The accusation that China steal US invention is bogus and pretext to impose unilateral tariff No doubt skull drudgery going on but that apply to almost all intelligence service in this world
But China technology and science advance in the last decade are mostly due to improving funding, building up facilities and training of large number of engineer and scientist Here it is
How China Is Trying to Invent the Future as a Science Superpower
In its quest for scientific achievement, China’s research and development spending has grown rapidly over the past two decades, making it second only to the United States
The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) in Guizhou, China.
Credit:
The following essay is reprinted with permission from , an online publication covering the latest research.
Genetic engineering, the search for dark matter, quantum computing and communications, artificial intelligence, brain science—the list of potentially disruptive research goes on. Each has significant implications for future industries, defense technologies and ethical understandings of what it means to be human.
And, increasingly, the are coming not from the great centers of science in the West, but Beijing, Shanghai, Hefei, Shenzhen and a number of other Chinese cities that make up China’s extensive research system. Inevitably, the question arises: How much of the future is being invented in Chinese labs?
The current
have brought
into clearer focus. As China aims to achieve leadership in emerging key technologies, the U.S. is quick to attribute much of Chinese progress to the
. But,
, I’ve seen dramatic improvements in China’s own innovative capacity, along with the science base needed for success in the knowledge-intensive industries it seeks to master.
In its
, China’s
over the past two decades. It’s now second only to the United States. China has become a
to the world’s science and engineering literatures, with Chinese papers in selected fields attracting an increasing number of citations.
Generous government science budgets have allowed China to build world-class facilities in a number of fields. And China is home to
, now enriched by high-quality domestic university programs as well as scientists returning from abroad with advanced degrees from the world’s leading universities.
But how is the enterprise of science in China organized? Who sets the priorities? And are its mechanisms of governance suitable for sustained progress?
CHINESE SCIENCE, BY SECTOR
In contrast to the U.S., where basic research is concentrated in universities, where there are strong traditions of corporate R&D and where research in government labs supports the missions of government agencies, the institutional arrangements for science in China reflect a different design.
Though each has been extensively reformed, Chinese science today is still largely conducted in five institutional sectors. The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), a legacy institution from the 1950s, oversees some 120 institutes—including China’s “big science” facilities—and three institutions of higher education. Following a series of reforms over the past two decades, scientists in many of its labs now engage in world-class research across a range of disciplines, including quantum physics, mathematics and neuroscience.
Universities comprise the second institutional system, with the top schools competing with CAS for talent and prestige. University-based research was not emphasized in the pre-reform era. But over the past two decades, China’s top universities have emerged as important centers of basic and applied research, while also promoting a culture supportive of high-tech entrepreneurship.
China’s industrial enterprises constitute the third institutional sector. Two of the most significant changes over the past two decades have been the growth of company-based R&D, especially in information and communications technology fields, and the emergence of non-state-owned, market-oriented high tech firms. R&D expenditures in the enterprise sector now amounts to
.
Government research institutes under civilian ministries—such as those for agriculture, public health, environmental protection, natural resources and so on—constitute a fourth system.
Finally, research and development in support of the military constitutes a fifth sector, one which remains largely opaque. In cooperation with civilian sectors, and guided by civil-military integration policies, it’s producing
.
In the last few years, the Chinese government has introduced policies to
. In particular, China has established national laboratories and other major new national research centers, inspired by the national lab experience in the U.S. and other countries.
– cross-disciplinary and problem-focused by design—are engaged in
. For example, the University of Science and Technology in Hefei is home to a leading facility for quantum physics and quantum information.
The government has also sponsored the establishment of major government-owned national research centers within leading Chinese companies. For instance, iFlytek, a leader in voice recognition technologies, hosts one on human-machine interactions. China National Offshore Oil Corporation hosts another on natural gas hydrates.
