China has made great efforts at home and abroad to become a global leader in digital technologies. China’s digital ambitions are state-driven that has a close connection within the IT sector between the state and private companies and show that China’s digital rise is not only spurred by economic interests but also by political goals to become a leading superpower in research and technology.
China wants to take the lead in dual-use technologies and quantum cryptography and advance its Artificial Intelligence (AI) programme. According to a study, it also wants to use its capabilities domestically to implement its vision to be a leader in digital technologies. Digitisation, for the country, is a means to achieve several goals at once: creating new engines of growth, achieving technological independence, social control, and international leadership in digital technologies.
The nation has invested disproportionately in technological innovation in recent years. For quantum cryptography research alone, China has provided at least an estimated USD 50 billion of funding, that’s ten times as much as the United States has made available. In AI, China filed around 30,000 patents last year, two and a half times more than the US.
All these efforts are beginning to pay off: The People’s Republic is already considered the leading digital marketplace and home to a third of all startups with a market evaluation above USD one billion. Soon, the country could become the world leader in digital key technologies. At the same time, Beijing is changing the global technology landscape by pushing blockchain, the Internet of Things and 5G standards and by filling key positions in relevant international institutions.
The advent of new technology and approaches to working with big data will allow China to keep track of and enforce key parts of its ideology within the Chinese population. A good example of a tool that will gain in importance in this area is the Social Credit System, which assigns citizens scores based on a variety of criteria.
The nation ranks second globally in ground-breaking scientific and technological research. The reports evaluated the performance of leading countries in “hot” and emerging fields of scientific and technological research. The reports identified 171 research fronts, including 110 hot and 61 emerging fronts in 11 broad research areas in sciences and social sciences. Research Fronts are formed when clusters of highly cited papers are frequently cited together, reflecting a specific commonality in the research – sometimes experimental data, a method, a concept or a hypothesis.
As reported by OpenGov Asia, another recent report titled “China Tech Decoupled” examined how China is building up a self-reliant domestic IT infrastructure ecosystem with detailed analysis. How China’s tech sector evolves and potentially decouples from the global tech system is one of the most important factors shaping the future. The report sheds light on how China’s effort to build up key domestic substitute IT infrastructure is going and how it will impact the world’s tech landscape.
The country realised early on that it depended heavily on foreign technology, particularly in a critical industry: semiconductors. Since then, a renewed national campaign to build up China’s self-reliant supply chains picked up pace significantly. A new industry suddenly became the centre of the spotlight for governments and private businesses. Referred to as Xin Chuang, or Information Technology Application Innovation Industry, this industry aims to build up a comprehensive, self-reliant Chinese domestic information technology industry from chips, operating systems, and applications.
China is likely to make reasonable progress in domestic replacement in the next decade in markets such as Internet-of-Things (IoT) O.S., cyber security, cloud computing, computing devices, and servers. These markets do not have as high technological barriers or long R&D cycles as chip manufacturing. As a greater share of these markets is captured by domestic companies, foreign companies will gradually lose market share and influence over the Chinese market.
