Great economic leap forward: China prepares for shift to market- and consumer-based economy
The five-year plan is the survivor of China's economic evolution. It is a vestige of a bygone Soviet age that has endured as other features of the command system have withered and fallen away. Gone are the collective farms, gone are the industrial targets and gone, too, are the fixed market prices.
But the five-year plan lives on. It does so largely because it has relevance in what is still a heavily centralised system, defining the Communist Party's strategy for what has become the world's second-biggest economy.
The party's decision-making Central Committee will meet from October 26 to 29 to approve a draft of the national economic and social development programme from 2016 to 2020. It will then be put to the National People's Congress for its rubber stamp in March before each region and industry comes up with its own programme that dovetails with the overall direction.
This time, as China's slowing gross domestic product expansion preoccupies policymakers and investors the world over, the 13th iteration of the plan is expected to confront two core issues: sustainable growth and an overhaul of the state sectors.