What the world's fastest computer tells us about China's absorptive state

Deep inside China's National University of Defence Technology, on the outskirts of Changsha, a computer is whirring. But this is no ordinary machine. With 3.1 million Intel Core processors, 1.4 petabytes of RAM and the capacity to perform 33,860 trillion calculations per second, it is the fastest supercomputer on the planet.

In June 2013, China surprised observers by seizing the number one spot in the TOP500, a twice yearly ranking of the world's fastest supercomputers. The Tianhe-2 (or Milky Way-2) was successfully tested almost two years ahead of schedule. Funded by the Chinese government's 863 High Technology Program, with additional support from Guangdong province, it will eventually be deployed at the National Supercomputer Centre in Guangzhou, where it will be used by researchers from across southern China.

Tianhe-2 is the most impressive result to date of a well-funded and targeted drive by China to move to the fore of supercomputing. It has knocked the US Department of Energy's Titan machine off the No.1 position, and although the US still dominates the TOP500 (occupying 252 places in the table), China with 66 places is catching up fast.

The race is now on to see which country will be the first to reach exascale: by producing a supercomputer capable of one quintillion calculations per second. The US, EU, Japan, India and Russia all have substantial research programmes directed towards this goal. But most experts expect China to get there first. In his 2011 State of the Union address, President Obama warned that "This is our generation's Sputnik moment", as he highlighted supercomputing as one of several fields in which the US was in danger of falling behind. Two years on, an exascale strategic plan has only just been submitted to the US Congress, and the prospects for new funding look uncertain.

In one sense, Tianhe-2 is an achievement that the Americans should be every bit as proud of as the Chinese. It was built using US-designed Intel chips, and while the Chinese media lauded Tianhe-2 as an "independently-developed" technology, some users of the social media platform Weibo remained sceptical. But TOP500 editor Jack Dongarrapoints out that "Most of the features of [Tianhe-2] were developed in China, and they are only using Intel for the main compute part…the interconnect, operating system, front-end processors and software are mainly Chinese." Other analysts agree that it won't be long before China produces its first entirely home-grown supercomputer.

Tianhe-2 is just one example of how China is becoming a more significant force in global science and innovation. This is partly a story of massive and sustained investment: in 2012, China's total R&D expenditure exceeded ¥1 trillion RMB ($163 billion USD). Since 2008, it has maintained 18 per cent year-on-year increases in research spending, in a period when the effects of the global financial crisis have seen investment flat-line or fall in the UK and other countries. As a result, China now accounts for 13 per cent of the world's scientific papers, up from 5 per cent a decade ago.

Supercomputing is one of several priority sectors in which foreign technologies are being absorbed, adapted and improved. The same process has occurred with a number of the technologies that China is most proud of, including its high-speed rail network, advanced nuclear reactors and the Shenzhou spacecraft.

These examples suggest that what China's President Xi Jinping has termed "innovation with Chinese characteristics" will not be a straightforward path from imported to home-grown innovation, but a messier process in which the lines between Chinese and non-Chinese ideas, technologies and capabilities are harder to draw.

In a Nesta report, which will be published next week to coincide with the first high-level UK government delegation to Beijing for over a year, we argue that China can now be characterised as an "absorptive state": increasingly adept at attracting and profiting from global knowledge and networks alongside its more supportive domestic environment for research and development.

The concept of "absorptive capacity" is well-established in debates about innovation at the level of individual firms. It can also be used to describe regional or national innovation systems; an earlier Nesta report defines it as "the ability of one place to absorb and adopt knowledge coming from another place." It is an idea which features in China's own policies, notably in its 2006-2020 Medium to Long Term Program for Science and Technology Development, which talks of "enhancing original innovation… based on assimilation and absorption of imported technology." And for potential partners like the UK, the notion of China as an absorptive state speaks to ongoing concerns about how to strike the right balance between competition and collaboration in the "global race" that is now a mantra of so many ministerial speeches.

Science and innovation are caught up in a bigger unfolding debate about the pace, scale and direction of China's economic and political reforms. Much still depends upon the playing out of a set of tensions: between the planned economy and the market; the hardware of research infrastructure and the software of culture and ethics; the skills and creativity of home-grown talent, and the entrepreneurialism and networks of returnees.

In the next decade, China is likely to change the way we think about science and innovation as much as science and innovation change China. In a series of posts this week on Political Science, we want to explore what these shifts will mean for China and for the wider world.