China yesterday said that it needs to build its own core technology because it cannot rely on buying it from elsewhere, as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) laid out plans for greater economic self-sufficiency.
Outlining details of its new five-year economic plan that elevates self-reliance in technology and innovation, senior party officials said that the nation would accelerate development of the kind of technology needed to spur the next stage of economic development.
Key to that are bold measures to cut reliance on foreign know-how, although that does not mean that China would cut itself off from the world.
Photo: AP
“To achieve technological advancement, China increasingly needs the world, and the world increasingly needs China,” Chinese Minister of Science and Technology Wang Zhigang (王志剛) told a briefing in Beijing.
The nation planned to “improve our ability to make innovations independently and do our own things well, because we cannot ask for or buy the core technologies from elsewhere,” he said.
At the same time, “we hope to learn from advanced international experience, and will share more Chinese technological outcomes with the world,” he said.
Tech stocks were some of yesterday’s best-performers. Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (中芯國際), the country’s largest chipmaker, surged as much as 8 percent in Hong Kong in its biggest intraday gain in about two weeks. On mainland bourses, Gigadevice Semiconductor Beijing Inc (兆億創新) climbed its 10 percent limit, becoming the biggest gainer on the CSI 300 index as of early afternoon.
Beijing’s drive for tech self-sufficiency is gaining urgency as the US seeks to contain the rise of its geopolitical rival. The US has pressured allies to shun equipment from Huawei Technologies Co (華為), barred dozens of China’s largest tech companies from buying US parts, and even slapped bans on ByteDance Ltd’s (字節跳動) TikTok and Tencent Holdings Ltd’s (騰訊) WeChat.
However, officials talked down prospects of a decoupling between the world’s two largest economies and said that China’s door would remain open for foreign competition.
“Complete decoupling is not realistic, and it is not good for China, the United States and the whole world,” a CCP Central Committee official Han Wenxiu (韓文秀) said at the briefing. “The truth is very few would really want to see the two countries decouple. Most would want our two countries to cooperate and work together.”
The Central Committee released initial details of the five-year plan on Thursday, stressing the need for sustainable growth and also pledging to develop a robust domestic market.
Officials did not specify the pace of growth they would seek over the period, but said that the National Development and Reform Commission would work on guidelines to be submitted to the parliament in March.
“Based on the general direction and strategy determined in the proposal, we will put forward corresponding numeric targets and specific indicators after careful estimate and calculation, so as to promote the reasonable economic growth and the steady improvement of its quality,” Chinese National Development and Reform Commission vice chairman Ning Jizhe (寧吉?) said at the briefing.
Wang said that it was a strategic choice to elevate the role of innovation and make technological self-reliance a strategic pillar of national development in the plan.
Han separately said that there are “three priorities of paramount importance. They are: reform, opening up and innovation.”
Central to that endeavor is self-reliance in chips, the building blocks for innovations from artificial intelligence to fifth-generation networking and autonomous vehicles.
The government intends to confer the same priority on semiconductor development that it accorded to building its atomic capability, people with knowledge of the matter have said.
That is said to include broad support for so-called third-generation semiconductors — a nascent field in which no nation yet claims dominance — for the period through 2025.
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