 Hello. In this session, we're going to be talking about China's investment in technology, a snapshot of the priorities through 2040. My name is Peter Wood. I'm a program manager for blue path labs. I'm speaking here today on behalf of our program, which does open source that does deep dive open source analysis of the PLA of Chinese S&T and other defense topics. The research I'm presenting here today is an early look at forthcoming research prepared by myself and my colleague Alex Stone. One of our programs is a consultancy that does a variety of open source research leveraging big data and our team of OSINT language enabled analysts to provide a variety of services from research and analysis to consulting services and technological integration. In the last couple of years, we've done a variety of deep dive analyses, including of China's ballistic missile industry of China's military civil fusion strategy, China's ground segment, and other aspects of the PLA largely for the China Aerospace Studies Institute. Now, to understand China's priorities for technological development, really what you have to do is we're pulling together from a whole variety of the various documents and plans and national strategies that are that are put out by the PRC government statements and speeches from senior officials. And to do that, we've combined all of these to really try to delve into what we believe are the most significant areas of investment and what things are placing the greatest priority on looking ahead. The first of these first group of these that we can talk about is national milestones. So the Chinese Communist Party places a lot of emphasis on several historical milestones, particularly the year 2021 and 2049 2021 being the centenary of the founding of of the CCP, and the year 2009 which they regard, which is obviously the 100th anniversary of the founding of the PRC, and also really what they regard as sort of the end of the initial arc of China's development since it will represent 100 years of national development. The next group of these is the national strategies. These include made in China 2025, the innovation driven development strategy and military civil fusion strategy. So these lay out a series of the longer term goals for the PRC and provide some insight as they line up where China wants to be by certain key dates. Other plans such as the medium to long term plan for development of S&T, and its forthcoming successor, which will cover 2021 to 2035, don't quite take us through 2040. But what these plans do offer is they they lay out the what China calls mega projects so massive areas of investment, which we'll get into in just a few minutes focus areas for investment and are an attempt to achieve long term and strategic effects for China. China of course has a whole series of national economic development plans, the most recent being the recently released 14th five year plan. And these also act as an important guideposts for where China is interested in going not only because they set priorities for on five year intervals, but also because they include details about laboratories and other national technologies that will be constructed during that period, which provides some indication of where China wants to be and what technologies that's placing priorities on. This slide provides sort of a brief overview of statements drawn from official documents and speeches by senior Chinese leaders as to what they're attempting to do. So obviously by 2020 and 2021, there's a whole series of this were recently passing a series of important milestones both on the domestic side where China is trying to build a what they call a moderately prosperous society, but also on the fence side where they're trying to, you know, the PLA is obviously expanded quite dramatically in the past 20 years. With underneath that one what they're trying to do is what they call informatization, which means the deployment of sensors communication systems to better networked the PLA, but also even more basic things that perhaps other countries might take for granted such as mechanization China's probably achieved a, you know, a very high level of mechanization and some level of informatization, particularly through the completion of the Bado DNS s. So at the same time, greatly improve their strategic capabilities through fielding such capabilities as a, you know, long range strategic bombers, they're capable of strategic strikes, a whole series of very advanced ballistic missiles, and also strategic support such as the Y-20. So they've made significant progress in some of these levels. At the same time, other plans such as made in China 2025, that place that we're primarily focused on economic side have were more focused on attempting to improve China's manufacturing capability. And a key part of this is, you know, realizing self sufficiency of core technologies. So looking at China's, you know, overall national strength, they're trying to obviously, you know, see major breakthroughs across all these levels and so when we look at what they're placing priorities on for in terms of technological development, we have to look at all three of these sectors. Now, on this last one, the economic area, something that we continue to see when examining Chinese speeches by official by top leaders is that they're less happy with the progress in internalizing these technologies, whether it's the ability to fully design on their own and then produce advanced microchips, something we've seen the supply chain of significantly disrupted during COVID, but also even more basic technology such as aero engines or or advanced electronics things that in that other countries might take for granted, China is not particularly satisfied with its progress in terms of, you know, reducing its reliance on imports from abroad. For example, it's still, you know, relies entirely rely significantly on imports of semiconductors from abroad and I believe that the overall volume of that trade actually exceeds its imports of oil at this time. So point is, is that while, you know, across the board, whether it's, you know, socially or militarily they've made significant progress, there are a number of these, you know, milestones that they haven't necessarily met entirely. So looking ahead closer to the 2040 timeline, that's, you know, the kind of the focus of this area, we actually have official milestones on either side of that, of that time so 2035 for example, the PLA wants to, you know, comprehensively, you know, make achievements and, you know, modernization of its weaponry and equipment, something I think that they're reasonably on track to achieve. And then what they would call basically complete modernization of national defense in the military which includes a whole slew of things beyond simply equipment, and also involves, you know, things like the, reorganization of their, of their entire military actually the adoption of the theater command system, improved training, things that have what they've made major changes since 2016 in particular are not easy, because you're talking about, you know, large scale changes across a massive organization, but the same time though they're clearly made a made major investments in improving the equipment of the PLA and so you know for example we can reasonably expect that before 2040 that the PLA will continue to make significant progress in this direction. The bigger question is and then which I'll get to into a moment is, how will technology change in the interim and really as we look across the board, whether it's the domestic development or economic developments or military development. So the PRC and then the Chinese Communist Party are attempting to future proof China, and by an end to do so they're making heavy investments in the future because if, you know, for example, they've, as they've stated that they want to do they want to have a you know strong democratic not in the way that the United States understands it but at least advanced society and and be a few top manufacturing power with you know advanced technology. These are investments where are these are places where if they're going to, you know, continue the progress that they've made and be able to keep up with other economies. They're going to have to continue, you know, to make major investments they can't simply ride off of the arc of rapid economic growth that they saw during you know the after their ascension to the WTO in 2000. So, to dig a bit more specifically into SNT, we can look at some of their SNT development plans so this is from a plan that came our strategy that came out in 2016. By 2020, you know I think by by many metrics you know China is ranking in the has met their initial goal for for 2020 which is to you know doing the rank of innovative countries, but something that we found as we've begun to dig into to data about about the volume of academic publications and things is that there's actually quite widespread dissatisfaction that many Chinese scientists themselves are not actually that satisfied with the originality of a lot of that research. So, while if you're purely to look at certain metrics that I think are very popular such as again publications, China is the volume of them has certainly increased. I think if you dig below the surface and as my colleague Alex has found, there are actually quite some significant issues resting below the surface here so this is not a development arc that I think that we can just take for granted and it's very clear that the PRC is not doing that as well. To get to 2035 or even as you know they're more lofty goal in 2050 of becoming a great global great power and scientific research. These are not guaranteed by any means. It says they're on the slide, you know she can ping himself has said, you know, China must seize the commanding heights of technological innovation. They don't want to take their economic growth or for granted and they realize that the thing is that fueled that growth in the past. The other route it was you know assembling things everyone knows made in China, or you know as domestic consumption has kind of risen. They don't want to take these things as guarantees of the next stage of development there's very clear emphasis and and I would even say alarm. That is discernible when reading PRC state plans. Regarding China's need to move up the value chain in terms of the types of equipment and you know products that it produces, but also to rely much less on foreign ideas imports, or what they would call. You know, indigenous development or you know the adoption or replication of technologies, and then improvement of those. There is recognition that they need to move beyond that model. And I think that when you look at the reason why they have these innovation driven development strategies and other similar plans. Because it's an attempt to more broadly, you know, begin to address address that and to the degree that they can force change structurally to try to do that. A really important set of plans to to talk about is the medium to long term plan for development of science and technologies. They're much longer periods than the the five year plans obviously, and they have implications that that are really, you know, beyond the our ability to predict in terms of short term technological forecasting, because these are. These are the investments that they're making that that go that are intended to be again strategic shifts where money and budget is allocated with the goal of of of achieving sort of strategic shifts. So in this case, we haven't had a public, there is not a public version of the next medium to long term plan, which will cover 2021 to 2035 coming up on that 2040 area. But at the same time the the current MLP will will still have some implications which we'll be talking to in a minute. So if we're ready for more details to be veiled on the new MLP, we can get a glimpse of what technology areas China is investing significantly on based on our D projects that are currently being funded. So SMT mega projects focus on product models industries and technologies on both the civilian and military sectors that are of strategic importance. These are ambitious R&D undertakings that involve enormous amount of investments. Some estimates say over 300 billion women be and over 240,000 personnel were involved in the years of the past decade. The current list of 16 public mega projects which include manned space exploration, next generation wireless technology, telecommunications technology, near space vehicle technology, etc. These were all laid out in 2006 with an incomplete with an anticipated completion date of of 2020 of 2020 during the 13 five year plan that just ended in in 2020. Policy makers announced a new category of meta projects to be implemented between 2016 and 2030. So these again, while they may seem you know less kind of technologies of the future. These represent some of those core technologies I mentioned that the China recognizes that it needs needs to be able to fully indigenize to be able to achieve the next level of state economic development, such as air engines gas turbines. And quantum communication computing which I'll get into in just a minute is obviously what's much more of these, you know, cutting edge type technologies brain science and brains inspired technology and artificial intelligence. But also even, you know, things that we might take for granted such as, you know, cyberspace security, or seed industry independent innovation. Obviously, these goals are attend go across that range of, you know, domestic domestic development, economic development and then kind of longer term things with defense implications. And many of the most of these in fact are actually dual use technologies, the latest five year plan, the 14 five year plan, called for achieving breakthroughs and seven frontiers of science taking technologies, which none of which are can be considered new research directions. But in fact represents, you know, continued investment in that so it's almost like a subset of the previously identified set of projects are going to see continued investment and that includes of course AI, not surprisingly, quantum, quantum technologies, integrated circuits which I mentioned earlier, neuroscience genetic and techno genetics and biotechnology, which have implications across the range of, you know, public health, or to, or, you know, food security in the form of you know better, better crops, clinical medicine health and sciences, and deep space, see in polar exploration. The interesting thing is when you look at authoritative books or books that are written by authors affiliated with the PLA such as the science and military strategy the latest edition from 2020 that was published by China's National Defense University, we actually see that there's quite a bit of overlap in terms of these domains. Obviously China is attempting to achieve significant breakthroughs in all these areas, but the PLA is also preparing to fight or carry out, you know, carry out. If not warfare, then at least be able to compete in these domains, which range of course from space which I think everyone is aware as you know, increasingly a an area of tensions between countries. There's no warfare that were what China calls the network domain, but even more extreme environment such as the deep ocean or polar regions, where Chinese military thinkers and strategists are talking about competition between states for resources, something that Russia talks a lot about this, but also biology and even cognition, which has been, you know, quite a bit of emphasis in the PLA in terms of being able to not only compete as a state, but also having capabilities to operate in this. In the biological sphere, for example the PLA is funding quite a lot of research into genetic manipulation, or looking at, you know, potential use of biological applications for human performance, but also even more mundane things and so far as that, you know, food and just, you know, making resilient crops should be and can be understood as part of China's food security and integral part of its national security. So, they just very much a broad approach to what is security and what needs to be funded for China to be a militarily strong, but also economically vibrant and competitive country. And again, to be able to, you know, be making the investments in these wide range of fields and sectors were frontiers, however you want to call it. So that China does not fall behind. At the same time, we're also seeing major investment in what in the PRC's state laboratory system and here I'm drawing on my colleague Alex's research. I think that China's investment in future S&T leadership can also be seen in these national laboratories and all and other scientific research facilities. China is actually in the middle of a complete overhaul of its laboratory system with blue path labs actually has a report a forthcoming report that will be examining all of this. And in my colleague's findings, she found that China currently has four officially approved national laboratories but has plans to build more during the 14 five year plan, including in the areas of quantum information, photonics and micro nano electronics network communications artificial intelligence, biomedicine, modern and modern energy systems which covers a range of things from, you know, next generation renewable or clean technologies or, you know, hydrogen, hydrogen energy or even more advanced systems like fusion. In addition to laboratories, there's also been major investment in scientific research facilities so these, you know, might be considered, you know, like a multi billion dollar programs and actual buildings and research architecture something similar in the United States might be the national ignition facility which is being used to test the boundaries of modern fusion technology. In many of these cases these enormous facilities which take up you know dozens of acres and again cost billions and billions of dollars are being built to explore energy China itself is also quite interested in looking at inertial confinement fusion and other next generation energy development technologies, but also life sciences or systems environment material science, which is something that they're particularly interested in particle physics nuclear physics space and astronomy and engineering technology. My colleagues found is that as of 2021. 2070s facilities are currently operation but more are under construction. So, these are not, these are not the kind of facilities that have an immediate, you know, payoff this isn't something you build it and you're expecting you know to have a recovery within a year so these are the things that on the timeline of 2040 are going to be where the these longer term payoffs are going to be seen, where China is is make is recognizing that if it wants to win the future as some people have said, it has to, you know, bite the bullet now and incur these costs, and, and, you know, and again begin doing research on these topics. So I also got, there are some documents that my colleagues have gathered that actually look at what the kind of subset of defense technologies that China's most interested are obviously artificial intelligence is right up there advanced materials, which could include materials, but also, you know, heat resistant materials things you may not you might use in a reentry vehicle shield for a space plane or ballistic missile advanced manufacturing to increase the efficiency and precision. Event structures, energy directly in particular directed energy, which I think all countries are making major investments in as they, you know, recognize that as energy storage and generation improve the ability to have a, you know, to have directed energy, whether it's a laser or jamming technology is going to be very, very important across the range of defending against UAVs or potentially, you know, dazzling satellites. That in particular is appears to be of major interest to China, but also even, you know, more, more mundane refinements of some existing technology such as target detection using artificial intelligence to, you know, help China sift through a much faster set of information, much more quickly, but find targets with satellite imagery or using or detect more significant information from signals collection, things like that. But again here we even see that you know advanced electronics and components this this idea that, again and again, China considers itself a, you know, considers developing its own indigenous electronics components whether it's a digital signal processing chips, or you know the types of types of chips that are used to power AI, or even particular even sensors and these these kinds of technologies, China is attempting to ensure that it doesn't rely on overseas suppliers for these as part of its kind of view of security. So when we kind of take a step back and look at the where the common areas are between national defense priorities and civilian or you know economic development type priorities for for technology. We see a couple commonalities that include of course artificial intelligence and brain inspired technology, quantum information which includes it's kind of a broader term for communications computing and sensing which I'll speak on a bit more in just a moment. GeneX and bioscience future communications network, but also the ability to operate in multiple domains China has a very rapid launch tempo for space, and as obviously you know fielded a Mars rovers and other things so that's it's got a very active civilian space program. So I think there's major implications for the military as it begins to field even, you know, greater or larger and more sophisticated and more resilient communication networks, or constellations of reconnaissance satellites, but again high end manufacturing as we've seen in prior studies of China's aerospace industry, for example, you know, really over the past 20 years there's been, you know, significant improvements in their ability to you know even have basic technology such as digital design software or digital modeling software, you know that allow the development of newer fighter jets and transports. But even at this, even 20 years later really, you know, after after China's economic economy really started to take off. You know the PRC still lagging behind this so again this is something where we see, you know, senior scientists of saying again and again we need to continue to make improvements to not only our ability to manufacture things more quickly but also the design software's technologies like that remain a priority for them. Before I kind of wrap up, I'm going to talk about a few of these technologies in a bit more detail just to kind of give a snapshot of where they are and how what their progress has been. So we can, you know, perhaps have a better understanding of where they might be in by 2040. One of these is applied quantum based technology so a kind of mission will go on, you know noted that whatever builds quantum computers first will occupy the global technological innovation high ground. That I think should, you know, you know, make it clear just how much they prioritize the development of this technologies which range from communications, computing and also sensing. As a scientist, and I'm, I will try not to mess this up but what we can see what I read what I see from from reading Chinese documents and news media coverage and speeches by Chinese leaders or scientific figures talking about these programs is that they they see significant advantages from quantum computing for a number of obviously civilian applications but also military applications improvements to machine learning for example. If they were able to apply quantum computing which for certain types of computing has the potential to, you know, increase them beyond what you know, Moore's law and the traditional improvements to CPU speeds for example, have or semiconductor speeds have have allowed to be able to go beyond that more militarily directed is the ability to actually crack adversary encryption. Which could obviously be a huge breakthrough for China, or if it's opponents were able to get there first will represent a massive breakthrough as well for them, but also quantum sensing. As China's likely adversaries have made major investments in stealth technologies and and you know, and China is attempting to negate those advantages. There has been some interest in in looking at and how quantum properties might be used, whether they were detecting stealth aircraft, or in other mediums perhaps even detecting submarines. A lot of that technology appears to be in sort of early stages, but the strategic payoff could be immense and I think those are the kinds of things that Dr. Gual was was talking about. As kind of a note of just how much emphasis being placed on this, you know, the National Board for quantum information scientists, you know, wasn't was established with the cost of 10 billion USD and 2017 and Dr. Pan Jin Wei who's a leader for across a range of these programs has been majorly involved in not only development of a the world's most powerful quantum computer at least as far as I'm aware at the moment. In June 2021, but also in a range of very interesting programs to improve the security of China's communications which include earth to ground are basically essentially using satellites and ground based facilities to using quantum technologies to secure the links between a satellite and ground based systems or between two separate ground based systems. Using what's called a quantum key distribution. So China, very, you know, very understandably has major concerns about the security of its communications and particularly as Elsa County and other people have noted that after the escalations from Edward Snowden I think that there was, you know, significant increase in their desire to, you know, okay we need to fundamentally secure our communications. And quantum appeared to be one of the best ways to do that. And so as you can see in this this map that I put together, they've actually built a whole series of ground stations all across China and then have tested using quantum entanglement capabilities to be able to change and to be able to transfer information between these points. You know, including one, one test involves two ground stations that were over 1000 kilometers apart, and also testing between ground stations and satellites. Because if they're able to do that of course then they'll be less vulnerable to interception word decryption artificial intelligence. So another one of these technologies that I think I think it's fair to say that the PRC scientist regard as if they fall too far behind there's a potential of losing out longer term. China often talks about what they call a systems confrontation. The idea that that you know, it's and other countries around the world are engaged in a competition that that that pits the entirety of their their political system their economy, the brilliance of their scientists, all of these things are being pitted against each other. And for technologies like quantum and artificial intelligence, you see similar kinds of statements from from top scientists or even from you know top leaders like Xi Jinping saying, we have to get these right. Otherwise, it's going to be disastrous for us longer term. And so really there's going to be a race to through 2040 to get these technologies, or to to make major breakthroughs in these technologies. And I think, you know, Joe G I think he said this in 2018. And really that, you know, this is the AI will be the most important dual use technology, acknowledging that whoever is able to successfully field artificial intelligence across, you know, the range of various types of AI that there are is much more likely to be successful in this kind of systems confrontation. So to talk real quickly about some of the defense applications that we see in PLA literature about this. We know that the PLA has been has had some issues you know absorbing the volume of data, you know, being created by all the various new platforms as you know China has fielded a wide range of very capable satellites, UAVs. But as all this new data becomes available, you know, creating, you can only reorganizing your system to be more efficient, you know, the moving people around and you know creating data fusion centers or intelligence fusion centers was something that they've done can only get you so far to actually be able to parse through all of that effectively, you're going to need machine learning and other applications like that. You know, whereas it's, you know, not as interesting as as you know for example a you know more autonomous vehicle. Breakthroughs in machine learning and some technologies like this are going to be essential for China to be competitive, going forward. And artificial intelligence is, you know, no surprise than a massive. A, you know, one of the top listed priorities for both the civilian economy, and also for defense. We're also seeing as some research by Nathan Boshan Mustafa and others have found, there's been some you know very interesting research looking at how the PLA is actually even talking about using artificial intelligence for information operations, you know, to better automate its ability to compete in what it calls the cognitive domain. You know, when we're talking about social media we always talk about, you know, grabbing people's eyeballs but in a real way that you know China wants to be able to both domestically and externally manipulate the information environment and one of the ways to do that is to leverage artificial intelligence. At the same time, there is, you know, looking at future discussions of what the PLA wants to achieve. An essential component of that is what they call intelligence is Asian or you know the ability to be able to fight intelligent wars. Other futurists, actually, you know, such as women she actually wrote a book called intelligent wars have actually talked about what these kinds of conflicts would, would involve and, and in his mind, while the weather is while the humans remain in the loop, they play a significant role. There are there's much greater emphasis on controlled use of swarms, or, you know, talking on a kind of a range you know to the 2030 or the 2040 timeline. There's simply, it's the speed at which conflict is going to happen is going to move beyond the ability for for unaugmented people or people without the benefit of artificial intelligence and on and semi autonomous or autonomous systems to be able to be effective. That chain of collecting data, analyzing it and then responding across all the various domains that I mentioned before, you know, whether it's the network domain or you know electronic warfare domain space, and an error, all of the action is going to be happening in these these kinds of, of technologies to support operations, they're simply not going to be competitive. And while, and to bring it back to the civilian economy which of course is you know another, you know, another kind of core component of why China's so heavily in there is that China wants to have a you know competitive society that wants to be able to have a strong military that will be able to compete with its adversaries across all of these technologies. But it also wants to have a, you know, economy that you know is is is survivable in the future that that it that has artificial intelligence and where, you know, many types of jobs will likely go away. Maybe again across the board will try to emphasize on the on the latter end of this presentation on on the more military applications, you know, we really see this strong emphasis on artificial intelligence but also artificial intelligence and quantum technologies, but also more emerging domains places are things like, you know, biology, where the implications may be less directly military, but the same time, the, in terms of improving the strength of China's overall system and its economy, the, the ability of its of its people to continue to find to have, you know, jobs and contribute to the economy or even you know something as simple as health, improving the overall situation of China's health care can really improve its its overall economic vibrancy and and the strength of the economy so prognostication is hard, but I think that this collection of plans milestones and strategies do give us some kind of insight into what these into what China wants and where will be in 2040. Thank you.