The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the State Council have issued 19 key measures to strengthen technological innovation, deepen its integration with industry, and improve institutional support for high-quality development. The guidelines cover five main areas, including technological and industrial innovation, innovation in development approaches, institutional reform, and talent management. They identify developing new quality productive forces as an inherent requirement and a key priority for promoting high-quality development, with a substantial increase in total factor productivity as the core indicator. The document also highlights stronger support for enterprises' role in technological innovation. The guidelines call for establishing a corporate research and development system, increasing the additional tax deduction rate for R&D expenses of technology-oriented small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and supporting capable private enterprises in leading major national technological research tasks.
Enterprise R&D projects that meet national strategic needs can be elevated to national projects through prescribed procedures. To accelerate commercialization, the document proposes deploying research and commercialization tasks together when technological projects are initiated and assessing actual application results upon completion. It also encourages universities and research institutions to license technological achievements to micro, small and medium-sized enterprises on a use-first, pay-later basis. The new guidelines combine traditional industrial upgrading with emerging and future industry development, placing particular emphasis on fully implementing the “AI Plus” initiative.
“Developing new-quality productive forces is not about simply abandoning traditional industries, but rather empowering the existing real economy with intelligent technologies, so that old industries can regain new vitality,” Xi Junyang, Professor at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, told the Global Times. AI can be widely applied across industries, making it an important avenue for developing new quality productive forces, Xi Junyang said.
China's high-tech manufacturing sector has maintained strong growth. Its value-added output among large enterprises rose 16.7% year-on-year in August, compared with 5.2% growth in overall industrial output. Industrial robot production increased 34.6%, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). The guidelines also call for advancing the energy revolution, developing advanced nuclear fission energy, and building a power system with a high proportion of renewable energy, while improving its integration and regulation, the Global Times reports.
