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The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (API) recently released a report confirming China’s dominance in “critical technologies”. The report attributed much of China’s progress to high-level design and long-term policy planning.
He also stated that western democracies are losing in the global technological competition and urged them to invest more in research and cooperate closely to curb China’s dominance in these technologies.
Before acting, it is important to make sense of China’s progress in critical technologies and separate fact from fiction.
Claiming that China’s leadership in research results reflects its dominance in “critical technologies” is paradoxical. Research output does not necessarily reflect technological innovation.
There is no denying that China has made great progress in research output over the past two decades, which is mainly due to the massive financial support from the central government to universities and research institutes based on a rank-based model.
But this model has prompted researchers to prioritize short-term incentives over long-term knowledge inquiry, which is driven by academic curiosity but carries high levels of uncertainty and risk.
China has followed in the footsteps of Western technological forerunners by imitating, simulating, and replicating current scientific research. After reaching the technological frontier, Chinese scientists must adjust their strategy and carry out forward-looking and decisive research.
Input measurement plays an important role when it comes to research results. In the year By 2022, China’s total research and development (R&D) workforce will exceed five million person-years, creating the world’s largest science and technology talent pool.
When weighted for purchasing power, Chinese researchers are generally lower than the OECD average, except for top scientists. China has nearly double the number of full-time researchers, equal to the combined total of the United States and the European Union. It is not surprising to see China making strides in research output.
However, quantity of research does not always equate to quality. The ASPI Technology Tracker provides general comparisons across countries and technology fields, but does not contain precise measures of research quality. This is because the ranking of a country in a certain field of technology is based on published quotations.
Although the ASPI report confirms that self-citations are legitimate, citation-based indicators give large organizations a significant advantage in publication impact when self-citations are included.
Another limitation of the ASPI standards is the inadequacy of journals and author influences on studies, which may reduce those who conduct basic and future descriptive research. Using bibliometric analysis methods such as co-citation and collaboration analysis, the United States outperforms China by a significant margin in many areas of science.
Building technological innovation is a gradual and cumulative process driven by industrial R&D. China has a relatively short history of industrial innovation, which is largely road-based. As a result, China has few advantages in established industries such as semiconductors and pharmaceuticals; Western officials have a “patent thicket” that prevents Chinese takeover.
China in 2010 Contributing to 27.5% of global R&D spending in 2022, compared to 35.6% in the US, US tech giants still dominate research and innovation in critical technologies such as artificial intelligence.
Unlike the United States, China’s research and innovation development occurs in different ways. Controversy has raised concerns for policy makers – while the research community celebrates achievements in the number of publications, industries face many “problems” in critical technology supply chains.
Less than 4% of China’s research output from universities is translated into industrial innovation capabilities – far less than most industrialized countries. Building a bridge between China’s research and innovation has become a policy priority.
Finally, the notion that China’s industrial policy plays an important role in research and innovation is a myth. China does not have a single industrial policy – instead, it has several policies that lead to government competition, where duplicate efforts and resources are wasted.
One way to overcome this challenge is to establish a new national innovation system. A centralized national system can provide innovation advantages for critical technologies.
Technologies with a clear scientific basis and development trajectory that require significant investment and collaboration among many stakeholders – such as chipmaking – will benefit more. But in such a centralized framework, the effectiveness of research and innovation should be seen.
Ultimately, long-term scientific research and grassroots entrepreneurship will be critical to achieving technological breakthroughs. The creation of a committee controlled by the Chinese Communist Party to oversee science and technology policy could result in China’s isolation from the international research community – something that is already happening. Following decades of growth, the number of joint papers between US and Chinese scientists has declined sharply in recent years.
ASPI’s findings are significant. Technology is at the heart of today’s geopolitical competition and the future of modern society. The United States and the West have imposed technology sanctions on China to protect its leadership in critical technologies due to the growing perception of the “China threat”.
ASPI’s recommendations can be seen as a deliberate promotion of fragmentation of the international research community, which could hinder international cooperation to solve common problems such as climate change, public health and sustainable development.
Given that the institute is partially funded by the Australian government, this report could cast a shadow over the fragile and slowly recovering relationship between Australia and China.
Marina Yu Zhang is Associate Professor at the Institute of Australia-China Relations at the University of Technology Sydney.
This article was originally published by East Asia Forum and reprinted by Asia Times under a Creative Commons license.
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