GoKawiilAs the country looks to commercial companies to drive innovation, it has a golden opportunity to support open science and increase its output in key areas.
Chinese companies have conventionally invested heavily in the applied sciences, but less so in fundamental research.Credit: Li Zhihua/China News Service/VCG/Getty
China’s firms and entrepreneurs are increasingly important for the nation’s research system as it seeks to further align its scientific output to the needs of its economy. That’s according to an analysis in Nature Index’s latest China supplement, published this week. The findings come hot on the heels of the country’s 15th five-year plan, which covers the period from 2026 to 2030. It describes businesses as the ‘main entity’ of innovation.
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It’s not difficult to see why. In 2023, the latest year for which data are available from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), China’s business sector contributed about 80% of the nation’s US$780 billion expenditure on research and development (R&D) when adjusted for currency and purchasing power — up from 75% in 2015 (see go.nature.com/4c2tuav). In the United States, just 70% of the country’s total expenditure of $820 billion came from businesses in 2023.
One challenge for China is that only a tiny fraction of its business investment goes to fundamental research, and its overall spending in this area still lags considerably behind that of the United States. According to the latest OECD data, less than 1% of the research done by China’s business sector in 2023 was in fundamental sciences, compared with 6% in the United States (see go.nature.com/3nwh2jj).
If the Chinese government is committed to expanding innovation, it should incentivize companies to funnel extra R&D funds into fundamental research. And more of this work should be published according to open-science standards and undergoing peer review. There are many benefits to doing open science, as we have set out before — not least because the outcomes and results can be tested and verified. Robust findings by commercial R&D teams are good not only for science, but also for consumers and society as a whole.
China could be the world’s biggest public funder of science within two years
There are signs of change. According to the OECD data, China’s businesses have been increasing the proportion of fundamental research that they do. Last September, China’s DeepSeek-R1 system became the first mainstream large language model to undergo full peer review in a leading academic journal (G. Guo et al. Nature 645, 633; 2025).
As China’s government works to improve links between research and economic needs, there are signs that it wants to delegate decision-making powers around innovation to businesses. According to the five-year plan summary published by the National People’s Congress — China’s state legislature — the country would “implement the principal role of enterprises in technological innovation decision-making”.
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