"Research and development (R&D) funding of China reached 3.6 trillion yuan ($496 billion) in 2024, with an 8.3% increase year-on-year, the South China Morning Post reported on Friday.
Investments in basic research increased by 10.5% from 2023 to 249.7 billion yuan ($34.46 billion) in 2024, or 6.91% of the total R&D spending."
Private companies in China also do a lot of basic research, here is a quote from the Huawei founder:
---
Q: How do you view basic research?
A: When our country possesses certain economic strength, we should emphasize theory, especially basic research. Basic research doesn't just take 5-10 years—it generally takes 10, 20 years or longer. Without basic research, you plant no roots. And without roots, even trees with lush leaves fall at the first wind. Buying foreign products is expensive because their prices include their investment in basic research. So whether China engages in basic research or not, we still have to pay—the question is whether we choose to pay our own people to do this basic research.
We spend roughly 180RMB billion a year on R&D; about 60 billion goes to basic research with no KPIs, while around 120 billion is product‑oriented and is assessed.
Certainly but US policy changes every 4 years and China has a gigantic one child policy issue which just can't be changed. I think it will with China somewhat similar how it was back in the day with the udssr where economists were predicting its economy would outgrow the economy of the USA by 1994 and then 1991 or so it died. Could imagine something similar might be awaiting china
Despite China's fertility rate plummeting to 1.09, the country has a demographic cushion that will carry it through mid-century without serious economic consequences. China's "Alpha" generation (currently ages 6-16) is a large demographic echo of its massive Baby Boom, and will stabilize the workforce through the 2020s and keep the dependency ratio favorable until at least 2030. China's dependency ratio won't surpass America's until the mid-2040s. Two straightforward policy levers -- raising the retirement age from 50-60 to 65 and dramatically increasing college enrollment (already jumped from 26.5% to 60.2% since 2010) -- will offset all effects of gradual aging over the next 25 years. Real demographic strain won't materialize until post-2050 when the large Millennial generation retires without a comparable replacement cohort. The idea that demographics will erode China's competitive position in the next two decades is overblown.
If you want to talk demographics, there are a lot of places that are way worse off than China. Obviously there are the usual suspects, S.Korea and Japan, but also Germany, Italy, and Spain. (Europe's largest economies, France aside... and I'm not so sure about France!) All of them have demographic situations that are far worse than China's, unless you genuinely subscribe to the notion that they can somehow be fixed via mass immigration from third-world countries.
>unless you genuinely subscribe to the notion that they can somehow be fixed via mass immigration from third-world countries.
There are a lot of people who do subscribe to that, mainly people who are on the left side of the political spectrum. Heck, the entire Biden administration believed that.
China no longer has a one-child policy and is now actively focusing policies and incentives on increasing childbirth. Although it’s not going to yield immediate results, the PRC operates on long time horizons and will probably succeed long-term in raising birth rates.
> the PRC operates on long time horizons and will probably succeed long-term in raising birth rates.
That would make them the first country to do so, I think. Others have tried and nothing has worked. But China will likely become rich before it gets old, so it may not matter.
lol, no. it will not even maintain its current extinction-tier TFR of 1.02, let alone maintain its current population.
like every other civilized people, the Chinese have largely realized that the game is rigged and the only winning move is not to play. the only way to "fix" the birth rate is to reject humanity (education, urbanization, technology) and retvrn to monke (subsistence farming, arranged marriages, illiteracy, superstition), which no civilized country will ever do. even the current TFR of 1.0-1.5 in the civilized world is largely inertial, and it will continue to fall. South Korean 0.7 will seem mind-bogglingly high a hundred years from now,
and 1CP was such a predictably disastrous idea that I seriously doubt the forward-thinking you seem to believe the CCP to posses.
The USSR didn't have the advantage of getting all the manufacturing supply chains in its soil funded by customers of the products it produced.
If there's one thing China learnt from the USSR was on how to be part of the globalisation push, and get as an advantageous of a position as they possibly could, in that the CCP has been very successful.
We will see if the shift to more authoritarianism from Xi will unwind that but China's future, with all its issues, is starting to look brighter than whatever the USA has become. Perhaps limiting the influence of the finance industry has a much better long-term prospect, it's very much one of the major flaws of the American system leading from the 1980s.
Unless you can retroactively birth children or import a shit ton of people (not practical in China, for all sorts of political and cultural reasons), the effects of a gigantic missing part of that age demographic can't be replaced. He's right, there's no way to fix that, other than wait long enough that those birth years would already be dead anyway.
Seems like they already do:
"Research and development (R&D) funding of China reached 3.6 trillion yuan ($496 billion) in 2024, with an 8.3% increase year-on-year, the South China Morning Post reported on Friday.
Investments in basic research increased by 10.5% from 2023 to 249.7 billion yuan ($34.46 billion) in 2024, or 6.91% of the total R&D spending."
Private companies in China also do a lot of basic research, here is a quote from the Huawei founder:
---
Q: How do you view basic research?
A: When our country possesses certain economic strength, we should emphasize theory, especially basic research. Basic research doesn't just take 5-10 years—it generally takes 10, 20 years or longer. Without basic research, you plant no roots. And without roots, even trees with lush leaves fall at the first wind. Buying foreign products is expensive because their prices include their investment in basic research. So whether China engages in basic research or not, we still have to pay—the question is whether we choose to pay our own people to do this basic research.
We spend roughly 180RMB billion a year on R&D; about 60 billion goes to basic research with no KPIs, while around 120 billion is product‑oriented and is assessed.
---
For basic research, which tends to be non-excludable/non-rival, this isn't even a bad thing! I hope India and other fast-growing nations join them!
Specially when their research is more hard science focused and spend very little on the soft sciences that tend to get way more funding in the US.
Great. Can I start blaming China for not solving all the worlds problems yet?
Not yet. This is the transitional period where the US is blamed and laughed at and then finally abandoned for China.
Don't you worry. If they do, we will just call them copycats. /s
Certainly but US policy changes every 4 years and China has a gigantic one child policy issue which just can't be changed. I think it will with China somewhat similar how it was back in the day with the udssr where economists were predicting its economy would outgrow the economy of the USA by 1994 and then 1991 or so it died. Could imagine something similar might be awaiting china
Despite China's fertility rate plummeting to 1.09, the country has a demographic cushion that will carry it through mid-century without serious economic consequences. China's "Alpha" generation (currently ages 6-16) is a large demographic echo of its massive Baby Boom, and will stabilize the workforce through the 2020s and keep the dependency ratio favorable until at least 2030. China's dependency ratio won't surpass America's until the mid-2040s. Two straightforward policy levers -- raising the retirement age from 50-60 to 65 and dramatically increasing college enrollment (already jumped from 26.5% to 60.2% since 2010) -- will offset all effects of gradual aging over the next 25 years. Real demographic strain won't materialize until post-2050 when the large Millennial generation retires without a comparable replacement cohort. The idea that demographics will erode China's competitive position in the next two decades is overblown.
If you want to talk demographics, there are a lot of places that are way worse off than China. Obviously there are the usual suspects, S.Korea and Japan, but also Germany, Italy, and Spain. (Europe's largest economies, France aside... and I'm not so sure about France!) All of them have demographic situations that are far worse than China's, unless you genuinely subscribe to the notion that they can somehow be fixed via mass immigration from third-world countries.
>unless you genuinely subscribe to the notion that they can somehow be fixed via mass immigration from third-world countries.
There are a lot of people who do subscribe to that, mainly people who are on the left side of the political spectrum. Heck, the entire Biden administration believed that.
China no longer has a one-child policy and is now actively focusing policies and incentives on increasing childbirth. Although it’s not going to yield immediate results, the PRC operates on long time horizons and will probably succeed long-term in raising birth rates.
> the PRC operates on long time horizons and will probably succeed long-term in raising birth rates.
That would make them the first country to do so, I think. Others have tried and nothing has worked. But China will likely become rich before it gets old, so it may not matter.
3 replies →
lol, no. it will not even maintain its current extinction-tier TFR of 1.02, let alone maintain its current population.
like every other civilized people, the Chinese have largely realized that the game is rigged and the only winning move is not to play. the only way to "fix" the birth rate is to reject humanity (education, urbanization, technology) and retvrn to monke (subsistence farming, arranged marriages, illiteracy, superstition), which no civilized country will ever do. even the current TFR of 1.0-1.5 in the civilized world is largely inertial, and it will continue to fall. South Korean 0.7 will seem mind-bogglingly high a hundred years from now,
and 1CP was such a predictably disastrous idea that I seriously doubt the forward-thinking you seem to believe the CCP to posses.
2 replies →
The USSR didn't have the advantage of getting all the manufacturing supply chains in its soil funded by customers of the products it produced.
If there's one thing China learnt from the USSR was on how to be part of the globalisation push, and get as an advantageous of a position as they possibly could, in that the CCP has been very successful.
We will see if the shift to more authoritarianism from Xi will unwind that but China's future, with all its issues, is starting to look brighter than whatever the USA has become. Perhaps limiting the influence of the finance industry has a much better long-term prospect, it's very much one of the major flaws of the American system leading from the 1980s.
>China has a gigantic one child policy issue which just can't be changed
...the one that was changed a decade ago?
Unless you can retroactively birth children or import a shit ton of people (not practical in China, for all sorts of political and cultural reasons), the effects of a gigantic missing part of that age demographic can't be replaced. He's right, there's no way to fix that, other than wait long enough that those birth years would already be dead anyway.
4 replies →
???
Gotta stop those people who don't look like us, right?