Third-quarter data show the world’s second-largest economy shifting from building things to building capabilities, and a Shanxi village and a sea-going booster catch show what that costs
China’s economy expanded 4.5% in the third quarter, official figures showed on Monday, beating the 4.4% that analysts had pencilled in and keeping the country inside its 2026 growth target of 4.5% to 5%. The more telling numbers sat deeper in the release. Investment in intellectual property rose 9.3% in the first nine months while overall fixed-asset investment fell 7.2%, a gap that captures where Chinese modernisation now has to be won: less in concrete, more in know-how.
That shift explains why Chinese leaders, presiding over an economy that produced about 107.11 trillion yuan ($15.94 trillion) of output between January and September, still talk about a “New Long March” rather than a victory lap. Seen from a rice paddy in Shanxi province or the deck of a recovery ship in the South China Sea, the phrase reads less like a slogan and more like a plain admission that the easy gains have already been banked.
From a retreat to a reinvention
The original Long March of 1934–1936 was a fighting withdrawal. Short of rifles, food and medicine, the Red Army broke out of Kuomintang encirclement and marched across snowbound passes and boggy grasslands, losing a large share of its people along the way.
Nobody is shooting at today’s planners, but the scale of the assignment is its own kind of terrain. A nation of more than 1.4 billion people is trying, all at once, to close the income gap between cities and villages, master technologies it once imported, decarbonise heavy industry, move factories up the value chain and lift household living standards. The 15th Five-Year Plan, which runs from this year to 2030, binds those goals together, and this year’s No. 1 Central Document, Beijing’s customary opening statement on farm policy, set out to turn agriculture into a “modern pillar sector”.
The obstacles are not hidden. The statistics bureau on Monday again flagged insufficient domestic demand as a “prominent” problem. Real estate investment was down 20.6% over nine months, and September retail sales grew just 1.1%. Those figures make the case for an economy powered by productivity rather than property, and the two stories below show how slow and granular that work can be.
The village that went back to rice
Beijing declared extreme poverty eliminated in 2020. Keeping it gone is the harder sequel, because a household lifted over a line by transfers can slip back unless the village around it earns a dependable living.
Duanting, a village in Shanxi in northern China, has the river water and level fields that rice likes. For years that advantage was wasted. The old local variety rotted with disease and struggled in the area’s cool climate, so in 1997 farmers gave up and planted mostly corn, a safer crop that left little room to add value.
The turn came in 2021, when Zhao Jibin, a native of the village who had been working in a bigger city, came home, stood for village head and won. His bet was that rice could out-earn corn, but only with seed bred for local conditions. When he learned that agronomists had developed a variety suited to Shanxi, he tried it on a single plot.
“In the first year, we planted two hectares. The area then expanded to more than 13.3 hectares in 2025,” Zhao said. “The amount we can plant now depends on how many rice seedlings the nursery can supply.”
Growth exposed the next weak link. By 2023, the village’s cramped old warehouse could not hold the harvest, and part of the crop went mouldy. Duanting applied for $100,000 to build new storage and buy modern machinery, a fix that put its rice business on firmer ground.
Zhao then went looking for a second income stream inside the same fields. In 2024, the village introduced rice-crab co-culture, in which crabs eat pests and weeds while the rice canopy shelters them. Roughly $15,000 in further funding paid for trenches, escape barriers and tanks for feeding and disinfection. Older residents were sceptical until they watched the stock go in. “I never imagined rice and crabs could be raised in the same fields. Seeing 40,000 crabs released into the paddies really opened my eyes,” one villager said.
The village has since cleaned up its riverbank, opened a campsite where families can go crabbing among the paddies, and registered a rice brand that markets the grain by the river that waters it. Zhao said the mix of farming and tourism has created more ways for residents to earn without leaving.
Not every village has a Zhao. Across rural China, young workers keep drifting to cities, industrial chains remain short and returns are uncertain, which makes it hard to build businesses sturdy enough to ride out a bad season. Duanting’s lesson is that each solved problem, from seed to storage to sales, reveals the next one, and the fixes take money, patience and local leadership in roughly equal measure.
The pattern will sound familiar in Pakistan. Punjab has framed its own village uplift plan around the idea that rural areas deserve an equal claim on public resources, and its subsidised Green Tractor scheme targets the same mechanisation gap that held Duanting back. The province’s chief minister also spent part of an August visit to Xinjiang studying Chinese dairy techniques, a sign that Lahore is watching how Chinese villages turn produce into income.
Catching a rocket by the hooks
If Duanting shows modernisation at walking pace, China’s reusable-rocket programme shows it under a stopwatch. Breakthroughs in strategic technology cannot simply be bought off the shelf; they demand home-grown expertise and a tolerance for expensive failure.
On July 10, the Long March-10B lifted off on its maiden flight from the Wenchang Commercial Space Launch Site in Hainan and placed its payload in low Earth orbit. Roughly ten minutes later, its first stage, the section that supplies the thrust at liftoff, came back to a ship at sea and was caught. China thereby became the second country after the United States to recover an orbital-class booster, with the aim of refurbishing and reflying it instead of building a new one for every mission.
“Bringing the first stage back and landing it precisely so it can be reused is a challenge on top of a challenge,” said Lou Luliang, the project’s chief designer. “The recovery process takes about five minutes, during which the booster must slow from around 2 kilometres per second to a complete stop, which is quite tough.”
The method is deliberately different from the one SpaceX made routine. Falcon 9 boosters relight their engines and settle on deployable legs, on land or on a floating platform. The Long March-10B carries no legs. Instead, four hooks on the booster snag tensioned cables strung above the deck of the recovery vessel Linghangzhe, or “Navigator”. Engineers say the arrangement tolerates some error in the final position and saves weight, and every kilogram of hardware left on the ground is a kilogram that can be given to payload.
Simple on a whiteboard, the catch is unforgiving in practice. Grid fins must steer the falling stage to the right point at the right speed, while the ship holds station against wind, swell and current and the hooks and cables must engage cleanly. A miss at any step can cost the booster, and with it the economics of reuse.
Ma Jianrui, one of the project’s designers, said the stretch from project launch to first recovery was the shortest his team had ever worked to, a measure of the pressure to turn a concept into hardware. When the capture succeeded, about 100 staff in the control centre wept and shouted, “We made it!”
The tears had history behind them. In December 2025, two Chinese recovery attempts failed: LandSpace’s Zhuque-3 booster crashed on return, and a Long March 12A stage lost control on descent. In August, LandSpace came back and recovered a stainless-steel Zhuque-3 booster after an orbital launch, so China now has two separate technical routes to reusability, one state-backed and one commercial. The next tests are already lined up. The Long March-10A, which shares the 10B’s first stage, is meant to carry crews to the Tiangong space station, and a heavier member of the family is being built for China’s goal of landing astronauts on the Moon before 2030.
That programme matters to Pakistan as more than a spectacle. Two Pakistani pilots, Zeeshan Ali and Khurram Daud, have been training in Beijing, and the final choice of who becomes the country’s first astronaut to fly to Tiangong as a payload specialist is expected this month. University links are thickening too: Lahore’s Information Technology University last week signed a research pact with Harbin Engineering University.
The road ahead
Rice seed and rocket hooks look like unrelated stories, yet they share a grammar. In both cases the first success merely uncovered the next bottleneck, whether a nursery that cannot raise seedlings fast enough or a ship that must hold position in a swell. That is the real meaning of a “New Long March”: a sequence of problems that can only be solved one at a time, by people willing to absorb setbacks along the way.
Monday’s data suggest the direction is set even if the pace is contested. Spending on research, patents and software is rising while property drags, and Beijing has signalled that it prefers patient capability-building to another round of debt-fuelled construction. Whether households start spending with more confidence will decide how quickly that strategy pays off.
The qualities the journey demands have not changed much since the 1930s: resilience, hard work, hope and an ability to cooperate. What has changed is the reach of the results. Cheaper launches, hardier seed and cleaner technology travel well, and for partners from the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation to Punjab, where Chinese firms are now scouting sites for electric bus plants, they offer something to share rather than a model to copy. China’s march, in other words, is no longer a solitary one.
Writing by Chen Ziqi; Editing by The Lahore Times desk
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Lahore Times.
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