Top academician pours cold water on future industries

China's push for future industries may be premature.

So says Zhang Jun, Party Secretary of Beijing Institute of Technology and an Academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, in a May 30 article published in Qiushi, the Party's flagship theoretical journal.

Zhang has three criticisms:

• Local governments are rushing to build future-industry parks around hot sectors – humanoid robots, the low-altitude economy, brain-computer interfaces, and synthetic biology – before the underlying scientific and technological foundations are secure.
• Many of the technologies underpinning future industries remain immature and uncertain, and are not yet ready for reliable, cost-effective mass production.
• The interdisciplinary research needed to develop future industries is constrained by siloed disciplines, single-subject evaluation systems, and fragmented funding.

Zhang is an insider critic, not an outside skeptic: His critique ran in the same Qiushi issue that published Xi Jinping's remarks on future industries.

• That marks his argument as part of the authorized reading of Xi's line.

Zhang's prescription: Universities should lead problem-driven foundational research, backed by patient long-term funding and revamped cross-disciplinary evaluation.

Get smart: There's no silver bullet in Zhang's prescription – it points to years of grinding S&T reform to tilt funding toward foundational research.

• Expect bigger basic-research budgets from both state and corporate sources, longer grant cycles, and reweighted university evaluation metrics.

Get smarter: Beijing's asking the S&T community to be patient in delivering foundational breakthroughs – but the mounting top-down pressure to deliver those breakthroughs is exactly what fuels the rushed, frenzied behavior Zhang is criticizing.

Bottom line: Telling local governments to slow down won't work while the targets above them keep speeding up.