China vows self-reliance on key tech

More R&D spending to narrow gap with US, ease ‘stranglehold problems’

Scaling up the technological ladder and focusing on selfreliance on key technologies topped the agenda in the 2021 Government Work Report, delivered on Friday by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang.

Chinese analysts said the blueprints and work method detailed in the report could lead to a big step forward in the volume and structure of research and development spending and be conducive for China’s efforts to narrow its gap with the US in technology.

Detailing some of the concrete targets to be achieved during the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25) period in the Government Work Report, Premier Li said the country will strive for above 7 percent annual growth in R&D spending, and will account for a higher percentage of GDP than that during the 13th Five-Year Plan period to keep up the country’s momentum to scale the ladder of technology.

“We will strengthen our science and technology to provide strategic support for China’s development,” Li said.

In the context of a brewing tech war with the US, the world’s leading tech power, further input into R&D stays at the core of China’s developmental bottlenecks, as the country is a determined manufacturing power that, in current times, can only be described as big but not strong, said Cong Yi, a professor at the Tianjin University of Finance and Economics.

“The world’s No.1 industrial production capacity and the most complete industrial systems desperately need more fruits from original innovation so that it can move up the value chain,” Cong said Friday.

Continued efforts to boost R&D spending will further narrow China’s technology gap with the US, Cong said.

In an interview on the sidelines of the two sessions on Friday, He Lifeng, chairman of National Development and Reform Commission, told reporters that China will give full play to a new nationwide endeavor for core technologies in key areas, aiming to solve “stranglehold problems,” and will introduce an open competition mechanism to select the best candidates to lead key research projects.

Zhou Shijian, a senior research fellow at the Center for US-China Relations at Tsinghua University, said the central government’s pledge of more aggressive spending will definitely help beef up China’s R&D expenditure as a percentage of GDP, potentially boosting that figure by 2025 to 2.8 percent – a level that the US enjoyed in 2019.

“However, given the level of insolence of US tech bully on China and the cutthroat nature of the tech sphere competition, this [level of input] is still not satisfactory,” Zhou told the Global Times on Friday.

Zhou said while it is impossible for the US to decouple with China in the trade and economic sphere, it is entirely possible for the US to decouple with China in the technological sphere, making more spending a dire necessity for the sake of national security.

“Ideally, the catcher should spend more,” Zhou said, predicting the Biden administration will continue a tech crackdown on China in the coming years.