Thanks to its tireless focus on research and development (R&D), China has become a global laboratory, attracting specialists from leading countries to get acquainted with its achievements, the Financial Times (FT) reports, citing experts.
According to Markus Hafkemeier, chief technology officer of Volkswagen Group, the German company took about 18 months to develop, test and commercially implement one of its autonomous vehicle technologies in China. This achievement was made possible thanks to a team of 700 people, mostly Chinese software engineers.
Achieving something similar in Germany would have taken, according to his estimates, up to four and a half years, during which time “ideas would have been bogged down in endless internal disputes and commercial negotiations with suppliers“. “In the last 10 years, this country has gone from third to fifth gear and is competing at full speed”,” noted Hafkemeier. The news constantly repeats that “the Chinese are flooding the European market with cheap cars”. "Come to China and see for yourself these 'cheap cars': they are full of technology and the quality is simply excellent," the expert says.
According to Sonja Ederstall, head of R&D for China at Swedish truck manufacturer Scania, the conditions for innovation in China are "completely different" from those in the West. The company has tried to introduce autonomous driving in Sweden, the US and other countries. However, it has only been successful in China. "Within a year, they were able to integrate the software into the vehicle and make it fully operational in this mode," she noted.
Many German engineers come to the company's R&D center in Hefei (Anhui province) to learn everything they can from their Chinese colleagues. "China's R&D capabilities allow it to compete with the West and perhaps even surpass it," the publication said. China's success will allow it to dominate future global energy and transportation supply chains.
China's government spending on R&D has surpassed that of the United States since 2015. The number of corporate research institutes has nearly tripled, exceeding 150,000, and the number of corporate R&D personnel has nearly doubled, reaching 5 million. Lizzie Li, a research fellow at the China Analysis Center of the Asia Society Policy Institute, stressed that China's R&D boom is focused on application areas related to industrial transformation. These include advanced materials, fifth-generation (5G) communications, batteries, energy equipment and other so-called enabling technologies that serve strategic purposes.