China\u2019s government has again made reducing reliance on imported digital technology a major goal.<\/p>\n
The renewed push came at the \u201cTwo Sessions\u201d, China\u2019s parliament that sits for just two weeks each year, and convened this week. One of the big moments at the Two Sessions is the delivery of the annual Government Work Report by the nation\u2019s Premier, China\u2019s second-ranking official.<\/p>\n
Premier Li Qiang delivered the report, and according to Chinese state media, emphasized<\/a> \u201cthe need to accelerate self-reliance in high-level science and technology.\u201d<\/p>\n Li set that goal against a background of what he described as \u201cunilateralism and protectionism escalating abruptly\u201d \u2013 almost certainly a reference to Trump administration trade policy \u2013 and after hailing China\u2019s recent advances in fields including \u201cindependent chip research and development.\u201d The premier also mentioned that China\u2019s output of integrated circuits rose by 10.9 percent last year and offered his view that China\u2019s AI companies \u201care leading the global open-source ecosystem.\u201d<\/p>\n This year, the Premier said China will also accelerate promotion of agentic AI, boost the open source AI ecosystem, and build the infrastructure to make that possible by working on \u201cultra-large-scale intelligent computing clusters and computing-powered collaboration, strengthening nationwide integrated computing power monitoring and scheduling, and supporting the development of public clouds.\u201d<\/p>\n Chinese government departments and agencies use similar language almost every week but dismissing the Premier\u2019s remarks as everyday rhetoric overlooks two factors.<\/p>\n One is that China\u2019s words about technologic progress have turned into real action: Think tank the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which tracks national research output, recently found that China leads the world<\/a> in 66 of the 74 critical technologies it tracks \u2013 and got there in under 20 years.<\/p>\n The other is that China sees US dominance of technology as a strategic imbalance it needs to correct.<\/p>\n Another think tank, the Asia Society, offered its take<\/a> on the Two Sessions by suggesting China\u2019s control of the supply chain for rare earths gives it leverage in trade talks, while the USA\u2019s control of semiconductors balances that out to create \u201cmutually assured supply chain disruption.\u201d<\/p>\n The two nations are therefore in a state of uneasy equilibrium that Beijing wants to change by improving domestic chip tech. \u201cChina\u2019s leadership is increasingly confident that it can break the United States\u2019 chokehold on advanced semiconductor technology over the next several years,\u201d The Asia Society\u2019s analysts wrote.<\/p>\n China is already taking steps to decouple from western tech, by steering<\/a> local buyers to local products<\/a>, and slow-walking approval<\/a> to import Nvidia GPUs.<\/p>\n Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has often said Washington must allow export of his company\u2019s products, to ensure US tech dominates the global AI industry. Beijing has heard that message loud and clear and Premier Li\u2019s words at the Two Sessions are the result.<\/p>\n But China needs its sci-tech sector to deliver results, too, because its enterprise technology players remain years behind their Western rivals in many fields. \u00ae<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"China\u2019s government has again made reducing reliance on imported digital technology a major goal. The renewed push came…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":463309,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-463308","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=463308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463308\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/463309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=463308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=463308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=463308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}