CHINA has devoted growing resources to basic research and original innovation in recent years, in the hope of cultivating a driving force for economic growth and improving people’s living standards.

The Chinese leadership has recently urged accelerated efforts to build China into a leader in science and technology, and achieve self-reliance and self-improvement in sci-tech at higher levels.

Chinese researchers, hi-tech firms and local governments are together actively striving to strengthen original innovation.

China’s spending on basic research from 2021 to 2025 may hit a record 8 percent of all research and development (R&D) expenditure, according to the science ministry.

China’s spending on basic research hit 133.6 billion yuan (US$20.4 billion) in 2019, accounting for over 6 percent of total R&D expenditure. It is estimated that spending in 2020 exceeded 150 billion yuan.

Professor Deng Ning, vice director of Tsinghua University’s hi-tech laboratory, has been making plans for an artificial intelligence (AI) research institution, which was initiated last October to explore the frontiers of AI research and make breakthroughs in key technologies.

He also participated in the establishment of the Beijing Academy of Quantum Information Sciences, an R&D institution initiated by Beijing’s municipal government in 2017 and jointly built by many top academic institutions in Beijing.

The academy aims to be at the global forefront of quantum physics and quantum information science. Its superconducting quantum computing team made a major breakthrough in May, improving the decoherence time of superconducting qubits.

“We attach great importance to institutional innovation and high-level engineer and research team building. By taking a problem-oriented approach, we set up teams to overcome challenges,” said Deng.

Professor Wang Zenghui at the Institute of Fundamental and Frontier Sciences of the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China is an expert on nanodevices and nanomaterials.

He said that science and technology development is the primary productive force, cultivation provides major talent resources and innovation is a crucial driving force. The combination of the three can help achieve sci-tech self-reliance and self-improvement at higher levels.

Initiated in 2013, Orbbec Technology is a leading company in 3D vision perception technology and has achieved many zero-to-one innovations.

Its founder and chairman Huang Yuanhao said 3D vision perception is a key and basic technology in the era of AI and the Internet of Things, involving core technologies such as imaging chips, computing chips and micro-nano optics. It is a bottleneck for the development of many other technologies and industries.

“We will work with research institutions and enterprises upstream and downstream to strengthen weak parts of our industry chains, and achieve breakthroughs in photosensitive chips, core algorithms, sensors and other key technologies,” said Huang.

The Chinese leadership has also called for enhancing the overall efficacy of the national innovation system, calling on national laboratories, national scientific research institutions, high-caliber research-oriented universities and leading sci-tech enterprises to shoulder their responsibilities in the drive.

The reform of the sci-tech system has been highlighted to work toward a basic system supporting innovation in all aspects. (Xinhua)