context: The 15th 5-year plan (2026–30) lists promoting key industries as its top priority, with particular emphasis on helping them 'resolve structural contradictions and accelerate their upgrade to the mid-to-high end'. Feeding that agenda requires shifting sci-tech effort away from academic reputation-driven research toward demand-driven work with clear paths to monetisation. Tighter central control and integration across research bodies also tracks the broader data consolidation trend, positioning research outputs to be staged and deployed in closer alignment with industrial priorities.
The PRC must sharpen division of labour between national labs, research institutes, universities and leading firms in order to close coordination gaps that weaken its systematic innovation capacity, argues Wan Jinbo 万劲波 Chinese Academy of Sciences Institutes of Science and Development researcher in Economic Daily. Wan argues that global scitech competition is shifting ‘from competition in single technologies and institutions to competition in systematic innovation capabilities’ and industrial competition ‘from competition in single products and enterprises to competition in industrial chain coordination and ecosystem dominance’.
Wan diagnoses two core problems within this frame
- functions and responsibilities are too broad
- mandates are too broad
- national labs, national key labs and provincial labs have too much functional overlap
- firm R&D intensity lags as 525 PRC firms averaged 4.0 percent in 2024 against 8.4 percent for 674 US firms
- mechanisms for multi-entity coordination and full-chain integration are lacking
- responsible entities at each layer for any given vertical are not linked, resulting in inefficiencies
- some entities emphasise competition scientific breakthroughs and output quantity over demand or problem orientation
Wan proposes three fixes
- clarify functional positioning
- national labs and research institutes: strategy-oriented systematic basic research
- research universities: frontier-oriented exploratory basic research
- leading tech firms: market-oriented applied basic research
- improve coordinated deployment of strategic tasks
- establish a value-creation project selection mechanism with rolling task lists
- align projects, talent, funding, platforms and bases across sci-tech plans
- diversify resource allocation over longer cycles
- share central-local investment in major tasks, pushing local spend toward long-cycle basic and applied research
- use national VC guidance fund plus Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta and Greater Bay Area regional funds to pull in SOE, financial and private capital
- strengthen insurance and capital market channels for 'patient capital' supporting innovation