Chinese leader Xi Jinping called for tech self-sufficiency a decade ago, according to speeches in new book

According to internal speeches made public for the first time, President Xi Jinping determined as early as 2013 that China had no choice but to become self-sufficient in key technologies and that the country could rely on the socialist system for technological superiority. a new book.

In a speech to tech delegates at the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) meeting in 2013, Xi Jinping said that China’s growth over the past three decades was the result of importing and utilizing foreign and “second-hand” technology from the previous industrial revolution, which would make China is at a disadvantage.

“If you stick to the old path, China will not only suffer from a wider technology gap [with the world’s advanced levels]but also trapped at the bottom of the global industrial production value chain,” Xi said in the speech, which was included in the On Technical Self-reliance and Self-improvementCollection of Xi Jinping’s speeches on the subject from 2013 to 2022.

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“Against the increasingly fierce competition in global comprehensive national strength, we don’t have much choice but to take the path of independent innovation,” Xi said.

Public discourse on economic security has become increasingly prominent in China in recent years, It comes after the U.S.-China tech war and Washington’s technological curbs exposed the risks of relying on critical overseas supplies.

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Xi Jinping delivered an internal speech on March 4, 2013, just 10 days before he was elected President of China. At the time, state media reported on the activities of the CPPCC National Committee, but had previously only published summaries of Mr. Xi’s speeches.

Newly released transcripts of Xi Jinping’s speeches offer a glimpse into the thinking of the leader of the world’s second-largest economy. Xi Jinping’s message of technological self-sufficiency and the need for China to control “core technologies” are themes that run through the book.

“Historical facts have proved that a large economy does not mean a strong economy. If a country lags behind other countries for a long time, the root cause is backward technology,” Xi said.

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Xi’s speech came years before U.S. sanctions on Chinese technology companies such as ZTE Corp and Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, a message that was further bolstered after Washington imposed broad export restrictions on China’s access to advanced chip technology.

In a speech in 2013, Xi also appeared to invoke China’s “century of humiliation”, saying the country’s “technological backwardness” was the reason it was “beaten hard” by other major powers. “This lesson is too deep to forget. We must keep it in our hearts,” he said.

In his speech, Xi called on the state to pool resources to help achieve breakthroughs in key technologies, while promoting the advantages of the state’s socialist system, which he said allowed China to “concentrate strength and achieve great things.”

“In the past we counted on it to successfully develop our nuclear weapons, missiles and artificial satellites. In the future we will also count on it to drive innovation,” Xi said.

In 1960, China’s first domestically-made land-based missile was successfully tested Under the tutelage of Qian Xuesen, once one of the top missile scientists in the United States. Qian, who returned to China after being accused of being a communist sympathizer, went on to play a key role in the country’s nuclear bomb testing and led a task force that built and launched China’s first artificial satellite in 1970.

Most of the speeches and articles in the book have been published by Chinese state media. The full text of Xi Jinping’s speech at a 2016 cybersecurity conference has been republished, in which he urged China’s big tech companies to cooperate like US tech giants Microsoft and Intel did in the 1990s to form China’s version of the so-called “Wintel” ecosystem.

“An important reason [why China lags behind] It’s our key companies that don’t have synergies like Microsoft, Intel, Google and Apple,” Xi told a conference on cybersecurity and information.

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