China Issues Consumption Expansion Plan, Targets 60 Trillion RMB Retail Sales by 2030

The '15th Five-Year Plan for Expanding Consumption' has been publicly released, marking the first national-level five-year plan named after 'expanding consumption' in nearly 50 years. The plan sets a target for total retail sales of consumer goods to reach approximately 60 trillion RMB by 2030. In 2025, this figure stood at 50.1 trillion RMB, implying an average annual growth rate of about 3.7% during the 15th Five-Year Plan period. The plan also includes benchmark indicators such as 'a notable increase in the household consumption rate' and 'a further enhanced role of consumption in driving economic growth'.

Service consumption is placed in the plan's primary chapter. The plan proposes expanding elderly care consumption, supporting childcare consumption, and promoting health consumption, each supplemented by dedicated sections: 'developing the silver economy', 'expanding the supply of childcare products and services', and 'implementing a special action to promote health consumption'. The latter includes measures such as 'establishing more than 10,000 health stations'. In the area of education, culture, and entertainment consumption, the plan calls for developing cultural and tourism consumption, encouraging sports consumption, and improving the quality of education and training consumption. It adopts a positive policy stance toward sectors such as performing arts consumption, cruise and yacht tourism, and ice and snow consumption.

In the chapter on goods consumption, automobiles and housing are the focal points. The plan proposes promoting auto consumption across the entire chain, including removing restrictions on auto circulation and consumption, invigorating the second-hand car market, and establishing a tiered and classified management mechanism for auto modification. For housing consumption, the plan calls for better meeting housing consumption needs, increasing the supply of improved housing through city-specific policies, supporting age-friendly renovations and smart upgrades of old homes, and supporting residents' self-initiated renovations. The plan also proposes steadily enhancing consumption of daily goods and implementing an action to boost agricultural product consumption.

The plan does not directly mention the continuation of the consumer goods trade-in policy. As of March 2025, the trade-in policy had driven sales of over 4.16 trillion RMB, benefiting 531 million person-times. The plan outlines measures to cultivate new consumption formats, models, and scenarios, including developing digital consumption, implementing a digital consumption enhancement action, and promoting 'AI plus consumption' to create consumption scenarios in areas such as home services, elderly care and disability assistance, cultural tourism, education and training, virtual and augmented reality, and brain-computer interfaces. The plan also calls for optimizing and improving cross-border e-commerce retail import policies, expanding imports of high-quality foreign goods, and continuing to open up sectors such as telecommunications, internet, education, culture, and healthcare.