Stronger tech innovation capabilities are facilitating industrial growth in China, which will help further the high-quality development of the nation’s sprawling manufacturing sector. The remark came after China’s industrial output increased 9.6% on a yearly basis in 2021, 1.5 percentage points higher than GDP growth, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
Meanwhile, China’s research and development expenditure rose 14.2% year-on-year last year, four percentage points higher than that in the previous year, accounting for 2.44% of the GDP. Tech innovation has played a bigger role in driving growth, and the manufacturing sector has recorded relatively fast growth.
Specifically, output from high-tech manufacturing and equipment manufacturing rose 18.2% and 12.9% year-on-year, respectively, 8.6 percentage points and 3.3 percentage points higher than that of overall industrial output. China’s innovation capabilities have continued to grow, which are fueling the expansion of emerging industries and new products.
More capital is going to the high-tech sector, which will also fuel the in-depth integration of the digital and real economies, and facilitate the high-quality development of manufacturing in China. Last year, investment in high-tech industries increased by 17.1%, 12.2 percentage points faster than total investment. Among the total, investment in high-tech manufacturing and high-tech service industries increased 22.2% and 7.9% year-on-year, respectively.
China’s industrial economy maintained relatively good performance in 2021. In addition to constant upgrades in industrial structure, the proportion of manufacturing in China’s GDP increased by 1.1 percentage points to 27%. That marked a major reversal to the past decade when the proportion of manufacturing in GDP had been gradually declining, Yao said. Experts warned earlier that a decline of manufacturing’s role in China’s GDP risked dragging down current economic growth and affecting urban employment.
China’s industrial sector is facing more positive factors this year than in 2021. For instance, stabilising investment has become an important point for the macroeconomy due to tech innovation. With positive factors ahead, monthly industrial output figures in 2022 are likely to be better than their counterparts seen last year.
Minister of industry and information technology, China’s top industry regulator, said earlier that stabilising industrial growth will be the ministry’s top priority in 2022, and it will ratchet up resources to boost the manufacturing sector’s innovation capabilities.
The future of the Chinese economy lies in innovation. With its pool of younger workers shrinking, China can no longer rely on imitation if it hopes to grow and support its ageing population. It will have to rely on tech innovation instead.
China now has at its disposal a resource that no other country has: a vast population that has lived through unprecedented amounts of change and, consequently, has developed an astonishing propensity for adopting and adapting to innovations, at a speed and scale that is unmatched elsewhere on earth.
As reported by OpenGov Asia, more than a dozen experiment racks and an extravehicular experiment platform will be installed to support hundreds of research projects in fields such as astronomy, space life science, biotechnology, microgravity, basic physics and space materials. China is aiming to boost global collaboration in this regard.
China is considering the launch of a faster supercomputer. The Chinese team that won the 2021 award described in their winning paper a yet-to-be-published powerful machine that can achieve a sustained performance of 1.2 exaflops of single-precision computing power.
Such a device could be used to screen out therapeutical molecules and to simulate the chaotic planet climate which could help slow down global warming. Although many complex problems in the real world cannot currently be solved through the quantum computer, its performance continues to rapidly improve. In 2021, Chinese scientists launched two superconducting quantum computing systems, Zuchongzhi and Zuchongzhi 2.1 within a half year, making China one of the world leaders in the field.
