Welcome to ChinaWatch, another post in WMB’s continuing digest of news from the world’s other military and economic giant. If you want more info on the topic, please follow the link to the original source. Enjoy! Top Innovator Awaits
China is set to become the world's most important center for innovation by 2020, overtaking the United States and Japan, according to a public opinion survey, Reuters reports.
China already is the planet’s second-largest economy, after establishing itself as the global workshop for manufacturing. Now it wants to move up the value chain by leading in invention as well.
Today, the United States ranks as the world's most innovative country, with 30 percent of people surveyed taking that view, followed by Japan (25 percent) and China (14 percent).
Move ahead to 2020, however, and 27 percent of people think China will be top dog, followed by India (17 percent), the United States (14 percent), and Japan (12 percent), according to the survey of 6,000 people in six countries done by drugmaker AstraZeneca.
The shift is not because America is doing less science and technology, but because countries such as China and India are doing more – a fact reflected in a jump in successful Asian research efforts in recent years.
A recent study from Thomson Reuters shows China is now the second-largest producer of scientific papers, after the United States.
Research and development spending by Asian nations as a group in 2008 was $387 billion, compared with $384 billion in the United States and $280 billion in Europe.
Sky’s The Limit
The 121-story Shanghai Tower is more than China's next record-setting building: It's an economic lifeline for the elite club of skyscraper builders.
Financial gloom has derailed plans for new towers in Chicago, Moscow, Dubai and other cities.
But in China, work on the 2,074-foot (632-meter) Shanghai Tower, due to be completed in 2014, and dozens of other tall buildings is rushing ahead, powered by a buoyant economy and providing a steady stream of work to architects and engineers.
The U.S. high-rise market is “pretty much dead,” said Dan Winey, a managing director for Gensler, the Shanghai Tower's San Francisco-based architects, tells the Associated Press. “For us, China in the next 10 to 15 years is going to be a huge market.”
China has six of the world's 15 tallest buildings — compared with three in the United States, the skyscraper's birthplace — and is constructing more at a furious pace, defying worries about a possible real estate boom and bust.
It is on track to pass America as the country with the most buildings among the 100 tallest by a wide margin.
“There are cities in China that most Western people have never heard of that have bigger populations and more tall buildings than half the prominent cities in the U.S.,” said Antony Wood, executive director of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.
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