China’s Two Sessions to reveal Xi’s economic and defence plans as military purge casts shadow

Thousands of delegates will arrive in Beijing this week for China’s annual Two Sessions, one of the most important events in the country’s political calendar and a rare opportunity for the global media to see Beijing’s top lawmakers up close.

The Two Sessions” are concurrent gatherings of the National People’s Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), an advisory body.

Of the two gatherings, the NPC, China’s legislature, is more important.

It has the power to amend the constitution, appoint people to political offices, enact laws and approve the budget.

In 2018 it was at the NPC that amended China’s constitution to scrap term limits for the president, and in 2023 it was the NPC that subsequently elected Xi Jinping to that office for an unprecedented third term.

However, in modern China, the Chinese Communist party (CCP) is more powerful than any organ of the state, and the NPC is in effect a rubber-stamp parliament, having never voted down any item on its agenda.

The real decision-making is done by the CCP at separate meetings.

Still, the opening of the CPPCC on Wednesday and the NPC on Thursday will be full of pomp and circumstance.The NPC is the forum in which the government releases its annual work report, outlining goals for the year ahead, including the GDP growth target, which this year is expected to drop below 5% for the first time.

But this year’s session is also particularly important because it marks the official launch of the 15th five-year plan, the economic planning document that outlines Beijing’s priorities for 2026-2030.

“This is going to be an unusually busy Two Sessions,” says Ruby Osman, a senior policy adviser at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.

“The Two Sessions usually tell us what Beijing wants to do over the next 12 months.

This year, they’ll also set out a much bigger strategy for navigating a decisive period of geopolitical and technological change,” she says.

Osman added that there is likely to be a “mismatch” in the priorities of the annual government work report and the longer term goals of the five-year plan, which “will make clear that....