It may well be coincidental that two talks in New York on Monday both focused on China's 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015).

At the China Institute, David Hoffman, vice-president of The Conference Board China Center for Economics and Business, was chatting with Peter Lighte, vice-chairman of J.P. Morgan's Global Corporate Bank, China, in front of a full house about how the plan will affect the business environment for foreign investors in China.

At Columbia Business School, Pu Yufei, an official from China's State Information Center, who participated in drafting the 11th and 12th five-year plans, demystified the latest plan and the future of the Chinese economy to a roomful of MBA students.

While it's no surprise that businesspeople want to know about China's 12th Five-Year Plan in the hope it will offer new opportunities, what has struck me is Americans' changing perception of the notion of five-year plans.

In the old days, most Americans didn't pay much attention to such plans. They viewed them as rigid Soviet-style central planning that did not work. However, that perception seems to be changing.

Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Director of the Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York, admitted that Americans used to think five-year plans were old fashioned, Stalinist, rigid, inflexible and useless.

"But I think we have come to realize the ability to plan is exactly what we are missing in America. We can't make a one-year plan, much less a five-year plan. Some of us have begun to understand that is a great danger to us," he said.

Robert Engle, winner of the 2003 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, said at a recent China innovation seminar that when China is planning for the future with wonderful five-year plans, Americans are merely planning for the next election.

China's 12th Five-Year Plan is quite different from previous ones. Even the official name has changed and it is called the 12th Five-Year Guideline, a change that shows flexibility and a willingness to embrace both central planning and market forces.

While the five-year plan has a more positive look these days, there are some things that cannot and should not be planned. Listening to Pu from the State Information Center talking about the necessity for the government to intervene and bring down property prices, one cannot help worrying about the negative impact of suppressing and distorting market forces.

Many of the serious problems that China is facing today, such as environmental degradation and growing economic inequality, suggest a lack of vision in the plans of the past three decades.

But the positives of the plan are there for all to see. After a trip to China in March, former Michigan governor, Jennifer Granholm, marveled at China's energy plan and lamented at the US inability to formulate its own energy policy.

Increasingly, Americans are blaming the government for the lack of any long-term plan, pointing to the country's crumbling infrastructure such as airports, highways and railways, declining education quality and lack of industrial policy.

On the other hand, the US is not totally without planning. It does have a plan, and a grand one at that, at least when it comes to the military. Its military spending equals nearly the total of the rest of the world combined.

As Robert Engle points to the complementary nature of Chinese and US economies, the two nations seem to have a lot to learn from each other about what should and should not be planned.

The author, based in New York, is deputy editor of China Daily US edition. Email: chenweihua@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 11/18/2011 page8)