However, the results of further research show that although China's status may be improving, China lacks three key decisive factors needed to become a superpower: favorable security advantages, military and economic hardware strength, and political, social and theoretical software strength.
1. Security advantages: domestic and surrounding areas.
To become a world power, a country needs to ensure the stability of its surrounding areas, so as to ensure its ability to exert and maintain control and influence over overseas events. Geographical location is an important aspect to ensure safety. For example, the United States, which has great security advantages, is only adjacent to two weaker countries, and there are two oceans to protect it from threats from other powerful countries. On the other hand, China is very different from the United States. It has about 24 maritime and land neighbors, of which at least five have a population of more than 10 billion: Russia, Japan, India, Indonesia and Pakistan. If China wants to become a world power, these countries will form strong geopolitical constraints. Even China people in Taiwan Province Province are trying their best to resist China's reunification efforts, and the problem of Taiwan Province Province itself may contain China and undermine China's modernization momentum for a period of time. The attitude of China's other neighbors is not optimistic. "
There is no hard power among the best.
The dominant countries in the world are the countries with the best hardware strength needed at that time. At present, China's military and economic strength is far behind that of developed countries. Military strength Due to the low technical level, China's army still has a long way to go before it has the military capability required by a world power. Now, China can't even establish air superiority around its own territory and control the sea control right of its own maritime border. Until at least 2020, it will be difficult for China to reach an appropriate level of naval power. First of all, naval air defense, command and control, intelligence, electronic warfare, logistics and anti-submarine capabilities need to be greatly improved.
Although China's achievements in missile technology are impressive, on the whole, its aerospace industry is still short of funds and has not made any special progress. Compared with developed countries, its efforts in computer science and its ability to implement strategic information warfare started late and fell far behind.
Military modernization will continue to be disturbed by a large number of problems, including supply control, limited funds, low absorption and utilization capacity, and management and administrative obstacles. The process of modernization will be arduous and slow. The international situation will limit the supply of weapons to China, and the domestic economic situation will also limit the purchase of weapons.
Because a large number of weapons are outdated, there is an urgent need for larger-scale reforms, especially the reform of state-owned enterprises, and military scientific research and technology also require large sums of money. Therefore, China lacks the resources to rapidly improve its weapon system and catch up with the western weapon system. Even with the necessary financial resources, it is still difficult for China to catch up with the West. Many systems in China restrict the further rapid development of economy, science and technology and national defense. The reform of these domestic systems will take a long time.
Economic Strength Although China's economic development is remarkable, these rapid growth figures should not be used to exaggerate China's strength and influence in the world economy. These figures do not reflect the whole situation, and may not reflect the corresponding improvement in productivity and technological development. China is currently one of the countries with the lowest labor productivity in the world, and its productivity is only a fraction of that of the United States.
At present, China's influence in the global market is still very small. Different from the world powers, it did not use investment, high-tech products and control of major industries to play a decisive role in some areas of the world market. "Its economic importance is mainly reflected in its import market and the absorption of foreign capital by domestic industries. Its export growth depends largely on foreign investment and cheap labor. These characteristics make people uncertain whether China's economy can develop steadily and vigorously in the future.
China's economic development in the past depended not so much on improving productivity through high technology as on the utilization of resources. Unless China can master and use high technology, the current economic momentum will lose momentum.
However, the task facing China is more arduous than people generally realize, because the low productivity in these fields is not a question of how much resources China should invest in scientific research, but a distorted and inefficient system problem.
According to a survey report of the State Science and Technology Commission of China, in 1995, nearly half of scientific research institutions in China did not publish any research reports. There are about 5,000 such institutes and institutions in China, with an average of 125 scientists and researchers per institution. Therefore, the report shows that in that year, 3 1000 scientists and researchers from nearly 2,500 research institutes and institutions did not even publish a research report. The survey report also found that only 5% of the scientific research results produced by research institutions reached the "national level" (the highest level), and 15% reached the "ministerial level" (the second level). The report also said that from 65438 to 0995, the average number of innovative patents applied by various scientific research institutes and institutions was only 0.09.
Obviously, this poor performance in China's scientific research field can't be explained only by the lack of resources, but proves the system and institutional constraints. These constraints explain why China has invested a lot of money to import advanced equipment and production lines through direct government purchase and joint venture, but it has made great technological breakthroughs in absorbing and utilizing foreign technologies so slowly; These constraints also explain why there are more and more scientific research achievements in the laboratory, but the success rate of innovation is only about 10%.
Compared with investing more resources in the development of science and technology, it will take longer to effectively solve these institutional constraints. If we can't do this, it will be difficult for China to improve the level of science and technology, so as to improve productivity and gain top-notch hardware strength. We should remember that China still has a long way to go to complete the transformation from a planned economy to a market economy. This transformation is not only arduous and full of risks, but also takes a long time to form a stable situation that can create a long-term, sustained and strong economic growth rate.