[Liberty Sea]

(05-03-2017 10:32 AM)Enigma Wrote:  

That's why I remain skeptical of China's ability to shift from an economic model that relies on them taking value to one of creating value.

Basically you're saying, China's success is largely due to the US willingly giving it to them. Well, that may be true to an extent, and some Chinese may be butthurt about that. But China's leaderships are painfully aware of their technological dependence of foreign power and technologies and are trying to move from this and come into their own.

You can afford to underestimate the cunning of the Chinese, but those in charge cannot.
China Tech Investment Flying Under the Radar, Pentagon Warns

It's up to you to be skeptical, but China's rivals are worried.

Korea's High-Tech Economy Threatened by Chinese Catch-up

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China is only six months behind in information technology

South Korea is famous as a high-tech powerhouse, from Samsung’s smartphones, the world’s fastest internet connection speed and world-beating innovation.

And while presidential hopefuls are laying out plans to develop new technology to drive the economy over the next five years, here is a reality check: the advantage of Korean companies over their Chinese competitors is closing fast.

In five years’ time there’ll be little difference between the tech of Chinese and Korean companies in most sectors, including high-end smart phones, wearable devices, memory chips, and smart electronics, according to a report by the state-run think-tank Korea Institute for Industrial Economics & Trade.



“Of the main industries, it seems Korea has a competitive edge over China only in the semiconductor and display sectors,” said Kim Hyeon-wook, an economist at SK Research Institute in Seoul.



The “Made in China 2025" strategy aims to push the world’s second-largest economy beyond labor-intensive work into more sophisticated sectors, from robotics to aerospace. It will enable increasingly advanced industries and make its companies into Korea’s “strong rivals,” according to the industrial think-tank’s report.

China’s rapid catch-up in technology comes as Korea struggles to find new growth engines to replace traditional manufacturing such as shipbuilding, which has struggled recently. And the rivalry is especially stark in new technologies.

According to a report by the Korea Evaluation Institute of Industrial Technology, the average gap with China on 24 key industries like biotechnology and displays was 0.9 years. This means if Korean companies make no effort, China would catch up in that amount of time.

“China’s improvement of industry is changing the structure of the value chain between Korea and China,” according to Cho Chuel, the director of Chinese industry research at Korea Institute for Industrial Economics & Trade. Rather than the previous vertical structure where Korea made value-added, high technology products, competition will become more equal... he said.

Locking China as forever technologically inferior to the West is not exactly a wise thing to do. China’s transforming, and transforming fast.

China has created the worst first photon quantum computer.
China adds a quantum computer to high-performance computing arsenal

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China already has the world's fastest supercomputer and has now built a crude quantum computer that could outpace today's PCs and servers.

Quantum computers have already been built by companies like IBM and D-Wave, but Chinese researchers have taken a different approach. They are introducing quantum computing using multiple photons, which could provide a superior way to calculate compared to today's computers.

The Chinese quantum computing architecture allows for five-photon sampling and entanglement. It's an improvement over previous experiments involving single-photon sourcing, up to 24,000 times faster, the researchers claimed.

The Chinese researchers have built components required for Boson sampling, which has been theorized for a long time and is considered an easy way to build a quantum computer. The architecture built by the Chinese can include a large number of photons, which increases the speed and scale of computing.

China is strengthening its technology arsenal in an effort to be self-sufficient. China's homegrown chip powers TaihuLight, the world's fastest computer.

In 2014, China said it would spend US$150 billion on semiconductor development so that PCs and mobile devices would convert to homegrown chips. Afraid that low-cost Chinese chips will flood the market, the U.S. earlier this year accused China of rigging the semiconductor market to its advantage.

It's not clear yet if a quantum computer is on China's national agenda. But China's rapid progress of technology is worrying countries like the U.S. A superfast quantum computer could enhance the country's progress in areas like weapons development, in which high-performance computers are key.

But there's a long way to go before China builds its first full-fledged quantum computer. The prototype quantum computer is good for specific uses but is not designed to be a universal quantum computer that can run any task.

The research behind quantum computers is gaining steam as PCs and servers reach their limit. It's becoming difficult to shrink chips to smaller geometries, which could upset the cycle of reducing costs of computers while boosting speeds.

If they deliver on their promise, quantum computers will drive computing into the future. They are fundamentally different from computers used today. Bits on today’s computers are stored as ones or zeros, while quantum computers rely on qubits, also called quantum bits. Qubits can achieve various states, including holding a one and zero simultaneously, and those states can multiply. The parallelism allows qubits to do more calculations simultaneously. However, qubits are considered fragile and highly unstable, and can easily breakdown during entanglement, a technical term for when qubits interact. A breakdown could bring instability to a computing process.

The Chinese quantum computer has a photon device based on quantum dots, demultiplexers, photonic circuits, and detectors.

There are multiple ways to build a quantum computer, including via superconducting qubits, which is the building block for D-Wave Systems' systems. Like the Chinese system, D-Wave's quantum annealing method is another easy way to build a quantum computer but is not considered ideal for a universal quantum computer.

IBM already has a 5-qubit quantum computer that is available via the cloud. It is now chasing a universal quantum computer using superconducting qubits but has a different gating model to stabilize systems. Microsoft is trying to chase a new quantum computer based on a new topography and a yet-undiscovered particle called non-abelian anyons.

In a bid to build computers of the future, China has also built a neuromorphic chip called Darwin.

China Races to Show Quantum Advantage

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Quantum computing has been one of those long-promised breakthroughs, forever on the horizon yet just out of reach, but a quickening is upon us with Google, IBM and others vying to cross a major threshold in a matter of months (as reported recently by MIT News). The target they are gunning for is quantum supremacy, the term coined by theoretical physicist John Preskill to define the point at which a quantum processor surpasses the ability of the largest classical supercomputer to carry out a well-defined problem.

A front-runner in the global supercomputing race, China is also proving itself as a world leader in quantum research. At a press conference in Shanghai on Wednesday, a quantum research team from Eastern China announced they had a hit a milestone in creating a quantum machine that can compete with today’s classical computers.

Team leader quantum physicist Pan Jianwei, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and his colleagues Lu Chaoyang and Zhu Xiaobo (of the University of Science and Technology of China), and Wang Haohua (of Zhejiang University) reported that their quantum processors could solve certain tasks faster than classical machines.


Experimental set-up for multiphoton boson-sampling (Source: Nature Photonics)

The researchers’ quantum device is called a boson sampling machine, considered “a strong candidate to demonstrate ‘quantum computational supremacy’ over classical computers,” according to the team. At the crux of the advance are two primary components: “robust multiphoton interferometers with 99% transmission rate and actively demultiplexed single-photon sources based on a quantum dot–micropillar with simultaneously high efficiency, purity and indistinguishability.”

The scientists’ implementations of three-, four- and five-photon boson sampling achieve sampling rates of 4.96 kHz, 151 Hz and 4 Hz, respectively, reaching speeds 24,000 times faster than previous experiments. “Our architecture can be scaled up for a larger number of photons and with higher sampling rates to compete with classical computers,” they write in their paper, which was published in the scientific journal Nature Photonics on Tuesday.

The Chinese team said their prototype quantum computing machine is 10 to 100 times faster than the first electronic computer, ENIAC, and the first transistor computer, TRADIC, and could “one day could outperform conventional computers.”

University of Texas at Austin Professor Scott Aaronson, who proposed the boson sampling machine, reported that the research showed “exciting experimental progress.”

“It’s a step towards boson sampling with say 30 photons or some number that’s large enough that no one will have to squint or argue about whether a quantum advantage has been attained,” he told the South China Morning Post.

Pan Jianwei is also the chief engineer of the world’s first quantum satellite, launched by China in August 2016. The goal of the project is to secure ultra-secure “hack-proof” quantum communications and to demonstrate features of quantum theories, such as entanglement. In January, Jianwei stated, “the overall performance has been much better than we expected; it will allow us to conduct all our planned experiments using the satellite ahead of schedule and even add some extra ones.”

More: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vw1bKuSe49A

It's true that China's reliance on foreign technology has been useful for some certain primary stage of development, but up to a point it becomes harmful for both sides. It slows down China's innovative process, and China realized this. Last year the US ban Intel from selling Xeon chips to China, which accelerated China's determination to build its own super chips.

China Knocks U.S. From Top Spot And Builds World’s Fastest Supercomputer Without U.S. Computer Chips

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China revealed its latest, and most powerful, supercomputer on Monday. It is a monolithic system with 10.65 million computer cores built entirely with Chinese microprocessors. The reveal of this groundbreaking device comes approximately one year after the U.S. government made a decision to deny China access to Intel’s fastest microprocessors.

Now China holds the most of the top 500 supercomputers in the world and is also number one on this list for the first time – knocking the U.S. off the top spot. China has 167 systems on the June 2016 Top 500 list compared to 165 systems in the U.S. Just 10 years ago China had only 10 systems on the list.

The supercomputer, named the Sunway TaihuLight, far outperforms any U.S. built system. There is no U.S. built system that comes close to the power of the TaihjuLight.

The most significant aspect of this reveal is the origin of the TaihjuLight’s microprocessors. It uses ShenWei CPUs developed by Jiangnan Computing Research Lab in Wuxi. In the past China has relied heavily on U.S. microprocessors in building its supercomputing capacity.

These microprocessors show that the Chinese are moving away from reliance on U.S. parts and are attempting to become self-sufficient. It has been long known that China was developing the TaihjuLight system. However, it was believed that China would turn to U.S. chip technology to reach this performance level.

The Chinese hit a snare when the U.S. government unexpectedly banned Intel from supplying Xeon chips to four of China’s top supercomputing research centers. U.S. government officials initiated this ban because it claimed China was using its microprocessors for nuclear explosive testing activities. The U.S. ceased live nuclear testing operations in 1992 and was hoping to influence the Chinese to do the same. Unfortunately, Chinese officials misinterpreted the move as an attempt to slow their supercomputing development efforts.

While it’s true the Chinese government is on pace to exceed the U.S. in supercomputing power the U.S. government hopes to regain their position as the leader in supercomputing technology by continuing to make advancements in the field, not by slowing the progress of other nations.

In July 2015, the White House issued an executive order creating a “national strategic computing initiative.” The goal of the initiative is to maintain an “economic leadership position” in high-performance computing research. It has long been known that China and countries in Europe want to decrease their dependency on U.S.-made chips. The U.S. is battling this by aiming to increase the power of U.S. supercomputers.

According to Jack Dongarra, a professor of computer science at the University of Tennessee and one of the academic leaders of the Top500 supercomputing list, this is the first time the U.S. has lost its lead in the total number of systems on the Top 500 list. China has 167 systems on the June 2016 Top 500 list compared to 165 systems in the U.S. Just 10 years ago China had only 10 systems on the list.

Many analysts argue that the writing on the wall shows that China has been striving to develop its own high-powered microprocessors for some time now. They state the U.S. chip ban didn’t slow the growth of China’s microprocessor program and instead accelerated it. The U.S. plans to increase China’s dependence on U.S. microprocessors with acts like the National strategic computing initiative. They aim to continue to build superior microprocessors. It appears competition with Chinese microprocessor developers has cause an acceleration in the American program in the same way the U.S. chip ban allegedly accelerated the Chinese program.

More info at:
China builds world’s fastest supercomputer without U.S. chips - China’s massive system runs real applications and is ‘not just a stunt machine,’ says top U.S. supercomputing researcher

China's secretive mega chip powers the world's fastest computer - China sends a warning to Intel: We can develop blazing fast chips, too

China still has the two most powerful supercomputers in the world

The US National Security Agency-Energy Department is worried that this can threaten US Security, in more than one way.

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China, Not Silicon Valley, Is Cutting Edge in Mobile Tech

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Snapchat and Kik, the messaging services, use bar codes that look like drunken checkerboards to connect people and share information with a snap of their smartphone cameras. Facebook is working on adding the ability to hail rides and make payments within its Messenger app. Facebook and Twitter have begun live-streaming video.

All of these developments have something in common: The technology was first popularized in China.

WeChat and Alipay, two Chinese apps, have long used the bar-codelike symbols — called QR codes — to let people pay for purchases and transfer money. Both let users hail a taxi or order a pizza without switching to another app. The video-streaming service YY.com has for years made online stars of young Chinese people posing, chatting and singing in front of video cameras at home.

Silicon Valley has long been the world’s tech capital: It birthed social networking and iPhones and spread those tech products across the globe. The rap on China has been that it always followed in the Valley’s footsteps as government censorship abetted the rise of local versions of Google, YouTube and Twitter.

But China’s tech industry — particularly its mobile businesses — has in some ways pulled ahead of the United States. Some Western tech companies, even the behemoths, are turning to Chinese firms for ideas.

“We just see China as further ahead,” said Ted Livingston, the founder of Kik, which is headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario.

The shift suggests that China could have a greater say in the global tech industry’s direction. Already in China, more people use their mobile devices to pay their bills, order services, watch videos and find dates than anywhere else in the world. Mobile payments in the country last year surpassed those in the United States. By some estimates, loans from a new breed of informal online banks called peer-to-peer lenders did too.

China’s largest internet companies are the only ones in the world that rival America’s in scale. The purchase this week of Uber China by Didi Chuxing after a protracted competition shows that at least domestically, Chinese players can take on the most sophisticated and largest start-ups coming out of America...

Industry leaders point to a number of areas where China jumped first. Before the online dating app Tinder, people in China used an app called Momo to flirt with nearby singles. Before the Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos discussed using drones to deliver products, Chinese media reported that a local delivery company, S.F. Express, was experimenting with the idea. WeChat offered speedier in-app news articles long before Facebook, developed a walkie-talkie function before WhatsApp, and made major use of QR codes well before Snapchat.

Before Venmo became the app for millennials to transfer money in the United States, both young and old in China were investing, reimbursing each other, paying bills,and buying products from stores with smartphone-based digital wallets.

“Quite frankly, the trope that China copies the U.S. hasn’t been true for years, and in mobile it’s the opposite: The U.S. often copies China,” said Ben Thompson, the founder of the tech research firm Stratechery. “For the Facebook Messenger app, for example, the best way to understand their road map is to look at WeChat.”

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CHINA: THE WORLD’S NEW FINTECH LEADER

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The centre of financial technology (or fintech) is migrating eastwards. In November 2016, a report jointly produced by professional-services firm Ernst & Young (EY) and leading Singaporean bank DBS stated in no uncertain terms that China has now leapfrogged ahead of global technology hubs such as Silicon Valley and London to become “the undoubted centre of global fintech innovation and adoption”. Multiple fintech hubs have now emerged in China alone, most prominently in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Beijing and Shenzhen, which has led to EY and DBS concluding that the country now clearly leads the way in fintech and is “revolutionising many aspects of financial services”.

Shanghai tops next global innovation hub ranking

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Shanghai recently came at the top of the list in a KPMG report on the next global innovation hubs. (in Chinese). KPMG selected Shanghai as a future tech leader, due to its “growing base of digital media and entertainment companies”, among others.

KPMG employed six criteria to evaluate shortlisted cities: availability of talent, access to tech infrastructure, the ability to drive customer adoption, access to alliances and partnerships, access to capital, as well as training and access to educational programs.

China’s Beijing and Shenzhen also made the list, ranking third and thirteenth, respectively. In addition, New York was ranked the second on the list, followed by Tokyo, tying for third with Beijing.

It’s worth noting that Shanghai won a 26% nod this year (PDF) compared with 17% one year ago.

In recent years, Shanghai has been spearheading efforts to develop itself into an innovation-driven metropolis and a major global entrepreneurial hub. It has made significant advances in the development of its high-tech industry with the gross output value reaching RMB 680.99 billion, or 21.7% of the city’s industry total in 2015.

Electronic computers and office equipment, electronic and communication equipment, as well as medical and pharmaceutical products are the largest three contributors of the industry’s revenue source by gross output value, as is shown in the 2016 Shanghai Statistical Yearbook.

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One of the first fruits of the Military-Civilian Integration and Made in China 2025 projects.

8,000 innovations added on China's first home-made aircraft carrier

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China's ambition to build aircraft carriers will boost the country's economic development and industrial upgrade, and will benefit society militarily and technologically, experts said.



China's first domestically built carrier, the Type 001A, was launched on Wednesday, while another with more advanced technology, the Type 002, is under construction.

"The huge project of building an aircraft carrier provides a valuable opportunity to many Chinese companies, and industries will be able to push industrial advances," Song Zhongping, a military expert who used to serve in the PLA Rocket Force, told the Global Times. Song believes that the aircraft carrier is a typical civil-military integration project that President Xi Jinping has promoted, and its technologies can be transferred to civilian use.

"The homegrown aircraft carrier involves 8,000 technological breakthroughs and some industrial standards in advanced manufacturing sectors, such as electronic equipment, power plants and steel products that have been developed in the wake of the project," said Liu Xuezhi, a senior analyst at the Bank of Communications. "The money spent on the aircraft carrier is an investment rather than a mere expenditure," Song said.

For instance, the steel with which the aircraft carrier is built is of a durable type, and performs better than other steel. Production capacity of this steel will be boosted by the construction of carriers, which in turn reduces the price, and eventually this will enable it to be used for civilian ships and improve their resistance to corrosion, Song said.

Han Pu, executive director of the Civilian-Military Integration Equipment Research Institute, said that an aircraft carrier such as the Type 001A is a boon for both State-owned and private players, especially at a time when the world economy is grappling with a downturn.

"There is money to be made for military products, averaging at above 30 percent of the investment," Han said, noting that even for private sector suppliers of military support equipment, the profit margins are still around 20 percent.

If China builds more aircraft carriers in the next few years, the investment would amount to 130 billion yuan ($18.8 billion) and fuel the country's economic growth, Han said.

"The direct contribution to GDP, in the form of creating jobs in high-tech sectors and driving the development of industries such as computers and telecommunications, is estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of yuan," Han said.

Han added that China's military industry still has great potential and will feed into the domestic economy in the long-term.

Liu agreed. He hailed the launch of the carrier as a milestone in the government's "Made in China 2025" agenda, noting that "technology-intensive projects like that have greatly boosted the country's research and development ability and the upgrade of the manufacturing industry."

China netizens nicknamed it Mantis Shrimp.

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China, Sending a Signal, Launches a Home-Built Aircraft Carrier

China's New Carrier 'Just First Stage in Creation of Fleet of Supercarriers'

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"The Chinese carrier program will likely develop in two stages," the expert noted. "In the first stage, China is striving to build three aircraft carriers (including the already-commissioned Liaoning), which are a development on the Soviet Union's Project 1143.6. These will be ships with non-nuclear power plants, and a springboard take-off system for its aircraft, although the third of the ships is likely to also be equipped with a steam catapult."

"In the second stage, China will switch to the construction of 'American-style' nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, although the first such vessel will probably join the fleet closer to the mid-2020s," the expert noted.

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China's homegrown amphibious aircraft.

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Successful First Flight OF China's AG600 Amphibious Aircraft Strengthens Territorial Claims

The AG600, also known as TA-600, is the world's biggest amphibious aircraft developed by Chinese state aircraft manufacturer, Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC). The aircraft is intended for forest fire-fighting, ocean monitoring, ocean rescue, and maritime enforcement missions.

Watch it spin.

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The aircraft has a maximum takeoff weight of 53.5 tons and can collect 12 tons of water in 20 seconds.

More details at:
http://www.aerospace-technology.com/proj...-aircraft/
http://www.militaryfactory.com/aircraft/...ft_id=1252

It won't be long until Japan is no longer superior to China in military technology. China’s military tech is becoming less of a joke and more of a threat.

Despite all this China doesn't seem to plan to go to war with the US in the near future. Its increase in military budget is smaller than before – it’s in race with Trump’s military budget raise. It's spending to money to upgrade military technology rather than expanding the military. Innovation is all the rage.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/04/world...years.html
China said Saturday that its military budget would rise by about 7 percent this year, apparently the lowest increase in seven years, signaling that its leaders do not plan to engage the United States in an arms race even as President Trump seeks to bolster the Pentagon’s spending.

Addressing reporters before the start of the annual National People’s Congress, Fu Ying, a spokeswoman for the legislature, said the increase would be “about” 7 percent. She said defense spending would amount to roughly 1.3 percent of China’s gross domestic product.

Last year’s proposed increase was 7.6 percent, though China has yet to release final figures indicating how much was actually spent. Those figures, and the exact number of this year’s projected increase, will be revealed in a budget that the government releases on Sunday, when the national legislature starts its annual full session.

Before 2016, the military budget had received double-digit increases for six years, a reflection of China’s then-roaring economy.
...
Mr. Yang probably found the relationship to be on a sound enough footing, Mr. Blasko said. “I don’t think they want to get into a military budget fight with us, not even a rhetorical one.”

Ni Lexiong, a naval expert in Shanghai, said that if China really felt the need to spend more heavily on the military, it would not hesitate to do so.

“If China felt threatened, I don’t think slower economic growth would stop them from spending more on the military,” Mr. Ni said. “You have seen how the Chinese were willing to starve to build an atomic bomb. We do not worry about poverty when we think a larger military is necessary.”

He said the new budget would allow China to keep modernizing its navy and air force, the two services currently getting the most attention. The navy launched 22 warships in 2016 to replace old ones, and the budget would let it keep up that pace this year, he said.

“A chunk of the expenditure will go towards developing and manufacturing the latest weapons for a stronger air force and navy,” he said. “I believe this speed of replacement will continue, because it has been one of China’s long-term growth goals to build a military stronger than America’s one day, in either quality or quantity.”

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Finally, I have prepared this post for a while but waited until today to post it. Since today is the day C-919: first Chinese-built passenger jet makes 'beautiful' takeoff

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Many top leaders attended the event, a sign of the economic and geopolitical significance that Beijing attaches to its entry into open competition with Airbus and Boeing. Planning for the 158-seat C919 began more than a decade ago, but the plane has become a centerpiece of the country’s more recent Made in China 2025 plan to become largely self-sufficient in many high-tech goods and to export them as well.




“We used to believe that it was better to buy than to build, better to rent than to buy,” President Xi Jinping of China told workers during a recent visit here. “We need to spend more on researching and manufacturing our own airliners.”

... The C919 is designed to compete with the Airbus 320 and the Boeing 737, single-aisle planes that are the workhorses of the world’s airlines. For Comac, the plane represents the culmination of decades of work; for Airbus and Boeing, it is a challenge to a profitable duopoly that has endured for decades.

For China, the C919 is just the beginning. Even if the plane proves less fuel-efficient than Western alternatives, the state-controlled airline industry may still be required to buy it, and the Chinese aviation market in the coming years is expected to rival only the American market in size and perhaps surpass it.

And although the plane represents a new challenger for aircraft sales, Airbus and Boeing, increasingly dependent on Chinese airlines for sales as well as on Chinese suppliers for parts, publicly welcomed its arrival.

Comac is already looking past the C919 to the design and manufacture of a wide-body jet that would compete with larger, more profitable planes like the Boeing 747 and the A340.

With this China has become one of the few countries that can build its own narrow-bodied commercial jets. Japan and South Korea are not among them.

Xi Jinping is determined to reduce China's dependence on foreign technology.

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Long-haul Ambition
During a visit to COMAC in 2014, President Xi Jinping said not having a homegrown plane left China at the mercy of foreign industrial groups, state media reported at the time.

The people don’t want to rely on foreigners forever either, for obvious reasons.

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National pride
At the air expo here, where the model of the C919 was a big draw, the prospect of Chinese airliners evoked a sense of excitement and even a little economic nationalism.
"The Chinese people can do this," enthused Mao Caihong, 35. "I am very excited by this plane. If China can keep on developing, we can build high-level, comfortable and safe planes."
Cheng Zhong, the mechanical engineer, was more to the financial point in his assessment.
"Airplanes cost China billions of dollars every year," he said. "Since we have the capability to make them, why let foreigners earn all the money?"

Among the forces that drive all this innovation rage and achievement is the government's push for an innovation-driven economy (aside from the ingenuinity and thirst for knowledge and forward drive of the Chinese people themselves). China's leadership has made innovation a central component of their reform. They truly understood that innovation is the key to becoming a superpower.

Boosting innovation capabilities among domestic companies is at the forefront of China's supply-side structural reform, experts said on Thursday.

Science is a major plank in China’s new spending plan

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China will invest heavily in S&T over the next 5 years and cut red tape hampering science spending with the hope that innovation will help the country weather its economic slowdown.

In a speech to open the National People’s Congress on 5 March, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang—the country’s top economic official—gave a broad-brush overview of the central government’s draft plan for economic development during the 13th 5-year plan, which runs from 2016 to 2020. Major elements include boosting science spending, which will rise 9.1% this year to 271 billion yuans ($41 billion), reducing bureaucratic barriers for scientists, and improving environmental protection while curbing carbon emissions and other pollutants.

“Innovation is the primary driving force for development and must occupy a central place in China's development strategy,” Li told delegates on the first day of the 2-week congress. Li’s speech, considered a guidepost for the specific policies that will be fleshed out in the next year or two, used the word “innovation” 61 times—nearly double the mentions it received in his work report last year, the state-run Xinhua News Agency pointed out.

The 5-year plan, which serves as a framework for the Chinese Communist Party’s long-term development goals, contains few concrete details on exactly how such measures will be implemented or funded. Instead, it contains a long list of priorities, from building national science centers and space programs to expansion of major infrastructure with thousands of kilometers of new high-speed rail and roadways. China’s new plan promises that by 2020, R&D investment will account for 2.5% of gross domestic product, compared with 2.05% in 2014.

Chinese scientists welcome the budget boost for science, but note that the real impact remains in the as-yet unknown details. “The government always has big plans, but it’s an uncertain time for the economy so we have to watch what happens next. Implementation is crucial,” says Wang Tao, an energy and climate analyst with the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy in Beijing.

China’s economic growth slowed to 6.9% in 2015, and the government has set a 5-year GDP growth target of 6.5% to 7%. In Li’s outline, technology and infrastructure investments figure prominently in what officials clearly hope is a new growth strategy less reliant on manufacturing and heavy industry.

Themes in the new 5-year plan include the domestic production of gas-turbine engines and planes, and increased focus on neuroscience and genetic research, national cyberspace security, and deep space exploration. Chinese aerospace officials told state media last week they hope to launch a Mars probe by 2020. Big data, high-tech medical devices, and cloud computing also earned mention as priority projects. Li spoke of tax breaks for companies that invest in high-priority endeavors and promised a reduction of bureaucratic hurdles to promote R&D.



“We will implement the strategy of innovation-driven development, see that science and technology become more deeply embedded in the economy, and improve the overall quality and competitiveness of the real economy,” Li said.

The plan spells out some measures for China’s environmental protection and energy production, but it’s unclear how much the measures will differ from what is already underway. By 2020, the government wants to reduce energy consumption by 15% and carbon emissions by 18%. In a news conference yesterday, Xu Shaoshi, the head of the National Development and Reform Commission in Beijing, said China will remove 500 million tons of coal production capacity in the next 3 to 5 years. Meanwhile, nuclear power capacity is slated to double to 58 gigawatts installed by 2020.

China is reorganizing its environment ministry to create separate departments focused on water, air, and soil. Scientists applaud what they view as a concerted government effort to tackle soil pollution. “After so many years of rapid industrialization and urbanization in China, soil pollution is clearly now evident and needs due attention,” says Yong-Guan Zhu, director general of the Institute of Urban Environment in Xiamen. He says that measures should include creation of a national soil surveillance system.

China’s leadership is funding and pushing for innovation in intellectuals, in State-Owned Enterprises, and in Private Sectors as well.

Xi Jinping urges Chinese intellectuals to devote to innovation-driven development

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The Chinese President... said that intellectuals should increase knowledge accumulation, strengthen innovation awareness and improve innovation capacity by focusing on the core links of economic competitiveness, the bottlenecks restraining social development and the major challenges of national security.

The interests of the country and nation should be put at the first place, he added, encouraging the intellectuals to take the initiative and help make nation a great scientific power.

The whole society should care for and respect intellectuals and cultivate a favorable environment that honors knowledge and intellectuals, Xi said, adding that authorities must create better conditions, speed up the mechanism-building and follow the work features of intellectuals so that they can concentrate on their duties and fully unleash their talent.

SOEs have potential in mass entrepreneurship, innovation: Premier

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[Premier] Li said centrally-administered SOEs should serve as vanguards in revitalizing the real economy by developing new growth engines and advancing industrial upgrades.

To meet the nation's strategic needs and implement the "Made in China 2025" strategy, centrally-administered SOEs should move up the industrial and value chains and increase their presence in emerging sectors, through developing revolutionary new technologies and new business models that bring into full play China's unique advantage of having a vast market, according to Li.

China to fund private-sector research and development projects

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The Chinese government has announced a programme to fund private-sector research and development (R&D) projects in military and related activities.

It is thought to be the first time that Beijing has supported private-sector defence R&D through state funds.

New and High-Tech Development Zones

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China has built up thousands of new and high-tech development zones. In the 53 state-level new and high-tech development zones, a great many sci-tech research results have been put into use in production. Over 30,000 were identified as high-tech enterprises in these zones, 20 of which had annual production values over 10 billion yuan, more than 200 over five billion yuan, and 3,000 over 100 million yuan. In these zones, the average growth in major economic indicators has been maintained at 60 percent per annum for 13 years running, and they have become important engines of national economic growth. In 2005, with a growth of 31.8 percent than the previous year, the export value of high-tech products of China reached US$218.3 billion, exceeding US$200 billion for the first time.

Private science and technology enterprises have also made great headway, some becoming group corporations with annual output values of several billion yuan. Their high-tech products now account for over half of the domestic market for such products.

Establishing export bases for new and high-tech products in selected high-tech industrial development zones is an important part of the government's plan for developing trade through science and technology. The first designated export bases, selected because of their rapid overall development, rich talent, excellent equipment, and rapidly growing export of high-tech products, include the Beijing Zhongguancun Science and Technology Park and high-tech industrial development zones in Tianjin, Shanghai, Heilongjiang, Jiangsu, Anhui, Shandong, Hubei, Guangdong, Shaanxi, Dalian, Xiamen, Qingdao and Shenzhen. The Pearl River Delta, Yangtze River Delta and the Beijing-Tianjin region have the greatest concentration of such export bases; consequently export volumes of new and high-tech products from these areas account for over 80 percent of the national total.

Xi is also intense establishing extensive innovation partnership with technologically advanced country such as Israel and Germany. In fact, he is going all over the globe, including countries as varied as Finland and South Africa, to push for strengthening technology partnership. They’re really seriously going at it. The attempt is anything but lackluster.

So, should the US be worried?

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While the United States is still at the top in total investment in research and development — spending $500 billion in 2015 — a new Boston Consulting Group (BCG) study released Monday has made a startling finding: A couple of years ago, China quietly surpassed the U.S. in spending on the later stage of R&D that turns discoveries into commercial products. And at its current rate of spending, China will invest up to twice as much as the U.S., or $658 billion, by 2018 on this critical late-stage research.
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The country is still the global leader in “basic and applied” R&D, which makes early discoveries and further refines them. About a third of the $500 billion the country spends on R&D is funneled to those activities. But while two-thirds of the total goes to later-stage “development” R&D, China invests 84% of its R&D money on advances that yield commercial products. For the past decade, “development” R&D has been growing 20% a year in China, versus 5% in the U.S., the BCG report says. As recently as 2004, the U.S. spent four times as much as China.

In China, many technology companies are state-owned and so they don’t have to worry if massive R&D spending yields losses until a product is commercialized, and even the research of private firms is often subsidized by the government, says Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. The Chinese government, he says, also gives the private sector specific timetables for achieving dominance in areas such as solar, printers, robots and drones.

How China is fast narrowing the technology gap with the West

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China recently scored impressive breakthroughs in science and technology (S&T). These include a gigantic 500m-aperture spherical telescope, the launch of the world's first hacker-proof quantum satellite and the world's fastest computer - the new Sunway Tianhe-1A - which extends China's lead in supercomputing.



Indeed, China has in recent years made remarkable progress across several S&T sectors. In space technology, for instance, it has sent 10 astronauts into orbit over the last 13 years, launched its first moon probe and two space stations (Tiangong 1 and 2). Most recently, China launched the Shenzhou XI manned spacecraft with two astronauts to the Tiangong II space lab for a 30-day manoeuvre.

Former US energy secretary Steven Chu has even observed that China is ahead of America in areas ranging "from wind power to nuclear reactors to high-speed rail". China is also catching up fast in artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, 5-G broadband technology and the "Internet of Things".

China's military modernisation is such that the Pentagon has started to worry. Beijing's growing arsenal of modern weapons includes the high-performance fifth-generation stealth fighter, "aircraft-carrier killer" missile, anti-ship cruise missile, nuclear submarine and long-range intercontinental missile.

All these should come as no surprise, given that China is the world's second largest economy. Last year, it devoted 2.1 per cent of its GDP to research and development activities, lower than Japan's 3.6 per cent and the 2.7 per cent of the US. But China's sum translates into a hefty US$220 billion (S$306 billion), making it the world's second largest research and development (R&D) spending after that of the US.

Consequently, China has become the world's largest source of new patents, industrial designs and trademarks. According to the World Intellectual Property Organisation, China in 2014 filed 34 per cent of the world's patents, compared with 22 per cent for the US and 12 per cent for Japan. China also filed 50 per cent of the world's new industrial designs, against 9 per cent for the US; and 76 per cent of new trademarks, compared with the US' 13 per cent.

The size of China's R&D manpower force looks even more formidable. Its total R&D personnel last year numbered almost four million, against 2.4 million for the whole of the European Union and 0.9 million for Japan. China also has a huge reserve army of graduates, thanks to 2,900 universities and colleges as of last year, with a total enrolment of 37 million, against the 21 million of the US. One in five of the world's university students is in China and, in line with other East Asian countries like Japan and South Korea, China has a relatively high proportion (about 40 per cent) of its university students taking up science and technology subjects.

It is not just in quantity that China has made progress; its efforts to improve the quality of its S&T sector has also borne fruit. In 2014, the Nature Index/Global, which tracks high-quality scientific publications, ranked China second in the world in terms of number of scientific papers published, behind the US. Another indicator is the performance of Peking and Tsinghua universities, which were listed in the 2015-16 Times Higher Education World University Ranking as among the world's 50 best universities.

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Ancient China was famous for its Four Great Inventions: the compass, gunpowder, paper-making and printing. The great Cambridge sinologist-cum-scientist Joseph Needham, in his Science And Civilisation In China, had painstakingly chronicled both its past discoveries and inventions and sought to explain why these inventions did not take off and develop in China as they did in Europe. He cited these unfavourable factors: China's agrarian economy, bureaucratic obstacles and the failure of its scientists to mathematise their hypotheses.

Today, however, China's S&T sector enjoys strong state support and ample funding and thus the pre-conditions for strong growth. Indeed, many of its research institutes are flush with funds and their laboratories equipped with state-of-the-art instruments...

US Undermining Patents, Innovation – Meanwhile, China Gains Ground

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Unfortunately, recent data shows that we are losing ground when it comes to the protection of IP and patents – consequently, we are falling behind in the innovation race. While China has long been seen as a nation which does not respect Intellectual Property and where piracy has been rampant, it appears they may have seen the error of their ways and are increasing their patent protections as we have started to undermine ours.

This past February, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Intellectual Property Center (GIPC), released the fifth edition of their International IP Index, which ranks nations according to their ability to foster innovation and economic success. The new edition shows that the United States is losing ground – especially when it comes to protecting our innovations through patents.

At first glance, the U.S. appears to be in a strong position, once again taking the top overall spot in the index – although a number of countries are nipping at our heels. Most concerning is that the U.S. has dropped from number 1 to number 10 in the world on protection of “patents, related rights and limitations.” This is the first time that the United States has not held the top position.

Meanwhile, the nations of Western Europe, along with Japan and Singapore, have leaped forward in patent protections – we are tied with Hungary, which continues to recover and reform from its days as a Soviet Union puppet state.

Most significantly, China appears to be gaining major ground as they have started to implement smart policy changes. Gene Quinn at IPWatchDog.com notes,

“China has introduced new enforcement mechanisms and specialized IP courts to better combat counterfeiting and piracy, and joining them in these efforts were Pakistan, the UAE and Sweden. And while not reflective in the 2017 rankings, China’s recent patent law changes, which make software and business method patent eligible, should result in a significant improvement in the patent landscape moving forward throughout 2017 and beyond.”

Additional data from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) indicates that these policies have paid off. Patent applications in China surged 45 percent in 2016, while in the U.S. they declined .9 percent. CBS News has reported that in 2015, “China accounted for more than one in three of the total 2.9 million patent applications in 2015, followed by the U.S. and Japan with about a half-million each.”

It’s certainly heartening if China is indeed moving away from the model of piracy and IP theft towards greater property rights. It is clearly in their interest to foster an economic environment where the protection of ideas is encouraged. And while it makes sense that nations with economies in transition, like China, would have a higher growth rate, the disparity between its ascent and our decline is very concerning.

China has only begun to put to use of the high IQ of its large population instead of wasting them away in dreary repetitive low-skilled manufacturing work.
China has 4.7 million STEM students graduating per year and on the rise, while the U.S only has half a million.

What is more,

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Study: International Students Outpace Americans in STEM Degrees
According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, international students earned 11.6 percent of all American doctoral degrees conferred during the 2012-2013 academic year. However, at the department level, a different picture emerges, with international students earning 57 percent of doctoral degrees in engineering; 53 percent of doctoral degrees in computer and information sciences; and 50 percent of doctorates in mathematics and statistics.
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Looking at enrollment, according Institute of International Education data, more than 886,000 international students were enrolled in American colleges and universities during the 2013-2014 school year. This figure is up 72 percent from 1999, with nearly all of the growth coming from Asian countries.

China sends the most international students, with 274,439 in 2013-2014, or 31 percent. Of these, 28 percent were studying business and management and 20 percent were studying engineering...

At some point China will have more engineers than the US has white people at this rate.

Going in by corporation, Huawei was the one that filed the most international patent in 2015. China's are growing (and growing fastest), the US's are declining.

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Among the top 15 origins, sizeable growth was registered in China (+16.8%), the Republic of Korea (+11.5%), Israel (+7.4%), Switzerland (+4.4%), Japan (+4.4%) and the Netherlands (+3.6%). Like the U.S., Finland (-12.1%) and Canada (-7.2%) saw fewer filings than in the previous year.

China overtakes US as top nation for technology acquisitions

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China has overtaken the United States for the first time as the world’s biggest “acquiring nation” for mergers and acquisitions in the technology industry, accounting for a 45 per cent share of the market in the first four months of this year, according to a report from Dealogic.
It estimated that Chinese technology acquisitions reached a new high of US$65.7 billion through 456 transactions, up from the previous record of US$41.6 billion through 434 deals in the same period last year.

Xi Jinping has ben pushing for China's entrepreneur to acquire foreign technology. Midea bought Kuka, one of Germany's top robot producers, and began to spend billions on building industrial robots.
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In other news,

China to launch Wikipedia rival in 2018

China leads the world in wind energy installations

New Chinese-made Diaper Surpasses European Brands in Performance Tests

China's Stocks Overtake Europe

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Market cap for the whole world now stands at $71.5 trillion. The US has – in absolute terms – accounted for much of that growth, though US markets are up a relatively modest 92%.

Other "developed" markets, like the UK, France, Canada, and Japan, have seen their market caps grow by much less. Slow economic growth, Eurosclerosis, and endless union and currency troubles have crippled European markets. The UK is up just 37% since 2004, and France has risen 51%.

But the real story here is China. Since 2004, the country's market cap has grown an incredible 1,242%.

In just 13 years, China's market cap has surpassed every country in Europe. Today, China's stock markets are worth more than those of France, Germany, and Switzerland – combined. European markets are losing their influence.

This tremendous growth in market cap also means that China's markets now account for a much larger share of the world's total...

China to connect regions with 400kph bullet trains by 2020

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Beijing is developing a new generation of trains capable of reaching 400 kilometers per hour, China Daily reported. The high-speed trains will be part of the so-called Belt and Road Initiative to boost economic ties with other countries.

“We will apply new materials in the research and production of the future high-speed trains, such as carbon fiber and aluminum alloy, which will help to reduce weight and enhance energy efficiency,” said Qiao Feng, a senior engineer at the CRRC Changchun Railway Vehicles, a subsidiary of China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation.

He added the new trains would be able to reduce energy consumption per passenger by ten percent. They are expected to promote regional connectivity and create new businesses for China and overseas economies.

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China has the world’s largest high-speed rail network with more than 20,000 kilometers and expects to more than double that to 45,000 km by 2030.

According to the Chinese National Railway Administration, the country has passenger train services running at operational speeds of 200 – 250 km/h and has the technology to produce trains with a top speed of 350 km/h.

It is actively developing high-speed train technology and last year set a new speed record with a train reaching 840 km/h on a test run. Two trains, known as Golden Phoenix and Dolphin Blue zipped past each other with only 1.6 meters of space between them.

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http://www.railwaygazette.com/news/singl...ramme.html
CHINA: The two prototype China Standard high speed EMUs being tested by China Railway Corp have successfully completed more that 600 000 km of trial running, under a programme that began in June 2015.

The 350 km/h China Standard EMUs have been developed using purely domestic technology, unlike the 23 types of high speed train currently operating in China which draw on international designs. Three trainsets were built by different manufacturers using standardised traction equipment, bogies and other key components, of which two were used for the testing programme. One, code-named Blue Dolphin, was built by CRRC Qingdao Sifang, while the Golden Phoenix was developed by CRRC Changchun Railway Vehicles and the third by CRRC Tangshan.

Chinese scientists propose 2,000km/h submarine maglev

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Chinese scientists have proposed the building of an undersea maglev system that would run at a speed of up to 2,000 km/h, more than twice as fast as the much-discussed Hyperloop proposed by Elon Musk.

The concept is similar to Hyperloop, being essentially a rail gun in a vacuum tube. The novelty is that the tunnel would float in water, which would bear 90% of its weight.

‘Robot’ technology employed to ease China’s notorious traffic jams

In some parts of China drones are being used to do intelligent agriculture.

Chinese drones rule the skies

Chinese company implants 3-D printed blood vessels into monkeys

China's space missions in 2016 tied to military ambitions

Highly informative China Watch: Technology at the Telegraph.