China awarded its top science prize to two researchers in their eighties in Beijing on July 8. President Xi Jinping then told the roughly 4,300 scientists and officials in the room that record research spending has not yet delivered the technology self-reliance he wants by 2035.
The numbers behind that goal are large by any measure. Chinese research spending has topped the United States on one international comparison, its patent count leads the world, and its scientists returned the first rock samples from the moon’s far side in 2024. The one gap Xi’s own five-year plan singles out for urgent work, advanced computer chips, has not closed anywhere near as fast.
Two Veteran Scientists Share China’s Top Prize
Xi presided over a combined meeting that folded together the national science and technology award conference, the general assemblies of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE), and the 11th national congress of the China Association for Science and Technology. The State Preeminent Science and Technology Award for 2025 went to Chen Liquan, 86, a physicist at the CAS Institute of Physics recognized for lithium battery research, and Ben De, 88, a radar specialist at the China Electronics Technology Group Corporation.
Both men are CAE academicians despite working in unrelated fields, a reminder that China’s highest science honor is not tied to any single discipline. The wider ceremony recognized 258 projects and 11 individual experts across three tiers, plus a separate award for international collaborators:
- State Natural Science Award – 51 projects
- State Technological Invention Award – 58 projects
- State Scientific and Technological Progress Award – 149 projects
- China International Science and Technology Cooperation Award – 9 foreign scientists
The foreign honorees make a point Chinese officials repeat often: the self-reliance drive is not meant to wall the country off from outside collaboration, even as it works to reduce dependence on any single foreign supplier.
A Speech Timed to the Plan’s First Year
The meeting fell in the opening year of the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030), the national blueprint that follows the 14th plan’s 2021 to 2025 run. China’s economy grew past 140 trillion yuan (about $20.6 trillion) during that prior stretch, and officials have credited sci-tech investment as a central driver of the expansion. Xi framed the new plan period in blunt terms.
We must seize the historic opportunity, rise to the challenges of the times, accelerate efforts to achieve high-level self-reliance and strength in science and technology, and make steady progress toward the 2035 goal of becoming a leading country in science and technology.
Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, made the remarks at the Beijing meeting, according to the official readout of the gathering. He laid out six priority tasks for the period, among them sharpening the country’s capacity for systematic breakthroughs, fusing sci-tech innovation with industrial innovation, and cultivating young researchers.
That 2035 ambition folds into a wider campaign that already spans record-deep boreholes and lunar sample returns, projects state media has repeatedly held up as proof the strategy is working. Beijing has cast the plan’s ambitions in similarly stark terms elsewhere, with state guidance promising an innovation push extending through 2030 built on record research budgets.
The Evidence Xi Pointed To
Officials did not leave the achievements to abstraction. Chang’e-6 completed the first sample return from the moon’s far side in 2024, delivering material now studied at a CAS laboratory in Beijing. Domestically developed drugs have moved from copying existing treatments to originating first-in-class therapies, and domestically bred crop varieties now cover more than 95% of the country’s farmland.
Emerging industries such as integrated circuits, biomedicine and intelligent robotics have expanded fast enough to be singled out by name, alongside frontier fields including hydrogen energy, nuclear fusion, brain-computer interfaces and sixth-generation mobile networks. Officials describe China as shifting from a participant in global science to a pioneer setting the pace.
The World’s Biggest R&D Budget
China’s own statistics bureau puts 2025 research and development spending at 3.93 trillion yuan, about $549.7 billion at market exchange rates, up 61% from 2.44 trillion yuan in 2020. Research intensity, the share of GDP spent on R&D, climbed from 2.36% to 2.80% over the same five years.
| Metric | 2020 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| R&D spending | 2.44 trillion yuan | 3.93 trillion yuan (about $549.7 billion) |
| R&D intensity (share of GDP) | 2.36% | 2.80% |
| Full-time R&D personnel | 5.24 million person-years | 7.95 million person-years |
Measured by purchasing power rather than market exchange rates, World Bank figures show China’s research intensity climbing above the OECD average over the same stretch. China’s statistics agency separately confirmed spending had already crossed 3.6 trillion yuan in 2024, part of the run that let China’s purchasing-power total edge past United States research spending, $1.03 trillion against $1.01 trillion, for the first time that year.
Patents follow the same trajectory. China became the first country to hold more than 5 million domestic valid invention patents by the end of 2025 and has led the world in international patent filings under the Patent Cooperation Treaty for six straight years. The 15th Five-Year Plan wants that pace to keep accelerating, targeting more than 7% annual growth in nationwide R&D spending through 2030.
Why Hasn’t Self-Reliance Reached the Chip Industry?
Because the equipment gap sits upstream of anything Beijing’s money can buy directly. Huawei and SMIC, China’s leading chipmakers, still cannot obtain extreme ultraviolet lithography machines from ASML, the Dutch company that holds a near monopoly on tools needed to etch the most advanced chips, leaving China years behind at the leading edge even as its broader research output surges.
- State media’s framing: record patent filings and Made in China 2025’s eventual production gains are cited as evidence the self-reliance strategy is delivering results.
- Semiconductor analysts (CSIS): China’s leading-edge node capability remains years behind rivals, since export controls keep the most advanced lithography tools out of reach.
- Independent researchers (FPRI, IGCC): no country, the United States included, has ever built a fully self-sufficient chip supply chain, making China’s shortfall real but not exceptional.
Researchers at the Center for Strategic and International Studies have tracked Beijing’s shifting chip strategy since export controls tightened, and keep landing on the same bottleneck: without direct access to extreme ultraviolet lithography, reproducing it from scratch is not something any single national program has managed.
That shortfall sits oddly next to a broader tally of Chinese strength. A tracker of 64 critical technologies built by Australian researchers found China leading in the large majority, part of a wider pattern of Chinese dominance across critical technology fields that makes the chip gap stand out precisely because it is the exception.
The Targets Attached to 2030
The 15th Five-Year Plan treats artificial intelligence as the organizing idea for industrial policy rather than one sector among many. Recommendations tied to the plan call for a top-level AI policy framework covering both new models and the advanced computing chips that train them, alongside a target of more than 22 high-value invention patents per 10,000 people by 2030, up from a 12-per-10,000 goal under the previous plan.
Nature’s science-policy reporting frames the shift as a sharper, more security-driven research agenda than the one it replaces, with semiconductors and basic research named as top concerns. The chip gap is the one line item Beijing has not been able to check off on schedule, and it is now the test the rest of the plan gets measured against before the 2035 deadline arrives.
Frequently Asked Questions
How large is China’s science and technology workforce?
China counted 7.95 million full-time equivalent research personnel in 2025, up from 5.24 million in 2020, and has held the world’s largest research workforce for 13 consecutive years, according to national statistics released this year. That scale is one reason Beijing believes it can chase self-reliance across dozens of technology fields at once rather than picking a handful of priorities.
Has China really overtaken the United States in research spending?
Only under one method of counting. The OECD comparison that put China ahead in 2024 measures spending at purchasing power parity, which adjusts for the fact that a research dollar buys more inside China than in the United States. Strip that adjustment out and use market exchange rates instead and the ranking looks different, which is why both sides keep citing different totals to make opposite points.
Why is the semiconductor industry still China’s weak spot?
Beijing’s 2015 Made in China 2025 plan aimed for 40% domestic chip production by 2020, a target it did not actually reach until 2022, two years behind schedule. The follow-on goal of 70% domestic production by 2025 has no confirmed public result yet, and the leading-edge lithography gap behind both targets has not closed.
What is Chang’e-6 and where are its lunar samples now?
Chang’e-6 landed on the moon’s far side and returned to Earth in 2024 carrying the first samples ever collected from that hemisphere. Researchers now study the material at the lunar sample laboratory inside the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.
What does China mean by ‘AI+’ in its new plan?
‘AI+’ is the shorthand Chinese planners use for embedding artificial intelligence across existing industries rather than treating it as a standalone sector. Guidance tied to the 15th Five-Year Plan calls for capitalizing on data resources, industrial systems and real-world application scenarios to deepen ‘AI plus’ development across manufacturing, agriculture and services.
