The China of the 2022 GII: Challenges, Opportunities and Challenges in the International Cooperation, Science and Innovation Environment and Economic Situations

China lags behind other nations in the use of widely used measures of innovation. It is not among the top 10 on the World Intellectual Property Organization’sGII, which is a list of economies on a basket of metrics. According to the report accompanying the 2022 GII, China leads in patents by origin, trademarks, industrial design and the size of its domestic market. However, the report identifies as “weaknesses” China’s regulatory environment, which includes the rule of law and environmental performance. China is not ranked high for GII metrics related to international relations, such as student numbers from abroad, joint ventures and foreign direct investment.

China is a ‘catch-up’ economy, according to Marina Yue Zhang, a social scientist in innovation and entrepreneurship studies at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia and co-author of a new book, Demystifying China’s Innovation Machine.

An exacerbating factor for China’s international collaboration difficulties has been COVID-19, with borders largely closed to non-Chinese citizens since early 2020. It means almost no foreign academics have been able to visit for conferences or field research. As of September, many students enrolled at Chinese universities, including research postgraduates, were still unable to return, according to the China International Student Union and media reports. The number of European researchers working in China fell by one-third after the swine flu broke out. J. high Educ. 12, 416–433; 2022).

Domestic travel restrictions too have been a problem, particularly affecting two areas designated as tech hubs and regional centres for innovation. The hub of the Delta is centred around the city of Shanghai, which had its power shut off for the first half of the year. The rest of the hub was not connected to any of the three neighboring provinces. The second is the Pearl River Delta hub, which joins Shenzhen and Guangzhou on the mainland China side of the border with the two special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau. The Greater Bay Area was envisioned to be China’s answer to the San Francisco Bay Area, with universities and tech companies located on the west coast of the United States.

Travel has been so difficult between Hong Kong and Shenzhen — two cities barely an hour apart on the subway — that the government had to open a special immigration channel to ease passage for cross-border students. John Lee, the head of Hong Kong’s government, canceled his upcoming trip to open the HKUST’s new Guangzhou campus due to COVID-19 restrictions.

The GBA is to allow Hong Kong’s knowledge and higher education excellence to be shown off to the mainland. But in Yang’s view, the way to stimulate faster growth would be for these large-scale projects to home in on addressing larger societal issues. The hubs can create an environment where innovation can be provided by universities, industry and the wider society.

Such an approach could also help international collaboration with China to be rekindled too, according to Christopher Tremewan, APRU’s secretary general, who says that “despite political tensions, international scholarly collaborations in science remain crucial to addressing challenges such as the pandemic and the threat of accelerating climate change”.

The countries and territories that do well in the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Global innovation index tend to have high research density.

The chart below shows the relationship between overall scores obtained by each country/territory in the 2022 Global Innovation Index (GII) and the number of researchers per million people in that location (in 2019). Bubble size, meanwhile, shows the volume of research in the Nature Index (as measured by Share in 2021) relative to population size.

The top six nations, which are shaded in orange to show more information on these, were marked out. Some other notable examples in the data are China, Singapore and Chile.

The population is 67.33 million and the efficiency is 1.71 as % of GDP.

Turning cutting-edge basic science into new technologies, medicines and other inventions that benefit our daily lives — while simultaneously bringing commercial rewards — is the foundation of a knowledge economy. Conventional wisdom dictates that the success of this strategy depends on strong public and private investment in research and development, excellent higher and technical education, and an openness to the exchange of ideas and people across borders. Some of these building blocks of innovation have come under severe strain during the past 15 years, first from the aftermath of the 2009 global recession, then a rise in geopolitical tensions and, most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic and economic impact of the war in Ukraine.