baseline thinking tells officials to know their floor; now they must plan for the worst
Baseline thinking, dixian siwei 底线思维, entered Xi Jinping’s vocabulary in 2013. Alert to how such formulae shape policy, CHINA POLICY began to keep a weather eye on it.
[note: in this political context we render dixian siwei 底线思维 as ‘baseline thinking’; the common ‘bottom-line thinking’ wrongly suggests financial accounting.]
In 2020 we described baseline thinking as balancing least-worst and zero-sum strategies. That December, we foresaw a tightening of the baseline in the upcoming 14th 5-year plan, with tougher applications amid decoupling and COVID.
All were fuel for Xi’s drive for a renewed policy mandate, secured at the 20th Party Congress in October 2022. Risk rhetoric reached a peak. We noted the bodies amplifying risk and security themes, the public and state security ministries and a reconfigured Central National Security Commission, all given top-level appointments after the Congress.
Baseline and worst-case thinking ascended further in the ideological armoury with the announcement of the Global Development, Security and Civilisation Initiatives, which drew even the language of civilisation, normally benign, into the security register.
Little relaxation of ‘baseline’ and its relatives has been seen in the post-COVID years. It has, if anything, pushed into wider and deeper domains, not least rural policy in 2024, and finance and tech with the onset of AI.
At the same time, a concept asked to govern everything from flood control to chip policy risks meaning everything and nothing.
From the outset, baseline thinking urged ‘knowing your floor’: identify the minimum acceptable outcome and build policy around protecting it. In its original form, it was a defensive posture. Plan for bad scenarios, do not be caught off guard, know when to stop.
Chairing the first meeting of the 20th Central National Security Commission on 30 May 2023, months after the disorderly exit from zero-COVID, Xi paired it for the first time with ‘worst-case scenario’ thinking, jixian siwei 极限思维: assume the worst has already happened and design everything around operating within it. Defending the floor was no longer enough; officials were to plan from it.
What is new in 2026 is reach. A formula minted for national security now turns up in flood directives and stock exchange plans, in energy strategy and EV positioning, in Politburo study sessions and township emergency drills.
two tools at work
In current practice the pairing splits the labour: baseline thinking marks the floor, worst-case thinking plans for the day it gives way.
Setting the floor: The Shanghai Stock Exchange embedded both concepts explicitly in the opening section of its plan for the coming 15th 5-year plan period, published 5 January 2026, framing market stability as a baseline issue and building full-chain risk monitoring as the worst-case response. Enactment followed: revised issuance and underwriting guidelines transformed baseline thinking into punitive rules; in the first week of June, the exchange took self-regulatory measures against 250 cases of abnormal securities trading.
On 1 June 2026, State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission issued a debt risk management framework that maps neatly onto the distinction: regulatory red lines and bond default thresholds on one side, a central enterprise credit guarantee fund on the other.
Preparing for the worst: at a province-wide flood and drought prevention conference on 9 May 2026, the Hubei provincial Party committee named both concepts explicitly as core command principles, specifying eight categories of risk as the baseline floor, and the worst-case principle as ‘better to prepare and not need it than to need it and not be prepared.’ The command principle was equally direct: ‘better to take a step forward and create overlaps than retreat half a step and leave gaps.’ Shaanxi’s provincial emergency management department went further, pushing both concepts down to township and village level and revising emergency plans to a single page.
everywhere at once
Three recent examples give a sense of the urgency and the reach.
Climate. At a Politburo collective study session on disaster prevention on 28 April 2026, Xi Jinping explicitly coupled baseline thinking with worst-case thinking: officials must not only know the floor but assume the worst will happen. Guangdong and Nanjing provincial party committees held follow-up meetings. Guangdong directed that ‘safety resilience’ (anquan renxing 安全韧性) be written into all territorial spatial planning and construction approvals. Floods, typhoons, and the compounding of multiple extreme events simultaneously are the material pressure behind what might otherwise read as an ideological campaign.
Technology. External technology blockades are a baseline problem, Liu Guangming 刘光明 National Defence University, argues in the Party School’s Study Times on 27 May 2026: external containment and rule restrictions should be used to force tech self-reliance and build an independent, controllable industrial chain.
Self-reliance under tech pressure has been PRC policy since at least 2018; casting it in baseline terms recasts a defensive posture as a productive one.
Energy. The Hormuz Strait handles roughly a third of PRC crude oil imports. CNPC (China National Petroleum Corporation) chairman Dai Houliang 戴厚良, writing in Qiushi in May 2026, treats that exposure not as a manageable variable but as a hard constraint: an immovable baseline around which the entire operational strategy must be built. Supply chains, technology development, and green transition are all required to run dual-track baseline and worst-case planning simultaneously across every CNPC business line.
AI’s role
Artificial intelligence sits at the centre of this shift in three distinct ways.
The first is as a subject of baseline governance itself. AI development needs its own floor, its own set of safety limits and ethical boundaries, before it can be deployed at scale.
The second is as the technology that makes baseline governance operationally feasible. Early warning systems, disaster monitoring, supply-chain stress detection, and financial risk surveillance are all AI-enabled capabilities. Liu Guangming’s Study Times essay urges tech advance driven by AI across ‘network, data, and intelligence’, to ‘arm national security work’. The kind of cross-domain risk management the baseline framework demands would be out of the question without machine-scale data processing.
The third is that AI is an intrinsically baseline issue in US-PRC rivalry. Here it bites. Top PRC models are ever more run on domestic hardware, partly by necessity, as export controls limit access to leading Nvidia products, and partly by design. CNPC’s deployment of its own Kunlun large model in the energy sector demonstrates that critical AI infrastructure can be kept within the domestic technology stack.
where it breaks down
The ascent of baseline thinking in official rhetoric aligns with institutional cracks. These are weaknesses in precisely the domains where baseline protection is most loudly proclaimed.
Food security is the sharpest example. A National Audit Office review of high-standard farmland construction funds across 20 provinces and 101 counties found that 41 counties had reported previously renovated plots as new work, and 87 counties had falsely reported uncompleted plots, in some cases non-farmland, as meeting the standard. The program is a baseline priority. The audit found the floor only existed on paper.
Two agriculture ministers have been removed in under two years. Tang Renjian 唐仁健 was investigated in May 2024 and sentenced to death with reprieve in September 2025 for taking C¥268 million (~US$37 million) in bribes. In a CCDI documentary in January 2026, he confessed: ‘Failure to hold the baseline set off a chain of events and hurt a whole circle of people.’ His replacement, Han Jun 韩俊, was removed in April 2026 after less than two years, with no explanation yet given; his name quietly disappeared from the ministry website.
doctrine or slogan?
In PRC political vocabulary, a fangzhen (方针 or policy imperative) is more than a slogan. It is an organising principle that reshapes institutions, resource allocation, and frames in which policy is made. Revolution, geming 革命 (1949–78), and reform, gaige 改革 (1978–), were both fangzhen of the respective Mao and Deng eras. Each reorganised every domain of PRC life around their central logic.
Is a third, Xi-era fangzhen now waiting in the wings? A senior PRC development economist has supplied part of the intellectual case. In a 2023 paper, Yao Yang 姚洋 couches the new era not as a continuation of reform and opening but as a correction of the imbalances four decades of reform produced: widening inequality, the growing weight of capital, the social strains of fast growth. He stops short of declaring reform over, yet warns his readers of a gloomy conclusion in store.
As to what replaces it, answers are suggestive rather than settled. Appearing ever more often as a governing aspiration is ‘resilience’ renxing 韧性; the end state is implicitly brought about by baseline and worst-case thinking. Liu Guangming’s Study Times essay traces PRC governing logic through three stages, from the early PRC’s security-first principle, through the reform era’s ‘development is the absolute principle’, to the present injunction to coordinate development and security, and calls for building qiangren tixi 强韧体系, a robustly resilient system capable of absorbing shocks and restoring order quickly. That system, in his account, is what resilience requires.
Resilience has yet to be declared a fangzhen, and may never be. But the concept is already doing fangzhen-level work. It is in mandatory planning documents, in doctrinal essays from the Party’s most important journals, in the language of provincial committees, state enterprises, and private firms.
floor managers
Huang Kunming 黄坤明 | Guangdong Party secretary and Politburo member
Global rivalry has shifted from single products to entire industrial ecosystems, Huang told Guangdong’s high-quality development conference on 24 February 2026, and only the fusion of manufacturing with services, stepped up by AI, will hold the high ground. The conviction that technology decides outcomes runs through his tenure: under his leadership the provincial committee has directed that ‘safety resilience’ be written into all territorial spatial planning and construction approvals, baking worst-case preparation into routine machinery of development approval in PRC’s most exposed coastal economy.
A Politburo member and Party secretary of Guangdong since October 2022, Huang served under Xi Jinping in both Fujian and Zhejiang and is counted among his closest provincial-era associates. He directed the Central Publicity Department from 2017 to 2022. Born in Shanghang, Fujian in 1956, he served in the PLA before studying politics and education at Fujian Normal University. He holds a doctorate in management from Tsinghua University, earned in service from 2005 to 2008.
Dai Houliang 戴厚良 | Chairman, CNPC
Meet external uncertainty with the certainty of your own work: prepare to the fullest, then strive for the best outcome. This formulation, from Dai’s address closing CNPC’s annual work conference in January 2025, is his governing philosophy compressed. Innovation is the Corporation’s ‘first strategy’, framed as a matter of national consequence rather than corporate advantage, with technology self-reliance and an expanding ‘oil, gas, heat, electricity, hydrogen’ portfolio built to generate what he calls second and third growth curves. Energy security is the floor beneath all of it: in Dai’s framing, CNPC is the ‘pillar’ on which national supply rests.
Academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, petrochemicals boffin by training, Dai led development of PRC’s complete aromatics technology suite, work that won a State S&T Progress Special Prize. Born in Yangzhou, Jiangsu in 1963, he rose through the Sinopec ranks to chairman in July 2018, moving to the CNPC chairmanship in January 2020. He holds a PhD in chemical engineering from Nanjing Tech University.
Hou Weimin 侯为民 | Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Centre for Marxist Economic and Social Development Studies Director
Baseline thinking guards against one risk above all others, Hou argues: anything capable of ‘delaying or interrupting the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.’ Writing on the CASS Marxism Studies network in April 2024, Hou positions the concept not as crisis management but as a permanent governing orientation, grounded in Marxist political economy and applied across all domains simultaneously. This framing elevates baseline thinking from administrative caution to ideological requirement, and helps explain how a phrase born in Party doctrine now shapes everything from flood planning to financial regulation.
An orthodox guardian of Marxist political economy in PRC academia, Hou specialises in Das Kapital studies and the theory and practice of socialist economics. He argues for an ‘autonomous’ PRC economics built on Marxist rather than Western foundations. He helped revise the national textbook An Introduction to Marxist Political Economy and has published over 100 papers in journals including Economic Research and Economic Dynamics. President of the Chinese Political Economy Society and director of CASS’s Centre for Marxist Economic and Social Development Studies, he is an expert on the Central Marxist Theory Research and Construction Project and holds a PhD in economics.