Xue Lan, deputy president with Chinese Public Administration Society and dean of the School of Public Policy and Management at Tsinghua University, delivered a speech on the fourth industrial revolution at the university's TED-like forum "Humanity Tsinghua". The following are key passages from his speech released by the forum's official social media account on Wechat.

Is China ready for the challenges when faced with the fourth industrial revolution?

First of all, from the perspective of science and technology research, China’s innovation has made rapid progress in the past 40 years. China has become the main force of scientific research in the world, ranking only second to the United States in size of science and technology research and development investment.

Second, from the perspective of output, since 2007, Chinese scholars have published more English-language papers in international academic journals than any European and American countries, except the US. Around 2011, the amount of papers published in high-level academic journals by Chinese scholars also surpassed their counterparts in any other countries except the US. Chinese scholars have published more papers on artificial intelligence than any other countries.

Third, from the perspective of technological innovation, China has made tremendous progress in transforming knowledge into commercial value, and in several fields China has already become among the leading countries. For example, China leads the world in terms of the quantity of licensed patents. Such success is due to innovations in institution. China has formed a stable and diversified science and technology research investment mechanism. Chinese companies have become very active in innovation. At present, 77 percent of China's R&D investment is made by enterprises.

The innovation achievements cannot be separated from the 40-year unremitting reform and opening-up. At the same time, China has also purchased a large number of international scientific and technological invention patents. Currently, apart from the US, China spends more on purchasing international patents than any other country.

Yet, China still has points of weakness in innovation.

First of all, China lags behind in original scientific research.

Second, China's innovation and development levels are extremely unbalanced. Although China's GDP ranks the second in the world, its labor productivity at the 90th slot, indicating that the overall quality of the Chinese economy is not good enough. While many foreign companies have been investing in basic research, Chinese companies spend almost all or above 90 percent of their R&D investment in application development.

Third, China is very dependent on imports in some key high-tech areas. For example, China currently spends more money on imported chips than on oil imports.

In addition, there is still large room for improvement in institutional systems, as well as innovation management systems.

Will China lead in the fourth industrial revolution?

In the previous three industrial revolutions, China started late; but for the fourth one, China is ahead of other countries.

It is urgent for China to improve its innovation management system, because China's innovation policy study in the past used to assume innovation is all good, and thus, focused on how to promote innovation, and overlooked risks and negative impacts rising from innovation or how to avoid such risks and negative impacts.

Public opinion should be effectively incorporated into innovation policymaking through establishing mechanisms to exchange views on technological risks and among different interest groups.

China must further strengthen weakness in scientific research, especially in fields such as pharmaceuticals, semiconductor design, special pharmaceutical and chemical materials, and in many user-oriented industries.

More consideration should be taken into account on how to better bridge the academic and business communities.

To secure future success through institution building.

First is societal insight. Market and scientists have decided many science and technology development in the past, but many choices of technologies of the fourth industrial revolution involve ethical issues or issues related with values. Under such circumstances, some of the technologies are very dangerous, therefore, in the process of selecting such technologies, every society group should participate. Second is simultaneous design. Third is adaptive governance. Fourth is international participation. In the past many of the rules were established without China's participation. Now, China is at a leading place with some other countries, and China is able to, and also must, participate in rule making. Therefore, China must work with other countries in the world to create a community with a shared future for humankind.

The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of China Watch.