China needs own tech know-how to control its own fate

Editor's note: Some Chinese entrepreneurs no longer regard the Silicon Valley as the Holy Land for innovation, because of the flourishing of dozens of innovation centers at home, comments Niutanqin, a popular columnist, in a post. Excerpts:

Although their scale and influence may still be incomparable to that of Silicon Valley in the United States, China's innovation centers have shown a strong development momentum.

Many Westerners still think made-in-China means cheap copycats, but the number of world-class enterprises from China has increased steadily over recent years, and they are reshaping the country's industrial and business landscape slowly but surely.

The number of Chinese enterprises among the Fortune magazine's world top 500 companies has increased from 35 a decade ago to 120 this year. And many of them, such as Huawei and Alibaba, are successful private companies with global influence.

The advancement of the internet and relevant information technology provides Chinese enterprises with golden opportunities to compete with the industrialized countries in the ongoing technology revolution.

According to CB Insights, a US venture capital investment research agency, the number of Chinese "unicorn enterprises"－tech startups with a $1 billion dollar market value－surpassed that of the European Union in 2015, and is shortening the gap with the United States quickly. By the end of January, more than 36 percent of "unicorn enterprises" in the world were Chinese.

Nevertheless, the Chinese people are well aware that the country remains weak in many core technologies even in some of its competitive industries.

Thanks to the ongoing trade frictions with the US, China is focusing more attention to developing independent core technologies. A national consensus has been formed that only through seizing the know-how firmly in its own hands can the nation control its own fate.