Several Chinese researchers have said that the volume of imports of high-tech products from overseas can continue to grow alongside efforts to boost domestic innovation.
They say that this kind of dual-track approach can improve the quality of economic development, while also meeting the needs of domestic consumers and local manufacturers.
China has seen substantial continuing advancement in the domestic development of high-tech products, thanks to its growing capacity for domestic innovation.
However, there is still a gap in some areas in terms of the quality and complexity of products built in China compared to what is available in overseas markets.
Qu Xianming, an official with the Chinese Academy of Engineering, explains that there is still a gap between the quality of the machine tools produced by Chinese enterprises compared with the products available from German manufacturers.
"Germany has great advantages when it comes to producing highly-accurate advanced machine tools, as their products have a high level of reliability and can maintain a high degree of precision. Although China can produce machine tools, they have less stability and reliability, and their level of accuracy is lower," says Qu.
Liu Zhiqiang, the owner of a Beijing-based high-tech firm, says that Chinese enterprises will need to continue to purchase advanced technologies from overseas if their development outpaces the improvements in products that are available locally.
"It's not necessarily that you can successfully produce something advanced right after you invest heavily in it. There's also the possibility that, although you invest heavily and eventually produce it, the product might already be out of date, as there's an upgraded version of the product every year, and it's often difficult for you to keep pace with developments. So, if there are already advanced technologies available, we can try to purchase them," says Liu.
Bai Ming, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation, believes that increasing the imports of high-tech products and services can help to meet the growing demands for advanced products in the domestic market.
"In the past, people's livelihood did not improve, and our foreign exchange reserves were insufficient, which meant our abilities fell short of our wishes. But now, our economic strength has been increased significantly, and we have the ability to expand our imports to meet increasing domestic demand," says Bai.
He adds that increasing imports of high-tech products from abroad is also favorable for the development of China's domestic industries.
"With imports being expanded and more advanced products from overseas being introduced, there will be much more competition among our domestic industries. Many of those industries may set targets to produce something with the same quality and character as these imports. Because of this, there will be good interaction and competition between our domestic markets and the advanced imports," says Bai.
