According to 2023 UN data, Chinese inventors led in international patent applications for the second year running, posting some 14,000 more than the second-place US, as the two giants increasingly face off over technology, innovation and global bragging rights. And earlier this month Premier Li Qiang announced a 10 per cent increase in government science and technology research, even as the partisan US Congress battles over every budget line.
China – long criticised for focusing on patent quantity over quality and for heavily subsidising patent applicants – is also raising its game, weeding out plagiarised research papers and reducing substandard filings.
“There’s no question the Chinese patent filings do reflect underlying technological capabilities. We’d be foolish or ostrich-like if we denied that,” said Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), who has served on government economic boards during President Joe Biden’s administration as well as the four previous ones.
“We still have a little time,” he added. “But by the end of the decade, if we haven’t responded in a very comprehensive and serious way, then it’s too late.”
Some analysts counter, however, that China’s swooning economy and rapidly ageing population could blunt its innovation trajectory and see momentum swing back to the US.
Bill to put US-China science pact under new scrutiny passes a House committee
Bill to put US-China science pact under new scrutiny passes a House committee
According to figures released this month by the World International Patent Organisation (Wipo), China filed 69,610 applications under the UN Patent Cooperation Treaty in 2023, down marginally, compared with 55,678 by the US, a 5.3 per cent decline. The 1970 treaty allows inventors to file a single international patent in several countries simultaneously, avoiding the expense of filing in multiple jurisdictions.
One problem as the two superpowers race to benchmark their progress in the increasingly contentious battle for tech supremacy: rankings diverge widely and innovation is difficult to pinpoint, including the link between patent filings and new products, industries and economic activity.
“We have to be humble,” said Carsten Fink, Wipo’s chief economist who oversees the UN agency’s Global Innovation Index. “I don’t think we have the last word in innovation measurement – that invariably is more of an art than a science.”
Wipo’s 2023 index, a compilation of 80 factors, ranks Switzerland as the world’s most innovative country, followed by Sweden and the US. China is ranked 12th of 132 economies surveyed, but first among upper middle-income countries, followed by Malaysia and Bulgaria.
“Time is running short to turn around US advanced industry fortunes,” said ITIF. “The race for global advantage in these industries is a zero-sum competition.”
In 2023, Qualcomm and Microsoft were the top US filers for international patents, while Huawei Technologies and the battery maker CATL led on the Chinese side.
Experts say that patents are a mixed blessing, nor is it clear how effective the US effort to slow Chinese advances in semiconductors by restricting exports will be. While patents encourage innovation by protecting inventors from intellectual property theft, they can also be weaponised, deterring collaborators from building on existing technologies. Most attempts to quantify innovation also struggle to capture relative intangibles like government regulation, business models, the quality and quantity of data and trade secrets.
There’s a lot of self-inflicted harm. We can’t blame it all on China
All countries promote patent filing but analysts say that China has taken it to another level. In its headlong quest for innovation, global rankings and benchmarks under its Made in China 2025 road map, Chinese applicants can earn subsidies that exceed the cost of filing, critics say – an incentive to file multiple patents for the same invention in order to garner income, glory and academic promotions.
“A lot of times, high subsidies lead to lower-quality patents,” he added. “The data is getting better for China, but China also regulates for data. It wants to generate those numbers.”
Experts say Western patent systems generally place more emphasis on showing that an invention is original globally, compared with China’s greater domestic focus and easier standards. One reason for this, they add, has been to defend against lawsuits by foreign patent holders over theft of intellectual property.
“That’s not to say there isn’t strategic patenting by [US] companies,” said Atkinson. “In China, they engage in more strategic patenting in order to gain the right negotiating position … Western companies, it’s one company at a time. There, the entire ecosystem – the entire state – moves forward.”
Even if Beijing’s numbers are inflated by 10 or 20 per cent, experts said, the trend is clear. Since its first patent was filed in 1985, China has often been underestimated overseas – that it lacks creativity, does not publish enough scientific papers, that those papers are not widely cited, that they are cited but not among the top 1 per cent – only to repeatedly surprise on the upside. “It shows they are creeping up the value chain,” Cohen said.
While China has the momentum, US innovation has been written off before – most notably in the 1980s, facing a rising Japan – only to mount a comeback as Silicon Valley exploded. China is also facing new headwinds.
China’s Xi wants market-ready scientific research – and singles out 2 provinces
China’s Xi wants market-ready scientific research – and singles out 2 provinces
Even as the US has slipped – in 1960, its R&D spending was 69 per cent of global R&D, compared to 30 per cent by 2020, according to the Organisation for Economic Development and Cooperation – it remains the biggest total spender at US$806 billion annually, compared to US$668 billion for China.
And while China had been widely expected to surpass the US in overall R&D spending, that has not happened so far, amid huge demographic challenges, a property crisis, rising local debt and slowing economic growth.
The US economy, meanwhile, has been surprisingly resilient, with low unemployment and some US$200 billion newly invested in R&D through the Chips and Science Act of 2022.
“We’ve all been waiting to see when those two curves cross, and they haven’t crossed,” said Arati Prabhakar, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, citing the sharp increase in US business R&D.
Others, however, are more inclined to expect a continuation of the US slide. Washington’s deep political divisions and budget battles have hurt government R&D that fuels private sector innovation, including an 8.3 per cent hit to the National Science Foundation budget this year.
China’s governing system, they note, makes it easier to set and quickly carry out national campaigns. Many of its top leaders were trained as engineers, they add, while the US has lost its sense of national mission following the end of the Cold War.
“There’s a lot of self-inflicted harm,” said Cohen. “We can’t blame it all on China.”
James Pooley, a partner at the Morrison & Foerster law firm, formerly with Wipo, said that Washington’s “small yard, high walls” strategy – with its calls to decouple, restrictions on hi-tech exports and Chinese students in the US as well as growing limits on bilateral investment – is short-sighted.
Intellectual property theft by China is a serious problem, Pooley said, but it needs to be balanced against the benefits of cross-border collaboration.
Patent upending: China revises rules to plug lab-to-market gap in hi-tech push
Patent upending: China revises rules to plug lab-to-market gap in hi-tech push
An IP attorney who asked not to be identified given the sensitivity of US-China relations said that China’s growing patent prowess has failed to wake up the US tech community in part because of its inherent divisions.
Patents are important for large hardware companies, helping guard against reverse engineering of a tangible design, but less so for start-ups too busy surviving. And software companies often view them as a “necessary evil”, the lawyer said, largely ineffective in protecting their secrets, including business models, the quantity and quality of data and trade secrets.
“This is why, for example, even though China filed 2.5 times more patents than the US for AI technology by 2018, I don’t think this necessarily means the US is behind in AI innovation,” the attorney added.
China’s focus on innovation is not without its own shortcomings, experts said, including Beijing’s distorting subsidies, market micromanagement and inordinate focus on security.
“Their close links between civilians and military, that’s a mistake,” said Caroline Wagner, an associate professor at Ohio State University. “It scares off a lot of [international] collaborators.”
AI systems cannot be named as the inventor of patents, UK’s top court rules
AI systems cannot be named as the inventor of patents, UK’s top court rules
Lewis of Calamu – named after his golden retriever – filed his first patent at 17. Most start-ups in his sector eschew patents but he has found them useful, since they force him to hone his strategy, assess competitors and serve as a marketing advantage that sets him apart from rivals. The US patent filing process seems unnecessarily lengthy, he added.
“I don’t know why it takes a year and a half or two when you have a patent that’s a finite number of pages and you’re doing all the searching electronically,” he said.
Lewis added that he avoids the China market, wary of having his intellectual property stolen and doubtful that a Chinese court would side with him against a local rival, no matter the merits.
His patent attorney, David Postolski, has other clients grappling with China, including some that have chosen to file for Chinese patents as Beijing’s filings rise. The figuring, he said, was “if you can’t beat them, join them”.
Nearly every country has a national science ministry, Postolski added – except the US. “Where’s ours?” he asked. “We really need to get back to innovation.”
