Hi everyone, How's it going, This is channel LoongSon and welcome back again to our channel, now before we get started be sure to subscribe and push the notification bell, so that you don't miss any of our great. Today, China and the United States have become the two most concerned powers in the world, and the competition in science and technology is especially fierce. China producing 250 million computers, 25 million automobiles, and 1.5 billion smart
phones in 2020, has surpassed the United States in number to become the world's scientific and technological power. In addition, Chinese artificial intelligence, 5G, quantum information science, semiconductors, biotechnology, and green energy have surpassed the US in some competitions, and become a serious competitor in the foundational technologies of the 21st century. On current trajectories, China will overtake the US by 2030. In 1999, the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine reported that the
United States would remain the greatest determinant of future knowledge, as it remained in the 20th century in the application of yesterday's science fiction technologies, such as animal cloning, electronic talking road maps, and powerful computers as small as a pack of cigarettes. Rereading that report today, the elephant in the room that was lost was China. In the future foreseen by the conventional wisdom of the time, China hardly mattered.
In 2010, this landscape was beginning to change. China had become a low-cost manufacturing site for multinational enterprises. In recent years, China has been challenging the US technologically, causing anxiety in Washington. Rivalry in technology is the main arena of competition with China, as the former CIA director said. Eric Schmidt, one of America's most respected leaders in advancing and applying technology, who led Google to become one of the world's top tech companies, has said many Americans still have an outdated view of China. Unless these trends change, in the 2030s the United States will compete with a country that has a larger economy, more investments in research and development, better research, a wider deployment of new technologies, and a stronger computing infrastructure.
To take stock of the state of the technological career, the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School has released a report detailing the progress made so far by the United States and China on every key technology of the future. Mainly in the following aspects. Artificial Intelligence, which is the most advanced technology, is likely to have the greatest impact on the economy and security in the next decade. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt states unambiguously: China is now a "full-spectrum peer competitor." In fact, China has already overtaken the United States to become the undisputed number one in the world in many fields of AI.
In speech technology, Chinese companies are outperforming U.S. companies in all languages, including English. The world's leading voice recognition startup, China's iFlytek, has 700 million users, nearly double the number of people talking to Apple's Siri. In financial technology, WeChat Pay's 900 million Chinese users vastly outnumber Apple Pay's 44 million in the United States. While two-thirds of Americans still rely on credit cards, 90% of urban Chinese primarily use mobile payments, spending $150 on mobile platforms for every dollar Americans spend, totaling $42 trillion in 2020. In facial recognition, there is no contest.
The United States has essentially admitted to the race because of concerns about individual privacy and deep reservations about how this technology might be implemented. Meanwhile, China's Sense Time and Megvii have developed cutting-edge apps like instant facial recognition , which can identify individuals from China's population of 1.4 billion in seconds. Financial markets reflect these realities.
Six years ago, two of the twenty most valuable Internet companies in the world were Chinese; Today, seven are Chinese. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, the "Seven Giants of the AI Era," are divided on both sides of the Pacific. Of every ten dollars of venture capital invested in AI in 2018, five went to Chinese startups; four to U.S. companies. 20 Of the ten most valuable AI startups in the world, seven are American and three are Chinese.
In 2021, China surpassed the United States in overall AI appointments, with a 35% increase over 2019. In the most popular subfield of AI, deep learning, China has six times more patent publications than the United States. In 5G, according to the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Board, "China is on track to repeat in 5G what happened with the United States in 4G. Despite advantages in 5G standards and chip design, america's 5G infrastructure deployment is years behind China's, giving China a first-mover advantage in developing 5G-era platforms.
With increases of up to a hundred times in speed, fifty times in reliability and ten times in device connections, 5G promises to enable new use cases that no one can imagine today. Over the next 15 years, 5G will add an economy the size of India to the world, most of which is on track to be in China. China now represents the world's largest 5G market, with 5G connections in the country accounting for 87% of global 5G connections by the end of 2020. In fact, almost all key indicators support projections that China will dominate the future of 5G.
At the end of 2020, China had 150 million 5G users compared to 6 million in the United States; 700,000 5G base stations to 50,000 in the United States; 460MHz of licensed mid-band spectrum at 70 MHz in the United States; and 300 Mbps in average 5G speeds to 60 Mbps in the United States. Of the top five suppliers of 5G equipment, two are Chinese; zero are Americans. Over the past two decades, China's national champion Huawei has gone from 0% market share in telecom infrastructure to becoming the world's leading provider of 5G equipment, with a market share of 28%, while former U.S. national champions Lucent and Motorola plummeted from 25% in 2000 to 0% today.
China is already pioneering cutting-edge 5G applications, including smart factory systems, digital twins for industrial applications, and the world's first 5G-enabled remote surgery. Where the 4G era saw Apple's iPhones, Google Android OS and Microsoft Holo Lens connecting users to the tech ecosystem, 5G is about to be dominated by Huawei networks that offer ubiquitous connectivity for Xiaomi smartphones, Tencent smart city solutions and Baidu robotaxis. In quantum computing, quantum communication, and quantum sensing, three consequential subfields within quantum information science traditionally led by American researchers, China is catching up and, in some cases, has already overtaken the United States.
Pioneered 30 years ago, QIS is a field long seen in the scientific community as a potential catalyst for revolutionary advances in science and technology involving large calculations, much faster communication, and precision measurement. Governments have recently recognized that threats to national security that were previously considered hypothetical are becoming possible. In fact, threats such as the ability to crack existing encryption to steal state secrets, the creation of fully secure lines of communication, and sensors so precise that they could free operating platforms from their reliance on space-based positioning systems may not be as far away as previously thought. Unlike previous technological revolutions that took place when China was still a poor country, China's meteoric rise has provided it with the funds and manpower to potentially lead this field. China is said to be the father of quantum.
In 2014, the United States and China were tied on the number of quantum-related patents, and in 2015 China was second only to the United States in annual spending on quantum technology research. But by 2018, two years after China launched a "megaproject" with the goal of making breakthroughs in QIS by 2030, China surpassed the United States, filing more than twice as many patents and accounting for 52% of all quantum patents. Today, China is spending four times as much as the United States on QIS. In December 2020, just one year after Google's 53-qubit Sycamore superconducting quantum computer achieved quantum supremacy, China reached the same milestone. That month, a photonic quantum computer created by the University of Science and Technology of China achieved quantum supremacy "10 billion times faster" than Google for certain calculations in physics. And just six months later, a team led by Pan Jianwei made headlines again with a new quantum processor, Zuchongzhi, which usurped Google's Sycamore as the world's most powerful superconducting quantum computer by solving a problem 100 times more challenging than the one solved by Google's Sycamore.
China's milestones in quantum communication are impressive. In 2016, China launched Micius, the world's first quantum-enabled satellite. Soon after, Chinese scientists created a record quantum communication link between satellites and an earth station separated by more than 745 miles. And in January last year, China announced the creation of the world's first integrated quantum communication network spanning a total distance of more than 2,800 miles, longer than the distance from New York to Los Angeles.
One expert expects Chinese government and military communications to turn black in as little as two to three years, meaning the U.S. would no longer be able to listen. Compared to quantum computing and communication, quantum sensing is a relatively mature field where real-world capabilities are already emerging. This is particularly important for military capabilities, where quantum sensing has the most direct applications, including the ability to override stealth technologies and radar interference. According to a 2019 report by the Institute for Defense Analysis, of all publications on quantum sensing, China ranked third in average citations per article after the United States and Europe.
However, in publications over the past five years, China ranked first in citations per article and in total publications on quantum sensing. As a central element of many everyday technologies, including ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, computers, automobiles, and more, semiconductors are an essential driver of general use in U.S.-China technology competition. The United States retains its dominance of the semiconductor industry that it has had for nearly half a century, but this position has been gradually eroded by a lack of domestic investment and increasing competition abroad.
Although the United States continues to lead chip design and semiconductor manufacturing inputs, its share of semiconductor manufacturing has fallen from 37% in 1990 to 12% today. Meanwhile, China's decades-long campaign to become a semiconductor powerhouse has yielded significant results in recent years. Although "the mainland is not yet a competitor," as assessed by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company founder Morris Chang, China has narrowed its gap in semiconductor production and design to just one or two generations behind major players. Over the next decade, China will become the world's largest semiconductor producer of mature technology nodes, and within 15 years they will be able to do it all on their own. With a threefold increase in its share of global semiconductor consumption from less than 20% in 2000 to 60% in 2020, China's growing domestic demand has provided national security and market incentives to expand its momentum in the semiconductor industry. China's national champion in semiconductor manufacturing, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, has consistently ranked among the top five foundries over the past decade, and its innovative 7-nanometer N+1 process in 2020 means its advanced manufacturing capabilities now rival Intel's.
While China still relies on semiconductor imports to meet 85% of domestic demand, these recent achievements refute the decades-old conventional wisdom that China's semiconductor industry cannot catch up. In fact, by the best judgment, China is only "one or two years behind the United States and Taiwan" in chip design and "five years behind Taiwan's TSMC" in manufacturing. Biotechnology is the development of new technologies derived from discoveries in the life sciences, spanning various categories such as genomics, biochemistry, molecular biology, and more. Looking to this future, the United States is the undisputed leader in biotechnology, but China is fiercely competing across the spectrum of biotechnology R&D, and in some cases even winning. In the last two decades, China has jumped to the top of basic biotechnological research.
From 2007 to 2017, China's biotech publications increased by 20% annually, with the second highest number of publications after the US. In 2019 and 2020, China surpassed Germany and the UK, respectively, and now ranks second in the Nature Index for high-quality life sciences research, increasing its annual output by 9% over the last year. In particular, its research output has surpassed that of the United States in multiple areas, including in Crispr-modified crops and transgenic plants. China also produces the most biotechnology patents annually, increasing its global share from 1% in 2000 to 28% in 2019, while the U.S. share fell from 45% to 27%. In biomedical patents, China's annual growth rate of 16% far exceeds the 3% of the United States, and in cell therapy patents China leads in both total patents and growth rate.
After acquiring U.S.-based Complete Genomics in 2013, Chinese genomics giant BGI is now the world's largest genetic research center and can sequence human genomes for a record $100, 6 times less expensive than its competitors and 100,000 times cheaper than cost in 2000. The most prominent testament to the success of China's biotechnology is CAR T cell therapy, which modifies T cells for use in immunotherapy and has shown promise in cancer treatment. In the race to harness GREEN ENERGY, the United States has been the leading inventor of new technologies over the past two decades, but China has taken the lead in manufacturing and deploying those technologies, allowing it to dominate multiple links in the green energy supply chain. Indeed, as energy geopolitics expert Daniel Yergin stated: "In green energy, China has already reached the 'Made in China 2025' target of a dominant role in the new industries of this century.
The expansion of green energy into the global energy mix promises to be as disruptive in the 21st century as oil was in the 20th century. Financial markets already reflect these realities: Clean energy investments reached $500 billion for the first time last year and will total $16 trillion over the next decade. China has raced ahead of the United States and other countries to dominate key links in the green technology supply chain, including equipment manufacturing, raw materials and energy storage. As the world's workshop, China is now the dominant manufacturer of equipment to generate renewable energy. From producing less than 1% of solar panels in 2000, China now supplies 70% of solar panels globally. By comparison, in a surprising reversal, the U.S. share fell from 30% in 2000 to less than
1% today. Four of the world's top ten wind turbine producers are Chinese and control 40% of the global market, compared to 12% for the United States. These advantages in manufacturing have positioned China as the largest producer of solar and wind power, with more than three times the capacity of the United States in solar and twice in wind. In these new elements, China has a near-monopoly on several of the key inputs needed for solar panels, batteries and other green technology, including chemical lithium with 50% of global production, polysilicon with 60%, rare earth metals with 70%, natural graphite with 70%, cobalt refining with 80%, and rare earth refining with 90% of global production.
And where China lacks resources domestically, it has secured them overseas. Chinese companies own 8 of the 14 largest cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, accounting for 30% of global production and a 51% share of the world's largest lithium reserve Meanwhile, the United States imports 40% of its lithium, 80% of its cobalt and 100% of its graphite. It could take 20 to 30 years just for the U.S. to catch up with China on sourcing raw
materials. In energy storage, Bloomberg's New Energy Outlook estimates that China controls 80% of battery raw material refining, 77% of cell capacity, and 60% of battery component manufacturing. Their assessment states that "Chinese manufacturers, such as Catl, have gone from nothing to world leaders in less than 10 years," while "the United States languishes in sixth place in 2020." In the next ten years, almost 75% of new lithium-ion battery plants will be built in China.
And as the world's largest hydrogen producers, China and the EU lead the development of green hydrogen: the two collectively spend $2 billion annually on R&D, more than ten times the $150 million annual allocation of the US Department of Energy. In short, although the United States has led the last half-century of technological innovation and still retains dominance in several other technological fields, China has become a serious peer competitor in the foundational technologies of the 21st century and is likely to be a leader in these by the end of this decade. Now you should understand why President Biden said, "If the United States doesn't continue to develop its infrastructure, China will overtake the United States." The president's fears may soon be realised. What do you think about that? That's all there is to it for today. Once again this is channel LoongSon.
Thanks for watching and have a wonderful day.
2022-02-09