Chinese President Hu Jintao said building China into a nation of innovation should be adopted as its future-oriented major strategy.

Addressing a gathering of 3,000 to mark the country's second successful manned space flight that took place last month, Hu, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, said the strategy should focus on the central task of economic development and the frontiers of the world science and technology.

Meanwhile, China should formulate its strategic goals of independent innovation and step up the establishment of the State innovation mechanism, he said.

Describing independent innovative capability as the core of national competitiveness, Hu said a nation should underscore independent innovation provided it wants to succeed in development and benefiting the world.

China should do much more to advocate the spirit of independent innovation, improve its mechanism for such innovation and its capability for original innovation, and innovation through integration or learning from imported technology, said the president.

He said China should make great, painstaking efforts to develop high technology of strategic importance, especially the core technologies with intellectual property rights, and auxiliary technologies that will have great role in spurring on economic growth and underpin economic restructuring and transformation of growth patterns.

They will provide great support for the national economy to grow in a relatively fast and stable way for a long period of time and increase the country's international competitiveness and capability of risk control, he said.

He said China has made breakthroughs in a great number of core and key technologies thanks to the development of its space undertaking, which helped boost the country's basic science research, the growth of its information technology and industrial technology, and commercialization of its scientific achievements and formation of high-tech industrial groups.

Meanwhile, he said, China's manned space project helped cultivate and train a contingent of young and capable space professionals and experts.

The project involves thousands of organizations or companies and an contingent of more than 100,000 scientific workers.

Moreover, China's progress in space programmatically demonstrates the great role of science and technology as "the first productive force."

China will continue to follow its strategy of reinvigorating the country through science and technology and the strategy of making the country stronger by producing and bringing the initiative of professionals and experts into full play, he noted..

He said China should always take human resources as its most prime resources and make great efforts to nurture an army of highly capable scientific workers.

The competition of comprehensive national strength in the world is, in final analysis, a competition of their educated people, he said.

The president said China will constantly expand the ranks of its army of professionals and experts through faster development of its education and scientific undertaking, which is crucial for building up the country's scientific strength and national competitiveness.

Source: Xinhua