China's Innovation Challenge and the Remaking of the Chinese Academy of Sciences

The remarkable pace of China's economic development since the late-1970s-with annual GDP growth averaging 9.8 percent over the last 28 years-is making China into an economic powerhouse.Measured by nominal GDP, China today is the world's fourth largest economy or, in purchasing power parity terms, the world's second largest (after the United States).However, the rapid economic transformation occurring in China has raised concerns among the country's leadership, and foreign observers, that the growth trajectory-with its overinvestment, resource and labor intensity, and negative environmental and distributive spillovers-has become unsustainable.Hence, the quality of growth has been undergoing a thorough reexamination in the context of national development goals for the next 15 years; the government's goal foresees the establishment of a "well-off society" by the year 2020 in which the per capita GDP will reach US$3000.This goal will require the maintenance of a high rate of growth, but China hopes to find a growth path which avoids the negative features of the recent development experience including, in the words of Premier Wen Jiabao, "an irrational economic structure, the overproduction of low-quality goods, low rates of return, and increasingly severe constraints resulting from energy and other resource scarcity and severe environmental degradation." 1 The keys to sustainable and quality growth, in the