Boosting high-tech manufacturing key to high-quality development

Foreign investment to China's high-tech industries rose by 52.9 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of this year, Ministry of Commerce data show. The high-tech manufacturing sector's investment growth alone was 35.7 percent.

Thanks to policies, technologies and the market, China's high-tech manufacturing sector, represented by electronic information, aerospace and biomedicine, has maintained a steady and sound development trend despite headwinds from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The growth rate of production, investment and efficiency of China's high-tech manufacturing is far ahead of the average level of the whole manufacturing sector. The deep integration of big data, artificial intelligence and 5G with manufacturing has led to innovation in new products, new formats, new models and value chains. Through boosting innovation efficiency in high-tech industries and helping transform and upgrade the real economy, the internet has become the "strategic parent industry" of many emerging industries in the digital era.

However, high technical barriers and blocked supply chains because of the pandemic and rising prices of raw materials have pushed up production and operation costs of high-tech enterprises, posing a threat to the stability of the industry and supply chains. The country should double up on its efforts to ensure supply and stabilize prices and help enterprises reduce costs and increase efficiency.

In terms of China's high-tech manufacturing industry, there still exist constraints such as the lack of original technologies, unsmooth transformation of scientific and technological achievements, and limited room for the improvement of innovation capacity. The country should strengthen its internal driving force by activating market players, strengthening industrial foundation, shoring up technological weaknesses and building an innovation ecosystem.

China should try to attract all kinds of innovation for its enterprises, which too should take the initiative to embrace digital transformation. Also, a mechanism with government inputs playing a main role and nongovernmental input from multiple channels playing a supplementary role should be set up to strengthen support for basic frontier research and original innovation.

In the face of the problem of its high-tech manufacturing "being seized by the neck", the country should achieve breakthroughs in key core technologies, and promote the simultaneous technological progress of high-tech manufacturing and new infrastructure. It should strengthen intellectual property rights in key and core technologies, and deepen cooperation with the outside world through expanded opening-up, and promote integrated innovation among enterprises in the upstream, midstream and downstream of the industrial chain.