"Made in China 2025" first surfaced in a government work report delivered by Premier Li Keqiang two years ago. The strategy aims to shift the focus of Chinese manufacturing from scale to quality and innovation. But recently, foreign commentators have raised fears the policy could result in unfair competition and domestic protectionism.
According to the news portal China Economic Net, some are concerned China will eventually cease importing high-end technologies from other nations as their own technologies advance.
The concerns were downplayed by the deputy head of planning at China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Li Beiguang. He said China is a developing country with an ever-increasing demand for advanced technologies and products, both domestic and foreign. The 10-year action plan merely aimed to promote China’s industrial transformation to meet domestic needs.
Meanwhile Xu Zhaoyuan, who researches industrial economics for China's State Council, said no one country could monopolise or replace all of its high-tech industries. And later-developing countries tended to have less impact on global manufacturing patterns. Japan, South Korea and Germany, all of which experienced later manufacturing booms, had been unable to completely replace products made in the US, Xu said.
China was bound to achieve further technological breakthroughs and develop new high-tech products, which Xu said would make a dent in other countries' competitiveness in advanced sectors, but that did not mean substituting one country’s technologies for another.
Fears China would pursue domestic protectionism were mislaid, Li said, since China's State Council had this year vowed to grant foreign and domestic companies equal treatment in the Chinese market. The success of the Comac C919 jet, for instance, was one of the fruits of Sino-foreign cooperation, he added.
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