This photo taken with a mobile phone shows lotus flowers on the East Lake in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province, June 20, 2026. (Xinhua/Shen Hongbing)

　　BEIJING, July 20 (Xinhua) -- China's newly issued 15th Five-Year Plan for Building a Beautiful China sets binding environmental targets through 2030 and maps out a green industrial leap over the next five years, pushing traditional industries to retrofit while accelerating green sectors.

　　Analysts summarize it as a dual-approach that focuses on subtracting emissions from heavy industry, while adding green capacity. It is a framing that shifts the conversation from pollution control to industrial modernization.

　　Official data shows the plan starts from a position of measurable progress: 89.3 percent of days with good air quality in cities at and above prefecture level, PM2.5 at 28 micrograms per cubic meter, and forest coverage above 25 percent.

　　But ecology authorities have cautioned that structural, deep-rooted and trend-based environmental pressures have not been fundamentally resolved, and the inflection point from quantitative to qualitative improvement has yet to arrive. The plan, developed through extensive analysis and consultation, frames the five-year period as a critical stage for reaching that turning point.

　　INDUSTRIAL SHIFT

　　Nine energy-intensive sectors, including steel, electrolytic aluminum, cement and six others, are the targets of a three-year energy-saving retrofit campaign initially outlined by the country's top economic planner and now written into the plan's 20 major projects.