China's Shenzhou-15 crew enter the country's space station and meet with another astronaut trio on November 30, 2022, adding the manpower at the in-orbit space lab to six for the first time. (PHOTO: XINHUA)

By LIN Yuchen

On December 16, 2022, China's perennial rice, bred by Hu Fengyi's team at Yunnan University, made the top 10 list of world scientific breakthroughs of 2022, according to the journal Science.

But it is not only rice where achievements were made. The completion of the Tiangong space station, and delivery of C919 large passenger aircraft to China Eastern Airlines were just some of the great strides made by China in sci-tech innovation in 2022.

According to the 2022 Global Innovation Index released by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), China's overall ranking for innovation capacity is now 11th in the world, up one place from the previous year and a jump of 23 places from 2012.

Among 132 economies, China has 21 science and technology clusters that entered the global top 100, 14 more than 2017. This number equals that of the U.S. for the first time, ranked first in the world.

The evaluation results of the WIPO reflect the continuous improvement of the overall effectiveness of China's innovation system, said Xing Huaibin, deputy director-general of the Department of Strategy and Planning of the Ministry of Science and Technology.

In the first 10 months of 2022, the national public budget expenditure exceeded 20 trillion RMB, of which science and technology expenditure exceeded 700 billion RMB, up 8.8 percent year-on-year. In addition, for the first time the People's Bank of China launched science and technology innovation refinancing loans of 200 billion RMB.

The Growth Enterprise Market and Science and Technology Innovation Board listed 248 enterprises in the first 11 months of 2022, raising over 390 billion RMB in initial public offerings, accounting for about 66 percent and 81 percent of the total initial public offerings respectively for the two markets in the same period.

A total of 173 national high-tech zones achieved an industrial output value of 23 trillion RMB in the first nine months of 2022. By last November, the total output of green products, such as new energy vehicles and solar cells increased by about 100 percent and 44 percent respectively year-on-year.