China decided to allocate 93.6 billion yuan ($13.4 billion) from its ultra-long special treasury bond funds to support equipment upgrading across major economic sectors, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the country’s top economic planner, said on Thursday.
The funds will support about 4,500 projects spanning industry, energy equipment, education, healthcare, grain and oil production and processing, customs inspection, the replacement of aging residential elevators, energy efficiency and carbon-reduction initiatives, as well as recycling and circular-economy applications, and the funds are expected to attract more than 460 billion yuan in total investment.
In addition to these project-specific allocations, the NDRC said it has transferred funds directly to local governments to continue targeted programs such as scrapping and replacing old trucks, updating urban bus fleets with new energy vehicles, and phasing out obsolete agricultural machinery.
Dong Shaopeng, a senior research fellow at the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China, told the Global Times on Thursday that issuing ultra-long special treasury bonds to support equipment upgrading is a significant move, as it provides companies access to low-cost financing, spurring faster technological transformation and increased R&D investment.
The move is expected to create greater market demand for emerging industries and technologies and trigger a chain reaction that drives high-end talent recruitment, boosts household incomes and stimulates consumption.
Since the beginning of 2026, the NDRC has worked with relevant government agencies and local authorities to implement the “two new” policy, expanding the scope of equipment-upgrade support, refining project applications, and strictly screening proposals to advance upgrades in key sectors, the commission said.
The NDRC will work with relevant parties to strengthen coordination, advance projects, accelerate on-the-ground progress, and enforce closed-loop fund management to ensure central government resources are used efficiently and the “two new” policy delivers tangible results, it said.
According to Dong, ultra-long-term special treasury bonds are designed to serve two principal objectives. First, they provide stable funding for critical public infrastructure that underpins the national economy and daily life — from power grids and schools to the replacement of aging residential elevators and upgrades to customs inspection facilities — ensuring the safe and reliable delivery of basic public services.
Second, the bonds support the country’s green development agenda by financing energy-saving, carbon-reduction and environmental-recycling projects and promoting circular reuse. These investments are also expected to leverage broader social capital, drawing private investment into areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), computing capacity, big data and industrial digitalization.
Dong said that such issuances will also advance the development of China’s bond market, promote yuan-denominated assets, broaden investor options and improve the capital market.
According to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on January 19, China’s GDP last year reached 140.19 trillion yuan, up 5 percent year-on-year at constant prices and meeting the annual target of around 5 percent, Xinhua News Agency reported.
The added-value of the manufacturing sector reached 34.7 trillion yuan in 2025, up 6.1 percent year on year, keeping its share of GDP at 25 percent, with equipment manufacturing and high-tech manufacturing accounting for 36.8 percent and 17.1 percent of value-added industrial output, respectively, the NBS said.
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