Guidelines published in May by the Communist Party’s Central Committee and the State Council (peak authorities of the Party and government) provide further detail on how China plans to achieve ‘innovation-led development’, a guiding principle of the Thirteenth Five Year Plan released in March 2016.
The guidelines call for China to become ‘an innovative nation’ by 2020, ‘an international leader in innovation’ by 2030, and by 2049, the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, a ‘world powerhouse of science and technology innovation’.
The guidelines also call for:
- continued growth in investment by government and companies in research and development (R&D), affirming a longstanding target of 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2020 and for the first time setting a target for 2030 (2.8 per cent of GDP)
- encouraging Chinese industry to move up the value chain and engage more internationally, including by increasing exports of in advanced areas like satellite technology, high-speed rail, nuclear power and supercomputing and by setting up R&D facilities offshore and partnering with or acquiring innovative foreign companies
- major new scientific projects to help China ‘leap forward’ in areas including drug discovery, nuclear power, water treatment, quantum telecommunications, aviation and brain science
- greater support for basic research and greater autonomy for scientists
- ongoing efforts to promote entrepreneurship, including by fostering an open and fair market environment and one that values innovation and tolerates failure
- protection for intellectual property rights (IPR) to be strengthened, consistent with China's existing roadmap for IPR reform
- China to play a greater role in major international science projects and engage more closely with global science, technology and innovation governance.
These high-level guidelines will inform more detailed policies and programs to be developed by China’s policy and funding agencies at national and provincial level.
For further enquiries, please contact
Sean Starmer, Counsellor (Science & Industry) at the Australian Embassy, Beijing.