China, anticipation
National basic-research funding allocation
China's National Bureau of Statistics, Ministry of Science and Technology and Ministry of Finance reported 225.91 billion yuan in basic-research expenditure in 2023, equal to 6.77% of national R&D spending.
6.77 % of total R&D expenditure, basic-research share of national r&d expenditure, 2023. National Bureau of Statistics of China, Ministry of Science and Technology and Ministry of Finance, 2023 science-and-technology expenditure communiqué, retrieved 2026-08-31.
The move, and what it needed
China's statistical and science ministries separate basic, applied and experimental R&D in a recurring national account, while public funders protect a basic-research tranche alongside mission-oriented programmes. That makes the long-horizon allocation visible in the same frame as industrial development spending.
Preconditions
- A national R&D classification that distinguishes basic research from applied work and experimental development
- Stable public funders and multi-year grants that can sustain uncertain work beyond an annual policy cycle
- A statistical system able to collect comparable expenditure returns from firms, universities and government institutes
Where else it has been used: A basic-research share travels only with a classification and funding system behind it: a percentage without stable grant institutions can be re-labelled spending rather than a durable long-horizon capability.
Limits: The share measures spending classification, not research quality, scientific independence, peer-review quality, frontier breakthroughs or the eventual use of results. The communiqué uses national administrative statistics, reports preliminary GDP inputs and excludes Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, so it is not a complete measure of every Chinese research activity.
This record describes what China delivered. It is linked to Long-horizon research commitments because no comparable dataset measures that capability. It does not affect the score or confidence.
More from China
5 other deliveries from this country.
Dynamic zero-COVID containment, and its dismantling
China's State Council joint prevention and control mechanism ran a national COVID-19 containment regime from January 2020, under which the mainland had reported 4,634 COVID-19 deaths when vaccination began on 15 December 2020; it dismantled the regime by circular on 7 December 2022, and the National Health Commission then reported 59,938 COVID-related deaths in medical institutions between 8 December 2022 and 12 January 2023.
National high-speed rail network
China's railway authorities built a high-speed rail network that the National Railway Administration put at about 47,000 km in operation in December 2024, from a programme that began in 2003; a World Bank review of the 27 lines in operation at the end of 2013 found a weighted average approved unit cost of RMB 129m per km for 350 km/h lines, which it put at no more than two-thirds of costs elsewhere.
National PPP programme and project library, and its dismantling
China's Ministry of Finance ran a national government and social capital cooperation (PPP) programme under the 2015 State Council guidance, whose management library held 10,332 projects with 16.6 trillion yuan of investment by the end of October 2022; in November 2023 the State Council ended the 2015 regime for every project not yet procured and replaced it with a concession-only, user-fee mechanism that bars availability payments.
Vocational skills upgrading action, 2019-2021
Under a State Council plan funded with 100 billion yuan from the unemployment insurance fund surplus, China's human resources ministry organised 32.184 million person-times of subsidised vocational skills training in 2021 alone, the final year of a three-year action that targeted more than 50 million.
Phased exemption of enterprise social insurance contributions, 2020
China's human resources ministry, finance ministry and tax administration let provinces exempt or halve employer pension, unemployment and work-injury contributions from February 2020 under a notice dated 20 February, and exemptions, reductions, deferrals and rate cuts together reduced contributions by 1.54 trillion yuan between February and the end of 2020.
The same indicator elsewhere
1 delivery linked to Long-horizon research commitments in other countries.
Lei de Informática, a sectoral industrial policy
Law 8.248/1991 tied information-technology incentives to annual research, development and innovation investment of at least 5 percent of eligible domestic gross revenue, creating a predictable regime for sectoral capability.