China increased the amount it spent on research and development by more than 10 percent in 2019, ScienceInsider reports. However, it notes that China will likely fall short of its goal of spending 2.5 percent of its gross domestic product on R&D by 2020.
According to ScienceInsider, this funding boost is a continuation of years of double-digit percentage increases in R&D spending. In particular, it notes that public and private spending on R&D increased 12.5 percent in 2019 to 2.21 trillion Chinese yuan ($322 billion).
This, it notes, brings China's R&D spending to 2.23 percent of its GDP for 2019, 0.09 percentage points higher than in 2018. As part of its 13th five-year plan, China vowed to spend 2.5 percent of its GDP on R&D by 2020. ScienceInsider says it is unlikely that China will meet this goal. But Cao Cong from the University of Nottingham's Ningbo, China, campus tells it that this "should not be considered a failure, as China has been increasing its R&D expenditure over the past several decades at a rate higher than GDP growth."