Recent back-to-back convenings of the National Advanced Manufacturing Conference and the World Manufacturing Convention have placed manufacturing in the spotlight, reinforcing a shared consensus that advanced manufacturing must be continuously expanded and strengthened.
During the 15th Five-Year Plan period, how can advanced manufacturing be made bigger and stronger on an ongoing basis? The key lies in building on existing foundations, aligning closely with the direction of industrial transformation, and further converting scale and systemic strengths into innovation, competitive, and developmental advantages.
Manufacturing is the foundation of a nation and the pillar of a strong country, while advanced manufacturing is a critical pillar of the real economy. Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, the nation's advanced manufacturing sector has steadily grown and expanded. Value-added output from manufacturing has ranked first globally for 16 consecutive years, accounting for nearly 30 percent of the world total. Leading fields such as photovoltaics, communications, high-speed rail, and shipbuilding have achieved global leadership. Robotics, artificial intelligence, and innovative drugs are flourishing. New quality productive forces are gathering momentum, and advanced manufacturing is surging with vitality. At the same time, it must be recognized that bottlenecks remain in some key and core technologies, an issue that urgently needs to be resolved in developing advanced manufacturing.
Entering the 15th Five-Year Plan period, continuously expanding and strengthening advanced manufacturing should not be simply understood as expanding capacity or increasing quantity. It is more important to adhere to intelligent, green, and integrated development, and to drive continuous improvement in the quality and efficiency of manufacturing development.
Innovation is the primary driving force for making advanced manufacturing bigger and stronger. Today's manufacturing competition increasingly reflects a contest of scientific and technological innovation capabilities, the efficiency of commercializing research outcomes, and industrial organizational capacity. It is essential to uphold industry-demand-driven technological breakthroughs, strengthen enterprises' principal role in innovation, promote deep integration of the innovation chain, industrial chain, capital chain, and talent chain, and enable more research achievements to move from the laboratory to the production line. In particular, new technologies such as artificial intelligence should be better embedded across the entire process of R&D and design, production and manufacturing, business management, and service support, driving holistic and systemic transformation in manufacturing.
Continuously expanding and strengthening advanced manufacturing cannot rely on a few enterprises advancing alone; it also requires industrial chain coordination and cluster development. Whether it is the C919 large passenger aircraft, domestically built large cruise ships, or new energy vehicles and industrial robots, none is the solo performance of a single company. Rather, they are the result of coordinated efforts across numerous links including materials, equipment, software, components, and services. It is necessary to continuously enhance industrial foundational capabilities, cultivate advanced manufacturing clusters, promote integrated development of large, medium, and small enterprises, encourage upstream and downstream enterprises to strengthen cooperation in technology, standards, talent, and application scenarios, and form an industrial ecosystem led by "chain leader" enterprises and supported by specialized and sophisticated small and medium-sized enterprises.
Continuously expanding and strengthening advanced manufacturing also requires allocating resources and expanding space on a larger scale. The country's super-large market provides rich application scenarios for new technologies and new products, and creates conditions for enterprises to continuously iterate and innovate. It is important to create new demand with high-quality supply, win domestic and international markets with premium products and services, steadily expand opening up and cooperation in manufacturing, encourage multinational enterprises to deeply participate in the nation's innovation and industrial development, elevate the industrial level through open competition, and move from "Made in China" to "Created in China."
The 15th Five-Year Plan period is a critical phase for consolidating the foundation and making comprehensive efforts toward basically achieving socialist modernization. By continuously expanding and strengthening advanced manufacturing and consolidating and bolstering the foundation of the real economy, the nation's economy will gain a more solid industrial underpinning and more abundant development momentum, continuously opening up new prospects on the new journey of advancing Chinese-style modernization. Turning the blueprint into reality depends on a better combination of a proactive government and an effective market. On the one hand, it is necessary to improve policy support, public services, the standards system, and factor guarantees in response to enterprise concerns, and continuously optimize a market environment of fair competition. On the other hand, it is important to respect enterprises' principal status, fully leverage the decisive role of the market in resource allocation, and allow enterprises with genuine technology, market potential, and promise to stand out.