Sci-tech serves nation's strategic needs (3)

Scientists set up the world's highest automatic weather station at an altitude of 8,830 meters on Qomolangma, aka Mount Everest, in May. SONAM DORJEE/XINHUA

Notable benefits

From creating salt-resistant varieties of soybean to giant metal bearings for tunnel-boring machines, Chinese scientists and engineers have strengthened their efforts to use their research to fulfill the country's strategic needs, resulting in massive economic and social benefits.

Testimony to this trend is the rapid growth of national high-tech development zones, which are the trailblazers of China's innovation-driven development strategy as they host 84 percent of the nation's State Key Laboratories and 78 percent of its national technological innovation centers, according to the Ministry of Science and Technology.

Last year, China had 173 national high-tech development zones, 84 more than in 2012. Meanwhile, the GDP of high-tech development zones grew from 5.4 trillion yuan in 2012 to 15.3 trillion yuan ($2 trillion) last year.

These zones contributed to 13.4 percent of China's GDP last year, while using just 2.5 percent of the nation's construction land, according to the ministry.

Wu Jiaxi, deputy director of the Department of Research Commercialization and Regional Innovation at the ministry, said the high-tech zones have proved to be resilient to risks and have achieved growth despite global uncertainties in recent years.

Li Youping, deputy director of the ministry's Torch High Technology Industry Development Center, said scientists and companies from the high-tech zones have made numerous breakthroughs in strategic fields in recent years.

Those feats included China's first artificial intelligence chip, the first quantum communications satellite, the first vaccines for COVID-19, high-speed rails, the C919 passenger jet and the Beidou satellite navigation system, he added.

Speaking at a forum in November, Zhang Yuzhuo, then vice-president of the China Association for Science and Technology, said the scientific community has been a major contributor to the healthy and inclusive development of the nation's digital economy, which refers to the use of information and communication technologies to support business models and economic activities.

Last year, the value of China's digital economy reached 45.5 trillion yuan, accounting for nearly 40 percent of the nation's GDP, Zhang said.

Meng Xiangfei, chief scientist at the Department of Application and Research at the National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin, said that in the past decade, he and his team have been dedicated to the development of the Tianhe series of Chinese supercomputers.

Tianhe-1, launched in October 2010, has become a valuable instrument that is capable of handling more than 1,400 computing tasks simultaneously, and about 1,000 research groups use the supercomputer every day, he said.

Meng and his colleagues are building the prototype of the nation's exascale supercomputer, Tianhe-3, which will handle more than 1 quintillion operations per second, making it many orders of magnitude more powerful than Tianhe-1.

"I always tell my teammates that every effort we put in will benefit the country in the end," Meng said.