During China’s National People’s Congress Two Sessions annual gathering in early March 2026, the immediate global attention fell on GDP targets and trade tensions with Washington. However, the more consequential outcome of those sessions was the formal adoption of the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030), a 141-page document that does not merely chart China’s domestic economic trajectory but doubles as a strategic blueprint for deepening Beijing’s presence across the developing world, and nowhere more deliberately than in South Asia.
The Two Sessions, which bring together the NPC and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, function as the institutional machinery through which the Communist Party converts political priorities into binding policy. Under Xi Jinping, these documents have shifted further away from high-speed growth toward technological self-reliance, national security, and state guidance of the economy. This year’s sessions institutionalized that shift at scale, and South Asia is expected to feel the consequences across the next five years in ways that go well beyond conventional infrastructure lending.
To understand where the 15th Five-Year Plan is headed in South Asia, one has to start with where China already stands. In 2024, trade between China and South Asia reached nearly $200 billion, doubling over the past decade with an average annual growth rate of 6.3 percent. That figure breaks down as roughly $100 billion with India, $27 billion with Bangladesh, $23 billion with Pakistan, $5 billion with Sri Lanka, $1.5 billion with Nepal and about $1 billion with the Maldives. China is, by a significant distance, the largest trading partner of every South Asian country except Bhutan.
The investment picture is equally striking. According to a World Bank report, China has extended $48 billion in loans to South Asian nations, with Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh owing record-level debts to Beijing. In 2024, China became the largest creditor of Pakistan, with nearly $29 billion in loans. Sri Lanka acquired over $13.2 billion from Chinese state banks between 2006 and 2022 for infrastructure initiatives, notably the Hambantota Port. Revenue deficits and financial difficulties compelled the government to lease the port to a Chinese firm for 99 years in 2017. These numbers represent a structural dependency that the 15th Five-Year Plan is designed to deepen, even as its character evolves.
In 2025, overall, BRI engagement globally reached a total of $213.5 billion through construction contracts and investments, an increase of 19 percent in deal numbers compared to 2024. Within South Asia, the picture is not uniform either. China’s engagement in Pakistan for the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor dropped by 77 percent in 2025, while simultaneously, Sri Lanka saw BRI engagement grow by 1,590 percent, with a major deal being the $3.7 billion investment by Sinopec to build an oil refinery. The CPEC slowdown however should not be read as retreat. Islamabad’s debt distress has made large, headline infrastructure loans politically and financially unsustainable. Beijing is accordingly pivoting to energy investments and softer forms of engagement that are harder to track and easier to absorb.
The more structurally significant shift embedded in the 15th Five-Year Plan is sectoral, not geographic. Primary-source analysis of the 15th Five-Year Plan reveals that artificial intelligence outnumbers references to integrated circuits by roughly 13 to 1. Computing power, nearly absent from the previous plan, now receives its own dedicated chapter. The plan introduces a new strategic term, “model-chip-cloud-application,” encoding a four-layer architecture that reaches from domestic semiconductor production all the way to deployed AI systems in partner countries.
This has direct implications for South Asia. The 15th Five-Year Plan formalizes a strategy centred on offshore computing facilities and multilateral AI institutions, including a proposed World AI Cooperation Organization and a Belt and Road AI cooperation platform, explicitly supporting “Global South countries in strengthening AI capacity building.” In practice, this means Chinese technology firms, backed by state planning objectives, will offer South Asian governments AI infrastructure, smart governance systems, and digital connectivity frameworks that embed Chinese technology standards at the foundational level. Under the Digital Silk Road initiative, Chinese tech giants such as Huawei and ZTE are already supporting Bangladesh’s ambitions in 5G deployment, cloud computing, and smart governance. Chinese state-owned companies dominate Bangladesh’s infrastructure, controlling significant portions of its energy sector and holding a 25 percent stake in the Dhaka Stock Exchange.
The port dimension of this digital push is also codified in the plan. Between 2026 and 2030, Beijing plans to codify data standards, align state-owned operators, and replicate successful models along key corridors so that port clusters run on similar Chinese AI and data stacks. China already holds operational stakes in strategic Indian Ocean ports. Running those facilities on Chinese AI infrastructure is a qualitative deepening of control that goes well beyond the asset ownership that drew initial criticism under the BRI’s first decade.
The Strategic Logic Beijing Is Not Advertising
China watchers have noted that Beijing is likely to leverage the overall planning process for the 15th Five-Year Plan to augment support for its Global Governance Initiative and Global Development Initiative from Global South countries.
South Asian states except India are, for the most part, poorly positioned to resist this logic. Their infrastructure financing needs remain enormous, their capacity to independently develop AI governance frameworks is limited, and the institutional alternatives, the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and Western bilateral lenders, move slowly and come with conditionalities that are politically costly. Beijing’s offer is quicker, cheaper to accept in the short term, and packaged in the language of South-South solidarity and shared development. The Chinese currency, the renminbi, is also set to evolve from a trade settlement currency to an investment and reserve currency, with offshore renminbi markets flourishing across multiple locations. If this materializes alongside AI infrastructure deals, it would tie the financial, technological and diplomatic threads of Chinese influence into a single, mutually reinforcing system.
The Two Sessions and the 15th Five-Year Plan together signal that China’s South Asia strategy has matured beyond the blunt instrument of loans for ports. It has become subtler, more technology-dense and significantly harder to reverse. The question for Dhaka, Colombo, Kathmandu, and Islamabad is not whether they wish to engage with China, the trade and investment numbers make disengagement implausible. The question is whether they are building the institutional capacity to set terms on that engagement before the next five years lock in a new generation of dependencies. On current evidence, most are not moving fast enough to answer that question confidently.