from Apple CEO Tim Cook, this boils down to an average of about six minutes per speaker. This makes it nearly impossible to say anything meaningful and leaves little room for questions, let alone debate.
These fast-paced sessions hardly did justice to the important theme of this year’s CDF: how to ensure high-quality development and create new opportunities as China embarks on its 15th Five-Year Plan.
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The start of a new plan is a crucial moment for the Chinese leadership to consider — and, yes, debate — the strategic opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. Unfortunately, the CDF, in its current form, is ill-equipped to fulfill this critical role.
A fragmented agenda, filled with soundbite-length contributions from a multitude of speakers—many of whom know little about the topics they are assigned to opine on—is incapable of fostering debate on anything, especially a new five-year plan.
In my opinion, if it counts (clearly not much in China today), the 15th Five-Year Plan is disappointing, as it basically repeats the 14th Five-Year Plan that has just ended.
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The top priority remains new high-quality productive forces, especially advanced technology. With domestic demand declining, this leaves the Chinese economy heavily dependent on exports at a time when external demand faces strong headwinds due to geopolitical tensions and rising protectionism.
However, the new plan is limited to empty words in relation to the Chinese consumer, who has long been the most obvious candidate to fill the void left by the weakness of the post-crisis property market and excessive investment in the public and private sectors.
When it comes to consumption-driven rebalancing, Chinese leaders at the top continue to talk a lot but are unwilling to act on it.
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Instead of addressing the excesses of fear-driven precautionary economics, which curbs long-term discretionary consumption, the new plan, like the old one, promotes trade-in campaigns for cars, appliances and other durable goods that simply make use of demand that would have been met anyway. If I were at the CDF this year, I would have raised this issue for the umpteenth year in a row.
Is it my resentment because I wasn’t invited this year? It is more a sense of disillusionment with the Chinese government’s denial of a serious growth problem and its fixation on suppressing debate in favor of “good stories from China”.
I will always remember my first participation in the CDF, in 2001. The then premier, Zhu Rongji, had launched the conference a year earlier as a platform for interaction and debate between Chinese government ministers, academics (foreign and domestic) and some business executives.
This underscored Zhu’s genius as a strategic thinker: If China’s senior leaders couldn’t handle difficult feedback immediately after the conclusion of the National People’s Congress, the biggest political gathering of the year, the logic was that they didn’t deserve their seats on the State Council.
On that occasion, I had long discussions with Zhu and his successor, Wen Jiabao, about the imperative need for a consumption-driven rebalancing. True to the original spirit of the CDF, we don’t always agree. But there has never been a problem with being frank and open when expressing disagreements.
Chinese leaders recognized the importance of constructive debate. Unfortunately, that was then, not now. The result is that China will suffer.
Translation by Fabrício Calado Moreira
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2026.
