Beijing — China is in a precarious economic moment. The world’s second-largest economy is facing weak domestic demand, low confidence and an industrial sector that’s producing far more than buyers want. Combined, this has shaken Chinese consumers and international investors alike.

This is not the assessment of analysts sitting in investment banks in far-flung capitals, but the frank outline presented by China’s premier, Li Qiang, who Tuesday forecast that China’s economy would grow by “around” 5 percent this year.

That’s the same as last year, when China was still struggling to emerge from three years of zero-COVID policies, but is a target analysts consider ambitious without significant government spending to boost consumer demand.

“The foundation for China’s sustained economic recovery and growth is not solid enough,” Li said at the opening of the National People’s Congress, China’s rubber-stamp parliament, in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People.

The annual meetings of the NPC and China’s top political advisory body, events jointly known as the “Two Sessions,” set the policy agenda for the coming year and are closely watched for clues about how the notoriously opaque Communist Party might act.

Despite repeatedly acknowledging the economic challenges, Li laid out Beijing’s relatively modest plan to weather the slowdown without pumping enormous amounts of government money into the economy — and prioritize security over immediate growth.

“Stability is of overall importance, as it is the basis for everything we do,” he said.

Although Xi Jinping has grabbed ever more power since starting a norm-busting third term as China’s leader a year ago, it is the premier who is responsible for the day-to-day running of China’s economy.

Delivering the highly orchestrated “government work report” before 3,000 Communist Party delegates, Li used the word “security” 28 times in his speech, three more mentions than his predecessor used last year.

Security has become a catchall term for the Chinese leadership’s obsession with defusing threats to China’s rise — especially from the United States. It is used to talk about responding to everything from unchecked local government debt levels to American trade restrictions targeting critical technologies like semiconductors. In most cases, the solution is more state control and curbing outside influence.

Li urged breakthroughs in core technologies by making “full use of a new system for mobilizing resources nationwide,” in line with goals to dominate key industries like electric vehicles, artificial intelligence, hydrogen power and commercial spaceflight.

This year is shaping up to be a difficult one for China. In the year since Xi formally began his third term, huge property giants have gone into liquidation, foreign direct investment has dropped to 30-year lows and the markets began the year with a 10 percent slump.

Beyond those immediate pressures, Beijing is staring down mountains of local government debt, a shrinking population and the potential of renewed tensions with the United States as China becomes a focus of debate on the presidential campaign.

So far, the Chinese leadership appears ready to batten down the hatches, ride out the turmoil and focus on long-term bets to control the technologies of the future.

The security-focused approach tries to defuse the most severe economic and financial risks while focusing on homegrown innovation in key emerging industries. Already, Chinese electric car company BYD has overtaken Tesla to become the world’s largest EV maker.

Diana Choyleva, founder of Enodo Economics, a consultancy, said that Xi has staked his leadership on rewiring the Chinese economy around national security goals, but that plan won’t easily restore confidence.

“They’re trying to smooth what’s going to be a painful adjustment,” Choyleva said. “But that plan is very different from what foreign and international investors want to hear.”

Foreign companies have been making their concerns about China clear. Foreign direct investment hit a 30-year low in 2023.

Li, a former party chief of the corporate metropolis of Shanghai, promised a better environment for business, with more opportunities for international corporations to take part in government procurement and scrapped all restrictions on investing in the manufacturing sector.

He also announced a 10 percent funding increase on science and technology — to $52 billion this year — to further fundamental research considered of national importance.

Then there’s a proposed 7.2 percent increase in defense spending, to reach $231 billion. That’s the largest jump in five years but is still a far cry from the $886 billion annual military spending bill that President Joe Biden signed in December.

There was no such relief, however, for struggling households and the stricken property sector. Some economists say this would be the easiest way to boost consumption and stop prices from falling.

The government’s warning to local authorities to “tighten their belts” suggested there would be limited additional spending to help out businesses or to expand social care, analysts said.

“The government is not doing a good job at restoring market confidence,” said Dan Wang, chief economist at Hang Seng Bank China in Shanghai, noting that support for high-tech industries would not do much for households. “They can do a lot of things but they can’t force people to cheer up.”

Li, who was promoted to No. 2 on the powerful seven-man Politburo Standing Committee in October 2022, gave the opening address of the NPC but, in a break with tradition, will not be giving the closing remarks.

The premier’s news conference, held at the end of the NPC since the 1980s and one of the few moments of relative openness in the Communist system, has been canceled this year. This comes after a party plenum, top Communist Party officials were expected to set out an economic agenda, failed to materialize as expected late last year.

The delays and opacity have fueled concern that Beijing plans to muddle through the downturn rather than introducing bold measures to spur substantial growth.

“The long delay of the plenum means there is no economic reform road map out there, at least not in the public domain,” said Nis Grünberg, lead analyst at Mercator Institute for China Studies, a China-focused German think tank.

Instead, Grünberg added, the consistent messaging from top Chinese officials suggests that state control will prevail over any liberalizing economic reforms.

Indeed, Xi appears to be harking back to the Communist Party’s Marxist roots. In December, he instructed officials to unleash “new productive forces” to prevent a sharp slowdown, leaving foreign investors to puzzle through pages of jargon to work out what the phrase means for markets and businesses.

“The essence of innovation is ‘establishing a new production function,’ which means introducing into the production system a ‘new combination’ of conditions and factors of production that have never existed before,” Chen Binkai, dean of economics at the Central University of Finance and Economics, explained to Qiushi, a Communist Party magazine.

Close observers of Chinese politics says Xi’s announcement is less about economic policy and more about establishing his position as an epoch-defining leader by following the example of past strongman rulers.

Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic, called for the “liberation” of laborers from feudal society. Deng Xiaoping, who unleashed market reforms in the 1980s, promised the “development” of production using science and technology.

Now Xi wants a high-tech upgrade to the Chinese workforce that can keep the economy afloat and secure dominance in strategically important emerging industries like clean energy, artificial intelligence and semiconductors.

Prominent voices within China are warning that Xi’s policies favoring the heavy hand of state intervention have gone too far and are dampening innovation.

“Officials at all levels no longer have the space to make decisions on their own, economic activity is constrained and less dynamic, and social freedoms have been restrained,” Yao Yang, dean of the National School of Development at Peking University, wrote in an article translated and published last week by Sinification, a newsletter.

For Yao, the leadership’s methods of trying to reassert control — a crackdown on “over-marketization” of the economy and emphasis on Marxist notions of egalitarianism — had been excessive and spooked entrepreneurs and the wealthy.

“The Party’s official theories are still stuck in Marx’s doctrines and have fallen far behind the realities of the reform and opening period,” he said.

Lyric Li in Seoul and Vic Chiang in Taipei, Taiwan, contributed to this report.