These new quality productive forces, as he has described them, involve “advanced productivity freed from traditional economic growth models”.

It is expected there will also be a whole-of-state effort, directed by Beijing, to both respond to “bottleneck technologies” such as advanced computer chips, where the West, and the US in particular, have significant leads over China, while leapfrogging the US and dominating other key emerging technologies.

China is confronting a number of problems the plenum will also have to address.

Xi’s crackdown on property developers and the big technology companies in 2021 dealt massive blows to China’s private sector and to its consumers.

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The property sector plunged into a downward spiral, with developers collapsing and sales and prices falling continuously, although very recently there have been some tentative signs that a range of government policies to try to stabilise the sector might be having some effect.

The listed private technology sector had around $3 trillion wiped off its market capitalisation as a result of the crackdown.

As a result of the actions against the property and tech companies, where private companies represented about 55 per cent of the value all Chinese listed entities in 2021, they represented only about 35 per cent at the end of last year.

That’s reflective of the broader trends within the economy.

Private enterprises, which had generated a disproportionate share of China’s growth – a decade ago they generated about 60 per cent of the growth – now provide less than half, after Beijing poured resources into state-owned or controlled enterprises in pursuit of fused economic and military industry strategies. The party has tightened its control over private businesses.

While China has said it now wants to treat private entities equally with state-owned entities, the private sector’s confidence and willingness to invest has been undermined by the events of the past three years.

So too has the confidence of foreign investors, despite a concerted attempt by China’s leadership to drum up foreign investment. Last year, for the first time in a decade, there was a net outflow of foreign investment.

China’s deteriorating trade relationships with its biggest market in the West – the US and Europe – aren’t helping and represent a threat to Xi’s strategies.

China’s emphasis on an expansion of manufacturing and exports to offset weak domestic demand has run into tariff walls in the US and, it appears probable, Europe because of the threat of excess capacity in Chinese factories to their domestic industries.

The US and its allies are also restricting China’s access to some of the building blocks of advanced technologies, like the newest generations of semiconductors and the machinery to make them.

Domestic consumption, perhaps because of the wealth shock created by the implosion of the property sector, has remained weak and, so far, Beijing’s efforts to stimulate it have been modest.

China is confronting a number of problems that the plenum will have to address.

The property sector woes have also exposed vertical fiscal imbalances within the economy. Beijing raises most of the revenue while local governments do most of the spending.

That has made local governments reliant on land sales and high levels of off-balance-sheet funding to fund their operations, with the deep downturn in property leaving many local governments at financial breaking point.

The plenum will inevitably have to do something to reform that mismatched relationship between revenue and expenditures and bail out the most affected local governments. It might also do more to help restore activity to the property sector, a prerequisite for rebuilding consumer confidence and spending.

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It is unlikely that anything particularly bold will be announced at the plenum. Xi’s shift from the previous prioritisation of growth towards national security and geopolitical dominance won’t be undone.

It is also unlikely the plenum will provide much detail on its plans for challenging the US in the advanced technologies that will determine future geo-economic and geopolitical leadership.

It was Xi’s detailed “Made in China 2025” plan released a decade ago that first alerted the rest of the world to his economic ambition of government-driven and incentivised domination of key 21st century technologies, and through that dominance, geopolitical leadership.

That ignited the backlash to the export drive towards that dominance that has prompted barriers to China’s trade rising steadily in the West. It is improbable that he will make the same mistake.

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