China surpassing US in key innovation metric and evolving from ‘imitator’, Washington report says
- Global market share of America’s firms and its allies at risk ‘in most high-value-added, advanced industries’ vital to national prosperity and security
- Think tank study finds China’s innovation in 2020 was 139 per cent of its US equivalent, up from 78 per cent in 2010
China has often been dismissed by industrialised nations as a country that is adept at copying but weak at creating, crippled by a memorisation-based education system, excessive respect for authority and a tendency to steal intellectual property. But a study released on Monday finds that China has surpassed the US in one key measure of innovation and is making major strides in another.
The report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a non-partisan Washington-based think tank focused on US science and technology policy, found that China’s innovation in 2020 was 139 per cent of its US equivalent, up from 78 per cent in 2010.
And based on another metric accounting for the comparative size of their economies and populations, China’s innovation output was three-quarters of US levels, up from 58 per cent in 2010.
“China is evolving from an imitator to an innovator, following a path blazed by its Asian Tiger neighbours – but at a much larger scale, with far greater geopolitical consequences,” said Robert Atkinson, the foundation’s president, who co-authored the report along with research assistant Ian Clay.