China- As per the recent update, on Friday, Premier Li Keqiang said, China is willing to invest much in Research and Development in the next five years to make a “major breakthrough” in technology.
The comments turned up at China’s annual parliamentary “Two Sessions” meeting as Beijing laid out its priorities in the upcoming years.
However, the tension between China and the U.S. in the last few years spilled over into the technology space that is hitting China’s biggest companies such as Huawei, and hurts critical industries like semiconductors.
However, China has focused on boosting its domestic capabilities in several technological fields. Li mentioned China will spend on research and development to enhance 7% per year between 2021 and 2025. R&D will further account for a higher percentage of GDP than in the last 5years. Further, he didn’t provide information on which the government may spend in absolute terms.
Currently, China’s spending on R&D has climbed 10.3% to 2.44 trillion Chinese yuan and accounted for 2.4% of GDP in the year 2020 as per the official statistics. In the meantime, central government expenditure is based on research while increasing by 10.6%, Li mentioned.
This year, the Two Sessions marked the beginning of China’s 14th five-year development plan which laid out priorities and goals over the upcoming years. This current plan runs from 2021 to 2025.
Before the annual gathering of delegates has overseen the majority of changes which involves President Xi Jinping’s abolition in term limits in 2018.
The report states that Li laid out Chiba’s vision for the upcoming five years. He mentioned, “To improve China’s innovation system, we will work faster to enhance our strategic scientific and technological capability underpinned by the development of national laboratories, strive to make major breakthroughs in core technologies in key fields, and formulate and implement a ten-year action plan for basic research.”
Now, China needs to focus on the development of a number of technology areas that involve semiconductors, health care, quantum computing, and cloud computing, as per the draft of its five-year plan.
