The National People's Congress Work Report

Constitutional Status and Annual Cadence

The Government Work Report (政府工作报告, zhèngfǔ gōngzuò bàogào) is delivered by the Premier of the State Council to the plenary session of the National People's Congress (NPC) each March, pursuant to Article 92 of the PRC Constitution, which makes the State Council "responsible and accountable" to the NPC. The report is simultaneously a retrospective accounting of the prior year's administration, a quantitative target-setting document for the year ahead, and — for foreign-policy readers — a tightly drafted index of the leadership's prevailing line on sovereignty, development, and external relations. It is approved by NPC delegates on the closing day and published in authoritative Chinese on Xinhua and People's Daily, with an official English translation released by the State Council Information Office, typically within 48 hours.

Li Qiang delivered his first Work Report on 5 March 2024, succeeding Li Keqiang, who had delivered ten reports between 2013 and 2023. The 2024 report broke a three-decade precedent by cancelling the customary post-NPC premier's press conference, a procedural change announced by NPC spokesperson Lou Qinjian on 4 March 2024 and widely read as a further concentration of communicative authority in the CCP General Secretary.

Structure and the Foreign-Policy Sections

The report follows a stable architecture: (1) review of the past year's work, (2) overall requirements and major policy orientations, (3) numerical targets (GDP growth, CPI, urban employment, fiscal deficit, defense budget), and (4) a closing section on diplomacy, Hong Kong/Macao, Taiwan, and national defense. Foreign-policy analysts read the document non-linearly. Four passages reward close attention:

• The defense budget line. The 2024 report set defense spending at 1.665 trillion yuan, a 7.2% nominal increase — the same rate as 2023 and the highest sustained growth since 2019. The figure is announced in the budget report submitted alongside the Work Report by the Ministry of Finance.
• The Taiwan paragraph. Tracked year-on-year for additions and deletions. The 2022 report dropped the phrase "peaceful reunification" (和平统一); the 2024 report likewise omitted "peaceful," retaining "resolutely oppose Taiwan independence separatist activities and external interference" and "advance the cause of China's reunification."
• The diplomacy paragraph. Typically 200–300 Chinese characters, it ratifies the slogans approved at the prior Central Foreign Affairs Work Conference. The 2024 text reaffirmed "head-of-state diplomacy" (元首外交), the Global Development, Security, and Civilization Initiatives, and "a community with a shared future for mankind."
• The Hong Kong/Macao paragraph. Reads as a barometer of Article 23 implementation (the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance was enacted 23 March 2024, three weeks after the Work Report endorsed "fully and faithfully implementing 'one country, two systems'").

How to Read It Against Prior Years

The analytical value of the Work Report lies in differential reading. Maintain a rolling textual diff against the prior three years. Additions, deletions, and reordering of formulations (提法, tífǎ) are the signal; the prose itself is deliberately formulaic. The disappearance of "peaceful reunification" in 2022 was not rhetorical drift but a coordinated shift visible across the Work Report, the 20th Party Congress political report (October 2022), and the August 2022 Taiwan White Paper. A formulation appearing in the Work Report has been cleared by the Politburo Standing Committee and constitutes binding guidance for ministries through the following fiscal year.

Numerical Targets as Policy Signals

The headline GDP target is the most-cited number, but foreign-policy readers should pay greater attention to four other figures the Work Report publishes annually: the defense budget, the fiscal deficit ratio, the M2 money-supply guidance (when included), and the urban surveyed unemployment ceiling. Each constrains the external posture. A defense budget growing faster than nominal GDP — as in 2024, where 7.2% defense growth exceeded the 5% GDP target — signals sustained PLA modernization despite fiscal headwinds. The 2024 fiscal deficit was set at 3% of GDP, with an additional 1 trillion yuan in ultra-long-term special treasury bonds announced as an off-budget item, a financing technique first used in 1998 and revived in 2020 for pandemic response.

The Work Report also fixes the annual quota for local government special-purpose bonds (3.9 trillion yuan in 2024), the instrument that funds most Belt and Road–adjacent domestic infrastructure and provincial outbound investment vehicles. Reading the bond quota alongside the National Development and Reform Commission's parallel report — submitted to the NPC the same day — yields a tighter picture of state capacity for external economic statecraft than the diplomacy paragraph itself.

Tracking Formulations Across Documents

The Work Report does not originate doctrine; it ratifies and operationalizes it. The authoritative sequence is: (1) Politburo Standing Committee decisions and Xi Jinping speeches at the Central Foreign Affairs Work Conference (most recently 27–28 December 2023); (2) Party plenum communiqués (the Third Plenum of the 20th Central Committee met 15–18 July 2024); (3) the annual Central Economic Work Conference (December); and (4) the Work Report in March. A formulation that appears at stage (1) and survives to stage (4) is settled policy. One that drops out has been demoted.

Worked example: the phrase "dual circulation" (双循环) entered the lexicon at the May 2020 Politburo meeting, was elevated at the Fifth Plenum in October 2020, and appeared in the 2021 Work Report. It was retained but de-emphasized in 2024, replaced in prominence by "new quality productive forces" (新质生产力), a term Xi introduced in Heilongjiang in September 2023 and that received its first Work Report appearance on 5 March 2024 as the leading item under the year's major tasks. For an external observer, this signals that industrial-policy resources — and the trade and technology frictions they generate with the United States, the EU, Japan, and Korea — will flow toward advanced manufacturing, AI, and biotech rather than traditional infrastructure stimulus.

Cross-Reading with the Two Sessions Companion Reports

The Work Report is one of three documents tabled at the NPC plenary, alongside the NDRC's economic and social development plan report and the Ministry of Finance's budget report. The Supreme People's Court and Supreme People's Procuratorate also submit annual reports. For foreign-policy work, the budget report's defense, diplomacy (Chapter 205 of the central budget), and foreign-aid line items provide the only publicly disclosed quantitative baseline for PRC external expenditure. The foreign affairs budget line — administered by the MFA — was 60.86 billion yuan in the 2024 central budget, up 6.6% year-on-year. Read all three reports together; reading the Work Report alone yields the rhetoric without the resourcing.