DO YOU have a dedicated team studying the policy outcomes from this year’s meetings of the National People’s Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) which began last Friday and finish on 11 March?To get more news about China Two Sessions 2021, you can visit shine news official website.

(These annual meetings are commonly referred to as the “two sessions”. For reasons described below, this year’s two sessions could, quite literally, set the direction of the global petrochemicals industry for decades to come.)

And will your team continue to monitor changes in government policy and how it is implemented in order to provide your petrochemicals company with constantly updated scenarios for global supply and demand over the next 20 years?

If your answer is “no” to either or both these questions, then I am sorry to say you haven’t been paying attention to the blog over the last eight years.

I am not proud, though, of my eight-year track record of flagging up the disproportionate importance of China to global markets as it is not long enough. The light only came on when I gained access to our excellent ICIS Supply & Demand Database (see the above chart as an example) and I began to analyse what the numbers were saying.

But the database shows that the critical tipping point for global markets wasn’t eight years ago but rather 12-13 years ago. It was in 2008-2009 when China became the biggest global consumer by volume across most of the petrochemicals and polymers, overtaking either North America or Europe.

I thought that when I first started doing my calculations, I had got my sums wrong and so went back and checked my calculations several times over. But, no, I was right. The above chart uses polypropylene (PP) as an example, but it is the same story in all the other polymers.

The NPC and CPPCC meetings, which occur every March, follow political meetings called Plenums which usually take place in October or November of the preceding years. I covered last November’s Fifth Plenum in a lot of detail.

Last November’s Plenum set the blueprint for China’s direction not just over the next five years – the length the country’s next Five-Year Plan – but also for the next 15 years. The NPC and CPPCC meetings will decide on the details to implement the blueprint.

But this won’t be the end of the story, far from it. Once we have the details about how China plans to move forward over the next 15 years, we will need to constantly monitor how government policy is being adapted and how effectively it is being implemented.

There are likely to be many minor, and possibly even major tweaks, to policies over the next 15 years and, policy implementation across such a vast country could be inconsistent.