Editor’s notice: China has risen to tenth within the global innovation rating for 2025, in response to the Global Innovation Index 2025 report launched by the World Intellectual Property Organization in September. People’s Daily Overseas Edition spoke to Xiao Bin, a researcher on the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and Yao Xu, an affiliate researcher on the Fudan Development Institute, about China’s strides in innovation. Below are excerpts from the interviews. The views do not essentially symbolize these of China Daily.
In phrases of innovation output, China has remained in pole place for the variety of patent functions for a few years. Marked achievements have been made in scientific and technological transformation. China’s industrial restructuring and upgrading have yielded tangible outcomes, and it’s steadily gaining benefits in global industrial competitiveness and new drivers of development have gotten stronger.
Artificial intelligence has considerably enhanced the effectivity of R&D processes, whereas the continual enchancment of the nation’s computing and knowledge infrastructure has led enterprises to include AI into their core strategic agendas. This has had a spillover impact in coverage steering, patent deployment, educational analysis and product software, resulting in a quantitative improve in addition to a qualitative enchancment in China’s innovation capability.
China promotes a steady setting for worldwide innovation cooperation and enhanced worldwide people-to-people exchanges to encourage extra inclusive and equitable innovation via the alternate of concepts.
Moreover, China helps the institution of broadly accepted worldwide guidelines and requirements in areas similar to AI and our on-line world, guaranteeing that innovation achievements serve the widespread pursuits of humanity and align with global requirements. Through these efforts, China contributes its knowledge and options to constructing an open, inclusive and mutually useful global innovation and know-how governance system.
The key to enhancing nationwide innovation capability lies in breaking down disciplinary boundaries and fostering deep integration and collaboration among the many pure sciences, engineering and social sciences. Technological innovation ought to be deeply rooted in moral and cultural contexts.
Drawing on worldwide expertise, China ought to combine engineering observe with humanistic care to construct a multidimensional innovation ecosystem that mixes technological drive with worth orientation. It can also be important to deepen institutional reforms in greater training and promote collaboration between universities and enterprises to strengthen the alignment between expertise cultivation and industrial demand. These efforts will present stable expertise and institutional foundations for attaining self-reliance in science and know-how.
To additional improve its innovation capability, China ought to deal with three key areas. First, strengthen the innovation ecosystem by systematically planning AI computing energy, knowledge assets and high-quality open-source programs, and by advancing demand-driven initiatives and business consortiums to bridge the “last mile” between analysis and market software. Second, reinforce the inspiration of innovation by sustaining sustained funding in primary analysis and offering long-term, steady assist to younger scientific and technological expertise. And third, strengthen innovation safety and open cooperation by establishing a unified framework for AI know-how analysis, alignment and security governance, and by selling worldwide pilot packages and commonplace cooperation to actively advance the global presence of China’s AI ecosystem.