According to the National Bureau of Statistics, R&D spending rose 11.6 percent year-on-year to 1.75 trillion yuan (about 280 billion U.S. dollars) in 2017. The spending accounted for 2.12 percent of China’s gross domestic product. Chinese enterprises spent more than 1.37 trillion yuan on R&D last year, up 13.1 percent from 2016, while R&D spending at government institutions and colleges increased 7 percent and 5.2 percent, respectively.
Some 92 billion yuan, or 5.3 percent of the total spending, was put into fundamental research in 2017, up 11.8 percent from a year earlier. China had 5.35 million people working in R&D at the end of 2015, the world’s largest pool of R&D personnel.
CAS news release, February 14, 2018