Minister of Science and Technology, Xu Guanhua, says China must take independent innovation as its basis for scientific and technological progress. In his article published in the overseas edition of the People's Daily, Xu illustrated the reasons for his statement by claiming that independent innovation capacity decides the competitiveness of a country. Since China's reform and opening up 20 years ago, she has introduced a lot of foreign technologies either through import or by attracting foreign investment into the Chinese market. This has played an important role in promoting technological renovation and restructuring of Chinese industries. However, with the development of the national economy, some new conflicts have emerged. With the increasing cost of labor, China is losing her traditional advantage in labor cost making it more and more difficult for enterprises to make a profit through this. Meanwhile, due to the lack of her own core technology, she has had to pay 20% of profit from mobile phones, 30% from computers and 20-40% from digital-controlled machinery to foreign patent holders. Due to low profits it is also hard to increase the salary of workers making it hard to realize the strategic goals of expanding domestic demand and service industry.

In addition, some industries have been somewhat dependent on foreign technologies. These can range from airplanes, car and other equipment manufacturing industries to clothing, daily necessities and cosmetics enterprises. With the WTO rules, intellectual property rights, technology trade tariffs and anti-dumping wave have become severe hurdles for Chinese enterprises to participate in international competition.

Xu Guanhua says that to import technology does not mean to import innovation capability. Under certain conditions, technology can be imported, but the capability of independent innovation is hard to import. It must be innate and can only be acquired through research and development. China needs to establish its own development platform and raise its own technological development team to realize the independent innovation practice.

Minister Xu stressed that in some strategic technology fields, national will is not out of date. China should improve its core technology competitiveness in the new development period.

He says that real core technology cannot be bought since western countries have never loosened their control in export of core technologies to China. China can only do more research and development itself on the basis of utilizing global resources and gradually improve China's core technology competitiveness.

Minister Xu says independent innovation does not mean that China should research and develop inside a closed door. It is based on introduced technology that can facilitate further research and develop new technologies. China has not done very well in absorbing the imported technology. Taking a look at Japan after the Second World War and South Korea in the 1990s, it can be seen that ratio of investment between introduction of technology, and further research and development, was 1 to 5 or 1 to 8, which lead to a rapid improvement in the innovation capability of both countries. However in China in 2004, the investment ratio between introduction of foreign technology and independent research and development was only 1 to 0.15. As a developing country, China certainly needs to introduce advanced western technology, but one must make good use of it and on that basis, conduct its own research and development. "Otherwise, it will always face the situation where technology is quickly out of date having only just been imported. "China's independent innovation capability will still lag behind," according to minister Xu.

By People's Daily Online