Local innovation lacking

Although China's research and development (R&D) spending has risen dramatically in recent years, the country still suffers from a lack of local innovation, an official from the Chinese Science and Technology Ministry said recently. At a conference in The Hague late last month, Zhang Weixing, deputy director general of the ministry's Torch Hi-Tech Industrial Development Center, said China is working to integrate science and technology with industry to stimulate further development. China's R&D expenditures at $37.7 billion in 2006, was the fifth-largest in the world after the United States, Japan, Germany and France. Zhang said the value of China's R&D had more than doubled in the past decade to 1.4 percent of its GDP in 2006, when invention patent applications totaled 210,000, the fourth-largest in the world.

But more than 40 percent of these applications came from foreign companies, he said.

China's overall capacity for sustainable innovation is still low and the intensity of R&D in the hi-tech industry is much lower than that of developed countries, he said, as China lacks core technologies and is highly dependent on foreign input.

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