China’s government has again made reducing reliance on imported digital technology a major goal.
The renewed push came at the “Two Sessions”, China’s 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’s Premier, China’s second-ranking official.
Premier Li Qiang delivered the report, and according to Chinese state media, emphasized “the need to accelerate self-reliance in high-level science and technology.”
Li set that goal against a background of what he described as “unilateralism and protectionism escalating abruptly” – almost certainly a reference to Trump administration trade policy – and after hailing China’s recent advances in fields including “independent chip research and development.” The premier also mentioned that China’s output of integrated circuits rose by 10.9 percent last year and offered his view that China’s AI companies “are leading the global open-source ecosystem.”
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 “ultra-large-scale intelligent computing clusters and computing-powered collaboration, strengthening nationwide integrated computing power monitoring and scheduling, and supporting the development of public clouds.”
Chinese government departments and agencies use similar language almost every week but dismissing the Premier’s remarks as everyday rhetoric overlooks two factors.
One is that China’s 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 in 66 of the 74 critical technologies it tracks – and got there in under 20 years.
The other is that China sees US dominance of technology as a strategic imbalance it needs to correct.
Another think tank, the Asia Society, offered its take on the Two Sessions by suggesting China’s control of the supply chain for rare earths gives it leverage in trade talks, while the USA’s control of semiconductors balances that out to create “mutually assured supply chain disruption.”
The two nations are therefore in a state of uneasy equilibrium that Beijing wants to change by improving domestic chip tech. “China’s leadership is increasingly confident that it can break the United States’ chokehold on advanced semiconductor technology over the next several years,” The Asia Society’s analysts wrote.
China is already taking steps to decouple from western tech, by steering local buyers to local products, and slow-walking approval to import Nvidia GPUs.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has often said Washington must allow export of his company’s products, to ensure US tech dominates the global AI industry. Beijing has heard that message loud and clear and Premier Li’s words at the Two Sessions are the result.
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. ®
