At the Two Sessions meeting, China announced its plans on spending more money on R&D over the next five years. (Image Credit: Xinhua)
China plans to spend more money on research and development over the next five years to make major technological breakthroughs. This was announced at China's Two Sessions meeting while Beijing laid out its ambitions to become a tech superpower. China's five-year plan focuses on building technology for healthcare, semiconductors, quantum computing, and cloud computing. China's 2021 Two Sessions meeting is the start of the nation's 14th five-year development plan that outlines priorities and goals over the next few years. The plan started in 2021 and ends in 2025.
China's research and development spending is expected to increase by over 7% annually, which includes the private and public sectors, between 2021 and 2025. That number was larger than the boost for China's military, which is set to see a 6.8% growth next year, potentially fueling an invisible race against the United States and the rest of the world. Previously, the government wanted to spend 2.5 % of GDP on R&D in the past five years, but they failed to reach that goal. This also means that GDP could see a higher percentage moving forward. However, the exact amount the government plans to spend has not been revealed at this time. Government payment on basic research is increasing by 10.6%.
China has also struggled in the microchip sector. Complex production caused Chinese businesses to stall, forcing them to import the needed semiconductors. Even though tens of billions of dollars were invested, China's chip production met 15.9% of demand in 2020. This number is slightly higher than the 15.1% share it saw in 2014.
Last week, China proposed to speed-up the development of operating systems, computer processors, cloud computing, high-end semiconductors, and artificial intelligence. The nation's latest strategy reinvents its Made in China 2025 campaign, which aimed to overtake the lead in a series of state-of-the-art technologies. The goal was to develop 70% of the core components for Chinese manufacturers by 2025.
How about more numbers? Last year, China's spending on R&D increased by 10.3% to 2.44 trillion Chinese yuan ($378 billion), which also accounted for 2.4% of GDP. At the end of 2020, China's 552 national key laboratories and 350 national engineering research centers were active. The National Natural Science Foundation of China-funded around 457,000 projects. Moreover, 3.6 million patents were approved, an increase of 40% in 2019.
According to the Federation of American Scientists, the US planned on spending approximately $134 billion on R&D last year. Did everyone follow suit? Meanwhile, the United Kingdom spent £11.4 billion ($15.9 billion) on R&D in 2020. The UK also plans on spending more than double by 2024 or 2025.
It's a "Cold R&D" race to the future. Sound like a boon to the engineers out there.
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