Innovation-driven development the way to take country forward

The China Innovation Index, a barometer of the country's innovation capability, climbed 5.9 percent compared to the year before to hit 155.7 in 2022, as indicated by a recent report issued by the National Bureau of Statistics.

Encompassing four subindices that measure the innovation environment, inputs, outputs and effects, the index has grown at an average annual rate of 6.5 percent since 2015, the base year.

Viewing innovation as an important development force, China's top authorities have made self-reliance in science and technology a top priority of national development in the past decade.

As a result, China has made significant progress in manned spaceflight, lunar and Mars exploration, deep-sea exploration, supercomputers, satellite navigation, quantum information, nuclear power technology, new energy technology, large aircraft manufacturing, and biomedicine.

The total number of China's research and development personnel has always ranked first in the world in the past decade, and its R&D expenditure increased from 1 trillion yuan ($140 billion) to 2.8 trillion yuan, ranking second in the world. The Global Innovation Index 2022 released by the World Intellectual Property Organization shows that China's innovation index has been steadily improving for 10 consecutive years, ranking 11th in the world, the top among 36 upper-middle income economies.

China's top leadership repeatedly stresses that to comprehensively shape new development advantages, the country should put innovation in the core position of overall development and use innovation to drive economic transformation and development. Under such a guideline, a number of emerging industries of strategic importance have been developed and technological breakthroughs, such as in high-performance equipment, intelligent robots, and laser manufacturing, have been made, effectively promoting the upgrading of China's manufacturing. Emerging frontier technologies have also accelerated the application of supercomputing, big data and blockchain and promoted artificial intelligence and the digital economy to flourish.

What is particularly striking is that the continuous development of the emerging economy represented by the new industries, new formats and new models has become an important force driving China's economic transformation and upgrading and enhancing its economic vitality.

Innovation will play a decisive role in whether China can fully build itself into a modern socialist country and achieve its second centenary goal. The country must accelerate the implementation of the innovation-driven development strategy and pool available resources and forces to carry out scientific and technological research, to win the uphill battle in its efforts to achieve breakthroughs in key and core technologies.