Bolstering High-Tech Development: China’s “Supply” and “Demand” Solutions

The sudden emergence of DeepSeek has awakened the world to China’s high-tech capabilities.? In the coming years, the country is expected to continue strengthening its efforts to increase such capabilities and nurture the development of its high-tech industries.? To this end, China needs to ensure, among other things, a continuous supply of high-tech talent and a strong demand for high-tech products from its population, which includes segments with limited digital and scientific literacy that may have the opposite effect, i.e., weakening such demand.? To address these needs, China recently introduced certain measures.?

The Supply of High-Tech Talent

In mid-January, the Chinese leadership issued the Outline of the Plan for Building a Strong Nation through Education (2024-2035), which sets forth goals to achieve the establishment of a high-quality education system by 2035.? Specifically, the country’s “foundational education” should then be ranked among the best in the world, in terms of its quality and accessibility in society.? In addition, by 2035, China seeks to transform into a “learning-oriented society”, where the country’s “national strategic capabilities” are better supported by education.

The outline also sets forth interim goals, which are to be accomplished by 2027.? These goals include: an overall increase in the quality of China’s own training of talented people, the continuous identification of “outstanding innovative talented people”, and bringing education planning “more in line with the needs of high-quality economic, social, and population development”.

Among nearly 40 tasks identified in the outline, the Chinese leadership emphasizes the need to “promote the growth and development of young scientific and technological talents” and to “enhance the overall efficiency of the national innovation system” by, for example, strengthening related coordination so that talented people can quickly contribute to the construction of international science and technology innovation centers in Beijing, Shanghai, and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.? In addition, the establishment of international STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education research institutes and the development of related academic alliances are strongly encouraged.

These plans illuminate the importance of the International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians (“ICCM”) to China and the high-level support that it has recently received from the government in Shanghai.? Founded in the late 1990s by Professor Shing-Tung Yau—formerly, the William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University, and currently, the Director of the Yau Mathematical Sciences Center at Tsinghua University, the ICCM has trained many Chinese mathematicians, who have made significant contributions in academia and enterprises.?

The ICCM recently held in Shanghai its annual conference titled “New Frontiers: Mathematics for Transforming Science and Humanity”, at which more than 400 top mathematicians, including Fields Medal winners Andrei Okounkov and Caucher Birkar, as well as young scholars shared their latest research.? Seeing the ICCM’s ability to bring outstanding talents to Shanghai and help increase the municipality’s capabilities in scientific and technological innovation, the leaders in Shanghai have announced that the municipality will host all ICCM conferences in the future.

The success of the ICCM will likely inspire China to form more alliances of this type to ensure that the country has a continuous supply of talented people in other high-tech disciplines.

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