As reported by Reuters on March 4, 2021,
China will increase its annual research and development spending by more than 7% every year over the next five years, the government wrote on Friday in its work report from the Fourth Session of the 13th National People’s Congress.
The government will increase expenditure on basic research by 10.6% in 2021, the report added.
The ramp-up highlights the country’s commitment to advancing in the tech sector, as the country increasingly clashes with the United States and other countries over technology policy.
In its five-year plan, China highlighted seven key areas related to technology it aims to boost: next-generation artificial intelligence, quantum information, brain science, semiconductors, genetic research and biotechnology, clinical medicine and health, and deep space, deep sea and polar exploration.
… The government aims to achieve 5G penetration of 56% in the next five years, according to the plan.
Let’s briefly deep dive into each of these 7 in order to understand what the future may look like as China is shaping it.
Opportunities: There are 7 areas where China is spending and finding a renewed focus. As described by Brandon Reeves, is this China’s version of the roaring 20s?
Next-generation artificial intelligence: As described by Forbes, examples of this would include unsupervised learning (“unsupervised learning is an approach to AI in which algorithms learn from data without human-provided labels or guidance”), federated learning (“Rather than requiring one unified dataset to train a model, federated learning leaves the data where it is, distributed across numerous devices and servers on the edge”), and transformers (“Transformers were introduced in a landmark 2017 research paper: Transformers’ great innovation is to make language processing parallelized: all the tokens in a given body of text are analyzed at the same time rather than in sequence.”).
Quantum information: Stanford’s institute for Theoretical Physics describes Quantum Information as the science that “aims to explore the nature of information at the quantum level, a world in which bits can be both zero and one at the same time and perfect copying is impossible.”
Brain science: One of the leaders in this field is the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Their institute is “grounded in an understanding of the brain and inspired by our quest to uncover the essence of what makes us human.” Getting at the core of this, would also unlock startup opportunities.
Semiconductors: As the Brooking’s institute reports, “Every year, China imports more than $300 billion of semiconductors, and most, though not all, major American semiconductor companies pull in at least 25% of their sales from the Chinese market.” This investment would be to create a “in China for China” model of semiconductor creation to export more and import even less.
Genetic research and biotechnology: ForeignPolicy.com recently reported on China's Genetic Experiments (and argued that they were pushing ethical limits). “Historically, Western countries, and especially the United States, have been the epicenter of research in the life sciences. The United States alone accounted for some 45 percent of biotech and medical patents filed in the 14-year period ending in 2013. But now, thanks to heavy state-backed investment, China is catching up. Economic plans instituted in 2015 call for the biotechnology sector to account for more than 4 percent of China’s total GDP by 2020, and estimates suggest that as of 2018, central, provincial, and local governments had already invested over $100 billion in the life sciences. Chinese venture capital and private equity investment in the life sciences, meanwhile, totaled some $45 billion just from 2015 to 2017.”
Clinical medicine and health: These 8 clinical innovations are coming soon (as reported by AdvisoryBoard.com) and will be among those invested in by China. Organoids, mobile health out of hospitals, personalized prescribing, chatbots, bioelectronics, CRISPR, and digital therapeutics among others.
Deep space, deep sea, and polar exploration: These are exactly what they sound like: developing technology and resources to explore the unknown.
Contributed by: Michael Bervell (Billion Dollar Startup Ideas)