When it comes to China’s inventions, the Four Great Inventions including papermaking and printing would be the first to pop into people’s minds. Nevertheless, Chinese society has developed at a soaring speed in recent decades, resulting in “imitation” not characterized China’s science and technologies. Instead, China has self-developed many leading technologies so far. Now let us see what they are and get ready to be shocked!

Quantum communication technologies

Ten years ago, nanotechnology was all the rage; ten years later, quantum technology became the mainstream and the world powers rushed to develop it with all their effort and China is definitely among the best developers.

China launched the world’s first quantum communication satellite Micius on August 16, 2016, marking that quantum communication has realized a great leap from theory to practice. The R&D team of Micius satellite was also presented with the Cleveland award in 2019, for its contribution to promoting large-scale quantum communication.

China also made the world’s first quantum communication encrypted video call with the President of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 2017 as a milestone in using quantum communication for practical use.

The application of quantum communication plays an important role in realizing information safety. “Quantum communication is a completely secure communication mode that cannot be eavesdropped and deciphered,” as Pan Jianwei, the main researcher on quantum communication in China put it.

High-speed train technologies

China was a late starter in developing high-speed rail technology, but it has staggering advancement speed. Until now, China has already become the country with the fastest development speed, the most complete technology system, the longest operating distance and the highest operating speed in the area of high-speed rail construction. China is leading the new trend of high-speed railway development in the world.

China’s high-speed rail system has seen rapid development since 2004. By March 2017, China had more than 120,000 km of railways and 20,000 km of high-speed railway in operation, ranking the first in the world.

Furthermore, China has achieved comprehensive independent innovation in high-speed tech since 2009 and set out to compete in the global high-speed rail market. China is currently negotiating more than 20 overseas high-speed rail projects, building around 60 percent of the world’s high-speed rail network. The involved countries are mainly Southeast Asian and African countries such as Indonesia, Pakistan, Laos, Thailand, and Ethiopia.

5G technologies 

The hottest word in communication industry this year is undoubtedly 5G, with some saying that China’s 5G is already a global leader, and others calling it boasting. So how good is China’s 5G technology indeed? We can make a relative objective evaluation by these two following aspects: international technical standards and technical patents.

Initially, the communication industry attaches great importance to technical standards. “What industry doesn’t value technical standards?” you might ask. Yes, there are technical standards in all industries, but most of the technical standards are not international uniform – most of them follow national or industry’s internal regulations such as power sockets. However, the technical standard of the communication industry is international uniform. Until now, there have been 21 standards in China, 9 standards in the United States, 14 standards in Europe, 4 standards in Japan and 2 standards in South Korea that have been approved for 5G standards worldwide.

Moreover, China has held nearly 40 percent of global 5G patents. According to the 5G patent report released by patent data company IPlytics, until April 2019, Huawei – a leading communication technology company in China has 1,554 5G standard essential patents, ranking the first in the world.

The ability to work out plenty of international standards and patents recognized by the international telecommunication union and followed by global telecommunication enterprises showed that China truly has stood at the top of the industry and play an important leading role in the development of the 5G industry.