send via emailChina relies on people power for its position in science and technology
The recently published OECD report on innovation policy in China gives an insight into a rapidly developing industrial nation.
It says China is now the third largest investor in R&D, after the US and Japan, spending $73.5bn (measured at purchasing power parity) in 2006. This is reflected in an R&D intensity that has risen rapidly, from just 0.6% of GDP in 1995 to 1.43% in 2006. The country, whose Party Committee is made up of former engineers, has recognised the value of science, technology and innovation and is investing in it heavily.
China has vast human resources to apply to its goal of becoming a more innovative country. Max von Zedtwitz, vice president of PRTM and a professor at Beijing University, told a recent EIRMA meeting just how large those resources are and how quickly they are being applied to science and technology.
Quantity
We can expect the number of the population with a college education to increase five-fold
Von Zedtwitz said that in June 2008, there were over 10 million applicants for 5.4 million university places. There are now 25 million students in China, up from 5 million in 1998. Tsinghua University, one of the country’s most prestigious institutions, accepts one in 1600 applicants: “It’s more difficult to get into than Harvard or MIT.”
Despite the large number of students, only 4 to 5% of the population have a college education “so we can expect the numbers to increase five-fold.”
He estimates that engineering, science, medicine and agriculture students make up 50% of the student body of 25 million. He compares this with the US, where the same four categories account for 17% of Bachelor and 13% of Master’s degrees, from a total of 16 million students. In Europe, 40% of students study comparable fields, out of a student body of 17 million.
“In a few years China will probably have more students in science, engineering, medicine and agriculture combined than all the students in the US or Europe,” he said.
It’s worth pointing out that the number of undergraduates studying natural sciences and technologies is falling as a proportion of the whole student body, because Chinese education is diversifying to cover a wider range of subjects. China has also emphasised engineering education over pure science, which some say has made it better at absorbing and applying technology than economies such as India, which put basic science first.
The OECD report says that the number of people in China with a higher education background rose from 16.2 million in 1990 to 66.1 million by 2003, at an average annual growth rate of 14.5%.
The number of postgraduates studying in China has also increased rapidly since the year 2000. In 2005, nearly 365,000 people began studying for Masters degrees, 2.8 times more than started in 2000.
Quality
China is steadily increasing the quality of its publications
China has launched a number of projects over recent years, including the 985 project to build world-class universities and the 211 project to build a hundred universities in the 21st century, to increase its academic capacity. The country also has more than 2000 tertiary education institutions and has established educational co-operation and exchange programs with more than 170 countries.
The rapid growth of China’s tertiary education system has raised questions about the quality of Chinese graduates. As in any country, there is variation in the quality of teaching, with the OECD reporting research which suggests that many multinational companies will only hire from 10 or 15 favoured institutions whose quality they trust. Other observers have noted strong technical skills among Chinese scientists, but a lack of managerial, production and marketing skills. [The same is often said of European scientists.]
China’s science skills appear to be strengthening rapidly, at least when measured by output of publications. In an article comparing the science and technology performance of China and America in the Journal of Informetrics, Ronald Kostoff of the MITRE Corporation, a US government research organisation, found that by 2007 China had matched or exceeded America’s production of scientific and technological literature, as measured by entries in the widely recognised INSPEC database of scientific and technical literature.
The paper uses the production of scientific papers in the nanotechnology sector as a guide to the wider performance of the US and China in science and technology. It says that while America had a strong lead over China and most other countries producing nanotechnology science during the past decade, China is steadily increasing the quality of its publications and now appears to be competitive with France, Italy, Japan and Australia.
The paper uses the ratio of highly cited nanotechnology papers to overall production of nanotechnology papers as its quality measure, defining ‘highly cited’ as being among the top 1% of all nanotechnology publications. Using this measure, the quality of China’s output climbed from sixth to third best in the world between 1998 and 2003. The paper concludes that China is increasing the number and quality of nanotechnology papers it produces rapidly, creating a strong position in the sector.
Research resources
China now has 1.36 million R&D personnel, defined as all persons employed directly in R&D, compared with the EU15’s 1.9 million. China also has 1.1 million researchers, defined as professionals engaged in the creation of new knowledge, products, processes, methods and systems, compared with the EU15’s 1 million. This still leaves China’s research base, as a proportion of the total workforce, trailing that of Western countries. For example, China has 1.5 researchers per 1000 members of the workforce, compared with 5.8 in the EU27 in 2004. There are also concerns that the ratio of R&D support staff to researchers is too low, meaning that researchers may be under-utilised because of lack of support services.
The proportion of researchers working in industry has grown rapidly, from around 38% in 1995 to more than 60% in 2005. This is reflected in China’s R&D spending patterns, which remain heavily focused on experimental development. Only 5.2% of all R&D spend in 2006 was aimed at basic research, compared to between 10 and 20% in OECD countries. Furthermore, only 11% of patents by Chinese firms in 2006 were considered truly inventive, compared with 74% of patents by foreign firms patenting in China. And Chinese high-technology industries continue to have much lower R&D intensity than their counterparts in most advanced OECD countries.
Creativity
Some observers question whether China’s hierarchical society suppresses the creativity and problem-solving capabilities that industry needs from its R&D staff. Von Zedtwitz argues that they’re looking at the issue in the wrong way, through purely Western eyes.
“Our sense of creativity is a Western kind of creativity,” he said. “The Chinese are very good at problem-solving in their own context. The question we should ask is - why did it take us so long to copy the Chinese?”
He argued that China is still emerging as a world power and a force in science and technology.
“China as a country is like a teenager, growing and flexing its muscles but not quite breaking free from its mother yet,” he said. “But we should be happy if China just becomes another Italy. Without Italy we would still be stuck in the 18th century.”
And he reminded the meeting of China’s resolve.
“If there’s anything you can be sure about in China, it is that if they say they want to do something then they will make it happen. Otherwise, they would lose face. I wouldn’t be surprised if the first man on Mars is Chinese.”