Against the backdrop of rising global protectionism, China is advancing a new paradigm of institutional opening-up during the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30) period. This represents a fundamental shift from traditional market-access opening to deeper institutional integration — one designed to serve both China's domestic development and shared growth across diverse global economies.

This evolution moves beyond reducing barriers to entry toward harmonization of regulatory frameworks with international norms. China is actively pursuing alignment with high-standard international rules exemplified by agreements such as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Digital Economy Partnership Agreement. As this institutional opening-up moves beyond "at-the-border" measures to "behind-the-border" institutional reforms, these commitments serve as strategic catalyst for domestic reforms in critical areas including the restructuring of State-owned enterprises, data governance and competition policy.

Rather than wholesale adoption of external standards, this institutional opening-up will unfold as an evolutionary process pioneered in targeted initiatives and pilot zones and negotiated through international collaboration. The Hainan Free Trade Port exemplifies this strenuous approach to harmonizing rules, regulations, management and standards. Beyond advanced market access, the zone pilots regulatory transparency mechanisms, enhanced intellectual property protection and fair competition review systems. The Hainan FTP has streamlined foreign enterprise registration by cutting application steps and materials and enabling online registration for eligible overseas investors. In 2024, over 2,000 new foreign-invested enterprises were established in Hainan, up nearly 20 percent year-on-year. A meticulous, step-by-step approach ensures that institutional reforms are both ambitious and grounded in practical reality.

Beyond these targeted regulatory innovations, China's new opening-up paradigm is underpinned by distinctive economic characteristics that create differentiated opportunities across the development spectrum. As a major export destination for nearly 80 economies, the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong Special Administrative Region absorbed about 13.3 percent of global imports in 2024, close to the United States' 13.6 percent, according to the World Trade Organization figures. With steady GDP growth of around 5 percent, China remains one of the world's few expanding large-scale markets — a critical stabilizer amid trade tensions.

Moreover, China possesses all 41 major industrial categories classified by the United Nations and the world's largest engineering workforce — about 17.7 million engineers as of 2020 — supported by a strong talent pipeline, including 3.1 million undergraduate-and-above graduates in science, engineering, agriculture and medicine in 2024. This complete industrial ecosystem enables rapid innovation cycles, converting research and development into products in weeks rather than months. These supply-side and demand-side capacities allow China to engage developed economies in high-end services, emerging industries and advanced technology sectors while supporting developing partners through preferential market access paired with infrastructure cooperation and capacity building.

The Recommendations of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China for Formulating the 15th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development outline the path forward. They identify strategic sectors including biotechnology, renewable energy, electric vehicles, semiconductors, aerospace and artificial intelligence, in which developed economies possess complementary technological advantages. According to the Ministry of Commerce, in the first 11 months of 2025, despite a 7.5 percent overall foreign direct investment contraction, high-tech sectors such as aerospace equipment (up 41.9 percent) and medical instruments (up 46.5 percent) saw remarkable FDI growth, as developed economies integrate into China's industrial upgrading.

Service sector liberalization creates additional opportunities. Removal of joint-venture mandates in key regions allows wholly foreign-owned hospitals to serve China's growing demand for premium medical services — a market with continuous growth in recent years. In telecommunications, lifting foreign equity caps for value-added services opens pathways for global operators in China's digital economy. Financial sector liberalization continues, with the recommendations calling for greater capital account openness.

For developing economies, China's paradigm offers transformative opportunities in infrastructure, market access and South-South cooperation. The Belt and Road Initiative reached record engagement in the first half of 2025, with $124 billion across 176 deals — up 47 percent year-on-year, according to the Green Finance & Development Center. Cumulative Chinese engagement has reached over $1.3 trillion since 2013.

The initiative is evolving toward "high-quality" cooperation, addressing debt sustainability and environmental concerns. Technology and manufacturing engagement peaked at $28.7 billion, while green energy investment also hit a record high of $18.3 billion in 2025. The next phase balances flagship infrastructure projects with community-focused initiatives, expanding cooperation in green development, the digital economy and AI.

Notably, China's digital infrastructure investments can offer developing economies pathways to bypass conventional constraints. In the past decade, Chinese companies have laid hundreds of thousands of kilometers of fiber-optic cables in Africa, constructed thousands of mobile towers and helped establish regional data centers. Chinese companies are integrating AI into local industries to boost efficiency, for example, AI-powered logistics at Peru's Chancay Port and the development of Egypt's landmark AI data center. The 15th Five-Year Plan's emphasis on the digital economy including digital trade suggests that these partnerships will intensify.

For developing economies navigating simultaneous development and decarbonization challenges, China's green technology cooperation enables potential leapfrogging of traditional high-carbon industrialization. Over the past three years, Chinese companies have committed over $180 billion to overseas clean-energy manufacturing and infrastructure, according to the Climate Energy Finance. And China has signed 55 memorandums of understanding on South-South climate cooperation with 43 countries, including programs such as low-carbon demonstration zones.

China's zero-tariff policy for least developed countries, implemented since Dec 1, 2024, is also delivering tangible results. As the largest export destination for LDCs — accounting for 24 percent of LDC exports in 2023 compared to 4 percent in 1995, WTO Sub-Committee on LDC data show, China generated an 18.1 percent increase in LDC imports during the policy's first month of implementation. The extension to 53 African countries, with which China has diplomatic ties, announced in June 2025, combined with 138 customs cooperation mechanisms with Belt and Road partners, creates additional opportunities for developing economies to diversify their exports during the 15th Five-Year Plan period.

Critically, China's development approach differs from traditional donor frameworks by prioritizing sovereignty and non-interference over conditionality. Unlike arrangements requiring governance reforms or structural adjustment programs, China's approach emphasizes infrastructure development and capacity building. This pragmatic approach enables developing countries to pursue development pathways aligned with their own contexts and needs, rather than conforming to externally imposed governance standards.

In conclusion, China's paradigm of institutional opening-up can shape a new landscape of cooperation and mutual benefit for the global economy. As global economic uncertainty persists, this framework provides a pragmatic model grounded in rules-based cooperation — one that acknowledges diverse development needs while navigating persistent tensions between openness and sovereignty, economic integration and national security, and creates pathways for shared growth across the global economic spectrum.

The author is an associate professor at the China Institute for WTO Studies at the University of International Business and Economics and an adjunct research fellow at the Center for International Finance and Economics Research at the National Institute of Financial Research at Tsinghua University. The author contributed this article to China Watch, a think tank powered by China Daily.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily. 

Contact the editor at editor@chinawatch.cn.