Five-year-plan stresses AI, Xi-Trump summit still on track, K-pop sensation’s global comeback, landslide win in Nepal elections, security risks self-radicalise online, and Manila drops Nobel laureate charges.

China’s latest five-year plan leaves no doubt about its determination to challenge the US for technological supremacy, says Nikkei Asia, the online business and politics news site.

The plan aims to build on China’s high-tech-focused industrial policies and serve as a bridge to doubling per capita GDP by 2035, compared to 2020.

The plan was approved on Thursday, at the end the nine-day Two Sessions meetings of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference – a conference the news site calls China's biggest annual political show.

In a five-takeaways wrap of the meetings, Nikkei Asia says the plan, the 15th five-year plan, listed as a top priority stepping up self-reliance on high-level science and technology. It called for extraordinary measures to achieve decisive breakthroughs in semi-conductors, industrial machine tools and software. The chip industry was upgraded from a frontier sector to an “emerging pillar.”

“The plan is heavy on AI, with a newly created chapter on ‘digital intelligence’ calling for accelerated development of homegrown chips and software with ‘international competitiveness’,” the report says. “This is paired with a push to apply the technologies across society.”

An analysis in The Diplomat, says the Chinese word for “lithography machine” does not appear in the plan. But neither, it says, does the entire vocabulary of the "chip war," as it is debated in Washington. China has moved on.

“What appears instead is a different strategic vocabulary,” the article says.

“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…[In the plan] the chip is one layer of four, alongside AI models, cloud infrastructure and application deployment. China’s strategic objective is not the chip; it is the system that contains the chip.”

Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post says China’s policymakers want the digital economy to account for 12.5 per cent of GDP by 2030 – a significant increase over the 10.5 per cent share achieved last year.

Beijing is accelerating its push to build a modern industrial system anchored in advanced manufacturing, the paper says.

Note: China is thwarting US attempts to choke its exports through Donald Trump’s tariffs, latest figures show. SCMP reports figures for January and February show exports to the US fell by 11%, year on year, but were  fuelled by demand for tech products.

Iran war weakens US moral authority in Asia

The planned summit between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump looks like will go ahead as scheduled, despite the international turmoil caused by the US-Israeli war against Iran.

The White House has said Trump will visit China from 31 March to 2 April – the first time in eight years a US president has made a trip to China. Beijing has not confirmed the dates but has said the two countries remain in communication over the visit.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi struck a positive tone on Beijing-Washington relations when speaking at a media conference during the Two Sessions meetings, Singapore’s The Straits Times said. Wang had stressed that interactions between the two leaders had helped stabilise the relationship.

Wang avoided........

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