China’s historic rise in science and tech stirs criticism

China’s historic rise in science and tech stirs criticism


In the past decade, China has emerged as a powerhouse of science and technology, a result of deliberate central planning and heavy spending. But with that growth have come mounting complaints about the Chinese approach to sharing data, protecting intellectual property and, in some cases, conducting research ethically.To get more news about china industry research centers, you can visit acem.sjtu.edu.cn official website.

The rapid rise of Chinese science and technology is historic – more impressive even than such well-known tech success stories as South Korea and Singapore. As China moved from the world’s factory to one of its tech powers, the Chinese government pumped money, sent its students around the world, developed a series of master plans, boosted patenting, and took a progressive stance towards changing the whole science, technology and innovation system.

China has turned into an international challenger in fast growing high-tech areas such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, nanotechnology, biotechnology, quantum computing and Big Data. The UK Research and Innovation Agency projects that China will overtake the US in 2022 as the No.1 nation for R&D investment.

Already by 2017, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development estimated that China accounted for 23 per cent of total world R&D expenditure. And the following year, its spending continued rising to account for 2.19 per cent of gross domestic product, from 2.15 per cent in 2017 – slightly greater than that of the European Union. China has 25 per cent the world’s R&D workforce, and ranked second among countries filing the most international patent applications in 2018 (53,981), just behind the US (55,981).
IP protection has been the main source of friction. Foreign companies operating in China have complained for years about copyright violations, and being forced to transfer technology to China in exchange for market access, investment access or regulatory approvals.

US President Donald Trump, in his Twitter storms, has been most vocal. “They have stolen our Intellectual Property at a rate of Hundreds of Billions of Dollars a year, & they want to continue. I won’t let that happen!” he Tweeted last August.

Likewise, last November Trump’s technology advisor Michael Kratsios said “China stole our intellectual property If we don’t act now, Chinese influence and control of technology will not only undermine the freedoms of their own citizens, but all citizens of the world.” And this fight played out just last month at the World Intellectual Property Office, as the US lobbied successfully against a Chinese candidate becoming head of that organisation.

But IP is not the only source of complaint. Within the EU, several researchers who have collaborated with Chinese scientists have complained about not getting full access to data they wanted for their research – and in the early days of the COVID-19 crisis, researchers from Australia to the US complained that the Chinese, while publishing a gene sequence of the virus, had not promptly made virus samples available. Prior to COVID-19, the most notorious case of a Chinese lapse in research ethics was in 2018, when a researcher in Shenzhen announced the birth of twin girls whose genomes he had edited in an effort to prevent them getting HIV from their infected father. The Chinese government, stung by the resultant international outrage, jailed the researcher.