Over the past two decades, China has transformed itself from the world’s factory into one of its leading innovation powerhouses.
As the Communist Party of China marks its 105th anniversary, Beijing’s decades-long bet on science and technology is reshaping the global order, and it has lessons for Pakistan.
China today ranks tenth overall in the Global Innovation Index — the gold standard for cross-national innovation measurement — among 139 tracked countries, and third in the Asia-Pacific, behind only Singapore and South Korea, and just ahead of Japan.
Carsten Fink, chief economist of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), has described China’s ascent in the index as a remarkable story driven by long-term strategy.
For decades, says a recent World Economic Forum (WEF) analysis on the structural shift in the Chinese economy, China’s economic rise was a story of size. The world’s largest manufacturing base, a consumer market of continental proportions, and digital platforms growing at speeds that left Western rivals scrambling to keep pace.
Beijing’s experience demonstrates how emerging capabilities move from policy signal to pilot project to large-scale industrial adoption
The country’s size and industrial depth create unique advantages in translating technological advances into sustained productivity gains, workforce adaptation, and long-term economic value, according to a WEF analysis.
Advanced manufacturing remains the foundation of this shift. Its importance is no longer only about output or production capacity, but also about the operating environment it creates for applied innovation. China’s dense networks of suppliers, factories, logistics systems, engineers, digital platforms and end markets provide new technologies with a place to be tested, refined and scaled against real-world industrial constraints.
While earlier leaders treated science and technology largely as a development tool, President Xi Jinping has cast technological capability as the foundation of China’s security, sovereignty and global standing.
The doctrine he has articulated — technological self-reliance and self-strengthening — marks a decisive break with the era in which China learned from and depended on the West. It is a posture shaped by the conviction that a nation cannot sustain great-power status on borrowed knowledge.
That conviction has been backed by extraordinary resources. China’s research and development spending has risen from roughly $33 billion in 2000 to over $1 trillion by 2024, measured in purchasing power parity terms, marginally overtaking the United States, which spent approximately 1.01tr in the same year. By 2025, China’s research and development spending had reached 2.7 per cent of GDP, matching the average for Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development member states.
The sources of that spending differ importantly from the American model. China relies far more heavily on government outlays; the US draws predominantly from corporate investment. Both models have produced results, but China’s state-directed approach has allowed it to concentrate resources in strategic sectors with a consistency that market-driven systems find difficult to replicate.
Beijing has been explicit about where this is heading. China’s Innovation-Driven Development Strategy sets out a three-stage roadmap: to qualify as an innovative country by 2020, to rank among the world’s leading innovative nations by 2030, and to become a global science and technology powerhouse — a major centre of original scientific discovery — by 2050. The first milestone has been met. Work on the second is well underway.
The 15th Five-Year Plan, now in force, reflects this ambition at the level of industrial policy. It centres the next growth cycle on what Beijing calls new quality productive forces: a model driven by innovation and advanced production rather than traditional reliance on labour and capital investment.
Advanced manufacturing, AI, biomanufacturing and an integrated clean-energy system are the pillars of that plan. China’s biomanufacturing sector alone has reached nearly 1tr renminbi (RMB) and is projected to approach RMB1.8tr by 2030. Its core AI industry is expected to exceed RMB1.2tr, supported by more than 6,000 AI enterprises operating across a vast industrial ecosystem.
For Pakistan, which shares a strategic partnership with China and is increasingly engaged with its technology sector through CPEC and related frameworks, the most transferable lesson may not be any specific technology. It is the system behind the technology.
China’s experience demonstrates how emerging capabilities move from policy signal to pilot project to industrial adoption at scale. That journey requires the connective tissue of institutions, infrastructure, talent pipelines and governance frameworks that can absorb and operationalise innovation. Pakistan has the ambition; it has a growing young, fast-urbanising population. What it has yet to build, at sufficient depth, is the system that turns potential into productivity.
China took decades to construct that system. It did so with clarity of purpose and consistency of investment. The window for Pakistan to begin building its own version of that infrastructure suited to its own conditions and constraints is open. The question is whether there is the will to use it.
Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, June 29th, 2026
