Made in China 2025: the plan, its ten sectors and its results

What Made in China 2025 is

Made in China 2025 (中国制造2025, often shortened to MIC2025) is a national industrial strategy issued by China's State Council, the country's chief administrative body, to move Chinese manufacturing from volume production toward advanced, higher-value industries. Its instrument is the State Council Notice on Issuing "Made in China 2025," document no. 国发〔2015〕28号 (Guofa [2015] No. 28), signed on 8 May 2015 and published on 19 May 2015. An abridged text is reproduced on a Chinese government site, and the National Development and Reform Commission also lists it.

The document sets out a three-step strategy:

• by 2025, enter the ranks of the world's manufacturing powers;
• by 2035, reach the middle level of the world's manufacturing powers;
• by 2049, rank at the top of the world's manufacturing powers.

The year 2025 was therefore the plan's first target date, and two major evaluations appeared that year. They reached different scores for reasons that come down to units of measurement, explained below.

The ten key sectors

Section 6 of the strategic tasks (大力推动重点领域突破发展, "vigorously promote breakthroughs in key sectors") names ten sectors. In the plan's own terms, they are:

• next-generation information technology (新一代信息技术产业), including integrated circuits, communications equipment and software;
• high-end CNC machine tools and robotics (高档数控机床和机器人);
• aerospace equipment (航空航天装备);
• ocean engineering equipment and high-tech ships (海洋工程装备及高技术船舶);
• advanced rail transit equipment (先进轨道交通装备);
• energy-saving and new-energy vehicles (节能与新能源汽车), where new-energy vehicles (NEVs) means battery-electric, plug-in hybrid and fuel-cell vehicles;
• electrical and power equipment (电力装备);
• agricultural machinery (农机装备);
• new materials (新材料), meaning advanced metals, composites and other engineered materials;
• biopharmaceuticals and high-performance medical devices (生物医药及高性能医疗器械).

Most categories that small importers buy, such as apparel, furniture, housewares and general consumer goods, are not among the ten. The sectors that are on the list overlap heavily with the products that US trade policy has singled out, which is where the plan matters most to a US-bound buyer.

Where the numeric targets came from

The State Council notice itself is mostly qualitative. The quantified goals sat mainly in a 2015 technical roadmap usually called the "Green Book," which contained more than 250 targets, according to the USCC's November 2025 staff report. Beijing described the roadmap as non-binding; the USCC assesses it as "semi-official."

The USCC also describes an economy-wide goal of 70% self-sufficiency in "core basic components and key basic materials." That percentage does not appear in the abridged State Council text. The notice does include an indicator table (a chart of headline quantitative metrics for the plan), but on the government page it is published as an image and the Editorial Desk has not read its values. Any figure attributed to that indicator table here would therefore be unverified, and none is given.

The practical rule for readers: when an article cites a precise Made in China 2025 target, check whether it comes from the State Council notice or from the Green Book roadmap. They are different documents with different official status.

Did Made in China 2025 succeed? Two ways of scoring it

The answer depends on what is being counted. The two main published scores use different units, and both should be reported together.

The USCC 2025 staff report: about half of the sectors

The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC), a body created by the US Congress, published a staff research report, "Made in China 2025: Evaluating China's Performance," on 14 November 2025. It is a staff paper and is not necessarily endorsed by the Commission. Its central finding: "China broadly met its MIC2025 goals in only about half of its focus sectors," against targets it describes as very ambitious.

• Largely met: electric vehicles, electrical equipment, biopharmaceuticals and medical devices, ships, and space equipment.
• Mixed: aviation, new materials and integrated circuits.

The report's examples show the range. NEVs reached about 91% of China's domestic market in 2024 against an 80% target, and 3.5 million indigenous NEVs were sold in 2021 against a 3 million target. Semiconductor self-sufficiency, by contrast, was 16.6% in 2020 against a 50% target. Across the ten sectors, Chinese firms accounted for "nearly one-quarter of the global growth in exports related to the ten MIC2025 sectors between 2015 and 2023."

Rhodium Group and the target counts

Rhodium Group, in a study commissioned by the US Chamber of Commerce and published 5 May 2025, found that China "largely succeeded in reducing its import dependencies," while remaining dependent on foreign firms in biomedicine, high-end machine tools, commercial aircraft and cutting-edge semiconductors. Rhodium also summarizes two other assessments that the Editorial Desk has not checked against their originals:

• a 2024 South China Morning Post (SCMP) analysis finding that China met "over 86% of the 260 targets," with new materials lowest at 75%;
• a 2024 Bloomberg Economics assessment calling the plan "largely a success," finding that of 13 critical technologies tracked, China leads in 5 and is closing the gap in 7.

The sources also disagree slightly on the size of the roadmap: the USCC says the Green Book had more than 250 targets, while the SCMP count, as summarized by Rhodium, uses 260. The scores are not contradictory once the unit is clear. A sector can miss its headline goal while most of its individual targets are met. What the assessments share is the pattern: large gains in EVs, batteries, ships and rail, and shortfalls in chips, aircraft and new materials. No CSIS evaluation was available to the Editorial Desk.

What happened to the name after 2018

A common claim is that Made in China 2025 was cancelled. The record does not support that. Rhodium reports that the policy "officially disappeared from public discourse in 2018," while its objectives continued under other policy frameworks.

The funding did not stop either. Rhodium reports that China's innovation-related tax benefits grew at an average of 28.8% a year from 2018 to 2022, and that state investment through government guidance funds (state-backed investment vehicles that take stakes in strategic companies) rose more than five-fold from 2015 to 2020. The USCC report reaches a related conclusion: the sectors that met most targets had consistent, long-term government support, vertically integrated supply chains or economies of scale.

The 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030)

The successor framework is the 15th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development, with its Outline of Long-Term Goals to 2035. The National People's Congress approved it on 12 March 2026, according to the Congressional Research Service's In Focus IF13204 of 16 April 2026. That CRS document prints the period as "(2025-2030)," which appears to be a typographical error; China's State Council Information Office describes the plan as covering 2026–2030.

Per CRS, the plan calls for "extraordinary measures" to reduce reliance on foreign science and technology and for "decisive breakthroughs" in advanced materials, equipment, machine tools, high-end instruments, AI and robotics, semiconductors, software and biotechnology. It also calls for upgrading legacy industries such as steel, petrochemicals and shipbuilding, and for "PRC-controlled and vertically integrated global supply chains." The industrial priorities CRS lists include:

• Materials: specialty steel, high-temperature alloys and advanced rare earths.
• Machines and tools: CNC machine tools, precision bearings, ball screws, motors and control systems.
• Energy: solar cells, storage, batteries, green hydrogen and fusion.
• Major equipment: large LNG carriers and CR450 high-speed trains.
• Technology: mature-node and advanced semiconductors, 6G, quantum, AI-enabled robotics, intelligent vehicles and drones.
• Medical: novel drugs and biomanufacturing.

The overlap with the 2015 list is direct. CRS also notes that foreign direct investment into China "has been falling since 2021," and that the plan seeks reinvestment of foreign firms' earnings and selective, "controlled" market openings. Numeric targets, such as a manufacturing share of GDP or an R&D spending ratio, are not given in the CRS summary, and the plan text itself has not been reviewed by the Editorial Desk.

What the plan means for importers

For most small and mid-size importers, Made in China 2025 is context rather than a sourcing factor. Consumer goods, apparel and furniture were never among the ten sectors. Its relevance rises sharply for buyers of products inside them, for three reasons.

• Capacity is deepest where support was strongest. The USCC's sector results (EVs, electrical equipment, ships) mark where Chinese supply chains became most complete.
• US trade measures concentrate on the same sectors. As of October 2026, the 2024 Section 301 four-year-review increases in HTSUS Chapter 99 (U.S. note 31) apply to Chinese EVs, lithium-ion batteries, solar cells, semiconductors and ship-to-shore cranes, among others. Rates and effective dates are on the tariff pages and must be checked per HTS line.
• Policy continuity is the base case. The 15th Five-Year Plan carries the same priorities to 2030, so the conditions that built these sectors are expected to persist.

The common errors are easy to avoid: do not describe the plan as cancelled, do not quote Green Book figures as if they were in the State Council notice, and do not report a single "success rate" without saying whether it counts sectors or targets.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission — Made in China 2025: Evaluating China's Performance (staff research report, 14 Nov 2025) (2025, PDF)
• Rhodium Group for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — Was Made in China 2025 Successful? (5 May 2025) (2025, PDF)
• cac.gov.cn/2015-05/19/c_1115334962.htm
• ndrc.gov.cn/xxgk/zcfb/qt/201505/t20150520_967388.html
• uscc.gov/research/made-china-2025-evaluating-chinas-performance
• congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/PDF/IF13204/IF13204.2.pdf
• english.scio.gov.cn/in-depth/2026-03/19/content_118390716.html