The article outlines a critical political economy analysis of Chinese planning today. The implementation of planning is in line with a specific political temporality. It is subject to a specific set of control mechanisms, embedded in both state and party, which operate against the backdrop of a decentralised bureaucratic order. The programmes of reform and structural change carried out in the economy over a period of several decades have thus established a planning model aimed at influencing market outcomes. These programmes have taken the place of the earlier system of command-based planning. The exercise of public control over the largest concentrations of land, industrial and financial capital in China thus configures the planning model, while ensuring the availability of large-scale resources to be allocated to the task of achieving the objectives of the plan. Planning in its current form is conditioned by the ascendancy of the party-state in the realm of capital.