Abacus | China isn’t playing tech catch up – it’s leapfrog and it may get dirty
Beijing knows it is too far behind to win the present-day intellectual property race; instead it is preparing to dominate in burgeoning fields such as artificial intelligence and aerospace
The editor of China’s Science and Technology Daily caused a stir last month when he described “the large gap in science and technology between China and developed countries in the West, including the US” and spoke of the obstacles China faces in catching up with more technologically advanced nations.
It goes against the narrative of technological achievement trumpeted by Beijing, but he was right about how far China lags behind the US.
If you were to believe much of the media coverage, you would think that China was already a world-beater in technology. Endless news stories recount how China now turns out more graduate engineers each year than any Western country, publishes more scientific research papers and files more patent applications.
However, these statistics indicate little about technological prowess. According to business managers, many of those three million annual science and technology graduates lack crucial analytical and communication skills, and are barely employable. Similarly, a large proportion of those 430,000 research papers have little or no scientific value.
And many of China’s 1.4 million yearly patent applications are destined to prove worthless. In fact, fewer than 20 per cent of China’s applications even claim to be for new inventions; the vast majority are for lower-tier design or utility model patents, which typically cover minor incremental changes to existing products.