The scientific leap forward – the WTO column

 

(coming week at Chinabiz)

 

Discovering a new dead angle in the way I look at China is an almost ongoing activity in this vast and fast-changing economy. But last week I stumbled, almost by accident, on a major one when I joined a Dutch academic delegation that was on a visit in Shanghai.

We toured the Zhangjiang Hitech park as I have toured many “successful” hi-tech zones in China before. Since I discovered that assembling washing machines and refrigerators was included in the Chinese definition of hi-tech, I have decided that – unless it was proven otherwise – ‘hi-tech’ zone was just a nice label, that did not mean that much.

Fortunately, we visited also some companies– apart from the obligatory speeches with PowerPoint presentations of the leading officials in the zone. Those visits and speeches of top-managers of those companies convinced me that the world might see yet another giant leap forward China is going to make – in science.

A few facts I did not know. China is now the third largest spender on scientific research in the world and as a percentage of its GDP China’s expenditure on scientific research went up from a poor 0.6 percent ten years ago to an impressive 1.6 percent now, making it the number three in the world in the percentage of its GDP.

That is a fairly recent development, as the many buildings under construction in the Zhangjiang Hitech zones showed. Also in influx of larger numbers of R&D centers of multinationals is fairly new.

The ministry of science and technology has developed a set of incubator programs for hi-tech zones in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen that have just taken off, offering government funding and free facilities to both domestic and foreign research projects.

The Dutch delegation found out that the ministry is seriously thinking of setting up its first scientific park outside China, in the Netherlands, to encourage scientific exchange in Europe.

 

Much of the ongoing scientific research in China is not available for the outside world, since 85 percent is only published in Chinese, in one of the few thousand academic magazines of this country nobody is able to monitor. “That is not always top-notch research,” said a researcher of a foreign chemical company in Shanghai. “But some is and some of it has already been very useful for our company.” Among the registered patents in China the company discovered products, it did not know it existed.

This company only monitored the research on food additives, but similar material might a useful in almost any industry.

 

Foreign researchers look with envy at what China might be able to achieve in the coming years. “For a project we might be able to get 1.5 researcher,” says one university professor from Holland. “The Chinese can put one hundred on it.”

 

All of the Chinese winners of the Nobel prize were working abroad when they got the prestigious prize. That might change very soon.

 

Fons Tuinstra