If there is one thing that China’s President Xi Jinping really wants then it is independence from the West. When President Trump imposed restrictions on telecoms giant Huawei purchasing U.S. tech in 2019, the move confirmed long festering anxieties among Chinese Communist Party leaders that it was too reliant on American, and more broadly, western high-tech imports. For decades, CCP leaders had highlighted the need to be “self-reliant” in critical technologies like microchips.
To accomplish that, every nook and cranny of China’s innovation system is being retooled. This includes an aggressive industrial policy, enormous amounts of money being funneled through government-guided investment funds, and boosting startups. It also involves coordinating university-based research.
In 2020, President Xi Jinping made a special appeal to scientists to work to develop technologies that made the country vulnerable to export controls, such as those issued by Washingon on high-end semiconductors in 2022. To marshall the innovative energy of the higher education sector, China’s Ministry of Education, which directly oversees 65 of the country’s most-prestigious research universities, jumped into the fray. In a 2023 essay for China Higher Education, Lei Chaozi, the director of the education ministry’s Department of Science, Technology, and Information Technology explained what was holding Chinese science back and keeping China’s self-reliance stuck.
Chinese scientists needed to find a way to thread a needle between engaging in “free [scientific] exploration” while keeping in mind the needs of the nation, Lei wrote, echoing a point President Xi had made in a speech a few months earlier. This included a particular need of the party to alleviate supply chain problems by developing so-called “chokepoint technologies.”
To address this issue, the education ministry rolled out a tailor-made R&D program. In a recently published study I illuminate the role of 30 new integrated research platforms to address chokepoints. Launched in 2019 and based at over two dozen universities in China, they function as cross-disciplinary initiatives that ideally work in teams, each focused on a discrete set of problems.
Lei also had something to say about teamwork, namely that Chinese innovation sorely lacked it and that any research group claiming to be a “team” was more likely behaving like “straddlers and disbanded soldiers.” Research teams needed to become “combat ready,” he said. In so doing, the ministry hoped that Chinese universities would succeed in securing Chinese supply chains and addressing their vulnerabilities to western sanctioning policies.
Since then, a slow trickle of announcements and publications suggests that Chinese universities are making progress. One such platform is the Shandong University Integrated Research Platform for New Generation Semiconductor Materials. It has half a dozen teams including one focused on silicon carbide (SiC), a semiconductor material with special electrical properties that make it useful for applications in industries expected to generate enormous demand — electric vehicles and batteries.
[Chinese researchers] are also being steered through funding and organizational concepts to focus on a specific set of technical problems aimed at challenging foreign players.
Shandong University has been the center of SiC-related research in China for decades. Knowing very well that it is home to such excellence, the Shandong provincial government released a five-year plan in 2021 for the development of third generation semiconductor materials, with silicon carbide semiconductors at the very top. The plan laments the dominance of American companies such as Cree and Dow Corning and European players such as Infineon and ABB in SiC-based technologies. Shandong province with its universities, platforms, and teams could help catch up.
However, China’s self-reliance drive goes beyond platforms and teams. A 2022 set of policy opinions issued by the Ministry of Education lists a whole host of funding programs, labs, centers, and other initiatives, and frames them as part of China’s technological self-sufficiency drive. In so doing, the ministry couched initiatives primarily aimed at academic excellence, such as the double first-class university construction plan — a 2015 plan with the goal of turning China’s universities into world-class institutions — in terms of self-reliance, alongside R&D programs, such as integrated research platforms, that are clearly aimed at reducing import vulnerabilities.
The success of this push is hard to measure and easily overestimated if all one considers are the numbers. Last year, the PRC was the world’s number one patent filer despite Beijing being aware that patents don’t necessarily translate into products. A recent study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research revealed that China’s scientific citation practices revealed a significant home bias, artificially bloating its standing in global citation rankings.
Numbers can clearly be deceiving. If one centers self-reliance as a goal of innovation then their relevance diminishes even further. It simply does not matter how many papers you have published or patents you file: if you can’t figure out how to make a specific production process work then you will not reach your goal.
If universities or any other R&D organization for that matter in China are succeeding in pushing for greater self-reliance then we ought to see a proliferation of public announcements, awards, university-corporate partnerships, or specific achievements described in journal publications. Even that is not a sure-fire way of measuring success if China’s government determines that secrecy is better than bragging.
One such public announcement came last fall, when Shandong University received the “outstanding product award” from the China Hi-Tech Fair for developing a 8-inch silicon carbide substrate preparation process. The award recognizes a significant achievement. The industry is just now transitioning from the older 6-inch silicon carbide wafers to the 8-inch format and various players are racing to make it first and better. Shandong University’s platform helped China pull ahead: Analysts now expect China to dominate the SiC market in 2024.
This is on top of a string of high-profile announcements. For example, Chinese and Swiss scientists developed a new approach to producing optical chips. Chinese researchers have also reportedly made a component needed to assemble quantum computers. Last year, the announcement of Huawei’s Mate 60, a phone with a domestic chip presumably in contravention of U.S. export controls, was timed to coincide with Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo’s visit to China. This makes it clear that such announcements are political signals as much as technical achievements.
The roll-out of integrated research platforms shows that Chinese researchers are not just getting signals from China’s party top brass but are also being steered through funding and organizational concepts to focus on a specific set of technical problems aimed at challenging foreign players. Successes at Shandong University and elsewhere suggest that this is yielding results.
Michael Laha is a researcher based in Berlin. He is a member of the 2021-22 cohort of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation German Chancellor Fellowship. During his fellowship he was based at MERICS where he conducted research on China’s innovation system. Previously, he worked at the Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations where he coordinated high level working groups on a variety of policy issues related to China. Laha holds a M.A. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University and B.S. in Chemistry from Tufts University.
