China is on a mission not just to dominate Planet Earth through its New Silk Road network and ambitious tech-focused China Standards 2035 Plan, but the cosmos too, thanks to the nation's increasingly bold space programme. As the West attempts to rein in its major rival, click or scroll through some of the key industries the world's most populous nation is seeking to conquer.
China is aiming to be the pre-eminent force in global logistics and infrastructure with its multitrillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – also dubbed the New Silk Road – which will create a 21st-century version of the trade link across land and sea spanning 140 countries from East Asia to Europe. In response, the US, Japan and Australia have formed the competing Blue Dot Network, while the G7 has launched the opposing Build Back Better World initiative.
China already leads the world in steel production. Last year the nation churned out in excess of a billion tonnes, more than the rest of the world combined, and its dominance of the global industry is only set to grow stronger with the potential megamerger of Anshan Iron & Steel and Benxi Iron & Steel, which would create one of the planet's biggest steelmakers.
The People's Republic is set to dominate the global electric car industry in the coming years. Powered by massive cash injections from the state, as well as international investors, Chinese electric car companies such as Zeekr, created by Chinese car company Geely, and NIO are popping up to challenge global market leader Tesla, and as a result factories are rapidly springing up across the country. China will be producing eight million electric cars per year by 2028, more than North America and Europe put together, according to forecasting firm LMC.
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China is already the main player in rare earth metals mining. There are 17 coveted elements, including cerium, dysprosium, erbium, europium, and gadolinium, which are used in a plethora of hi-tech and green products, and demand is only likely to surge in the future. For this reason, the US is working to challenge its rival's dominance and reduce the nation's reliance on Chinese-mined rare earth metals by ramping up domestic production.
As part of the ambitious plan, the Chinese government wants to be top dog when it comes to self-driving vehicles too. To make this happen, the state will do everything from fund autonomous driving start-ups to construct intelligent road infrastructure and set autonomous driving standards, develop HD mapping technology and create robust cybersecurity systems.
The country's three biggest internet companies – Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent – are leading the development, and the Chinese state dubbed search engine Baidu a "national champion" for its Apollo Project, an open-source software platform for those involved in the industry to share information and collaborate. The Project is open to non-Chinese companies too, with the likes of Daimler, Microsoft and Ford also signing on.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be ubiquitous in the near future and China is positioning itself to dominate the global market, according to Forbes. As with the other emerging technologies we've mentioned, AI is being prioritised by the People's Republic as part of the China Standards 2035 plan and homegrown firms such as ByteDance and Baidu are already in the vanguard. Currently, China produces as many AI researchers as America does, but the Chinese government is hoping to change this with increased focus and investment in the area.
China is currently classed as a Tier 3 low-end manufacturing hub, but has aspirations to reinvent itself as a Tier 2 high-end manufacturing nation – a sector that is dominated at present by the EU and Japan – and eventually to challenge the US, which is considered Tier 1 due to its status as a global innovation hub. China hopes to achieve Tier-1 status in the next 30 years, partly by hugely increasing R&D spending.
The Chinese government is putting a strong emphasis on additive manufacturing, aka 3D printing, which will be commonplace in the coming years. In fact, the technology is explicitly alluded to in the China Standards 2035 plan, with the state promising to focus on its development.
China is also at the forefront of the industrial internet of things (IIoT), which involves the integration and linking of AI, big data, wireless networks and more with physical and industrial equipment via smart sensors and other new technologies, leading to vastly improved performance, efficiency and reliability. Championed by President Xi Jingping himself, the IIoT has already “entered the fast lane” in the country says a senior government official.
Adding to the long list of emerging technologies China is looking to dominate is advanced robotics. Even though China buys and makes more industrial robots than any other country, its domestic market is dominated by robots made in countries such as Germany and Japan. China-made robots represented 39% of the domestic market in 2020, and the government is aiming for this to reach 70% by 2025. Industrial robots are the key target – they are considered integral to the high-end manufacturing upgrade and a solution to the country's ageing workforce – but service bots are popping up in their droves across the country too.
China may be a late starter when it comes to cybersecurity, but the nation is fast catching up with the likes of the US and UK. Actively encouraged by the Chinese authorities, the size of the domestic market has doubled since 2015 and there are currently 3,000 rapidly-expanding companies in the field.
In 2019 President Xi called for the country to “seize the opportunity” and become a leader in blockchain database technology, promising to support R&D as well as standardisation. Since then the state has created its very own network, the Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN), which was rolled out globally in August last year.
Fuelled by generous state subsidies, cheap labour costs and myriad other factors, China has become the global green energy leader, and intends to stay that way. It now dominates a wide range of eco energy industries and is the world's leading supplier of solar panels and wind turbines. In fact, more than half of the world's new wind power capacity in 2020 was built in China, nearly matching the global growth levels of 2019. The country also controls the global lithium ion battery supply chain.
Apple and Samsung have led the global smartphone sector for the past decade, but Chinese brands such as Xiaomi, Oppo and realme are going from strength to strength, though the much-maligned Huawei has seen its piece of the pie shrink. In the first quarter of this year, these four Chinese brands accounted for 33% of worldwide sales, against Apple's 17% and Samsung's 22%. The People's Republic also dominates smartphone manufacturing.
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Biotech is also at the crux of China's 14th five-year plan. And while the US is leading the game at the current time, its hold on the top spot is under threat as the People's Republic dashes ahead, throwing money at infrastructure development and research into new drugs and medical equipment. At the same time, China is turning its attentions to vastly improving agricultural and industrial biotech.
Though it lags behind the US, Russia, France and Germany, China nonetheless has fast become the world's fifth most important arms exporter, trading everything from armed drones to submarines, fighter jets and assault rifles. Its capabilities are set to mushroom in the future and, according to the latest five-year plan, the state is looking to expand the involvement of private sector contractors to support the development of advanced military assets.
However, China isn't that far behind considering recent revelations. This week the state has declassified information that revealed its military tested an umanned drone submarine in the 1990s and 2000s, and that the vessel test-fired into the Taiwan Strait using artificial intelligence.
America's widely-used Global Positioning System (GPS) rules the roost right now, but China is making serious forays into the realm of satellite navigation and digital mapping and last year announced the completion of its very own network called BeiDou. It had been two decades in the making.
China is also keen to dominate a number of sectors that foreign observers may have deemed unlikely in the past. This includes wine production. As directed by President Xi, the state wants to take on traditional wine-growing countries such as Italy, France and Spain by developing its own homegrown industry in the north-central Ningxia region, complete with chateaux. China aims to produce 600 million bottles of quality wine by 2035, more than quadrupling current production.
President Xi has pledged to make China a “great space power”, and an integral part of the nation's “space dream” is the construction of the manned Tiangong (meaning "Heavenly Palace") space station, a rival to the International Space Station. The orbital facility is due to be completed next year and two astronauts, or 'taikonauts' as China calls them, Liu Boming and Tang Hongbo, have already completed the first spacewalk outside it.
As well as taking on the International Space Station, China is developing a competitor to the Hubble Space Telescope and its successor the James Webb. The Chinese Space Station Telescope (CSST), aka Xuntian (which means "Heavenly Cruiser"), is slated to launch in 2024 and will boast a field of view 300 times greater than Hubble, along with a state-of-the-art 2.5 billion megapixel camera.
In May this year, China's Mars mission, dubbed Tianwen-1 (translated as "Questions to Heaven"), successfully landed a rover on Mars, the second country to do so after the US. The People's Republic aims to launch another craft in 2028 and plans to bring back samples from the Red Planet around 2030, vying with NASA and the European Space Agency to achieve this remarkable feat. A manned mission is planned for 2033.
NASA recently announced it would embark on two missions to study the “Lost Habitable” planet Venus at the end of the 2020s, but China's space administration has also set its sights on a mission to the so-called evening star, and is hoping to launch an orbiting probe to examine the super-hot planet's atmosphere and internal structure.
The People's Republic is eager to explore the Solar System's outer planets too. Plans are afoot to launch two missions to Jupiter, with Chinese scientists working with their European counterparts on the projects, which are named the Jupiter Callisto Orbiter (JCO) and the Jupiter System Observer (JSO). Expected to launch in 2029, they will explore the Gas Giant and the mission could include a landing on Callisto, its second-largest moon.
In addition, in around 2025 China is planning to accomplish a sampling and return mission to and from the tiny near-Earth asteroid 469219 Kamo’oalewa, as well as launch an orbiting probe exploring the main-belt comet 311P/PANSTARRS. The nation's space administration is also developing a Voyager-style mission that will venture into the heliopshere at the edge of the Solar System, which could happen as soon as 2024.
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