If yesterday’s successful launch of Chandrayaan-2 is seen as a response to China surging ahead in space, a look at how China fares in the overall tech race is illuminating. Beijing has invested billions of dollars in recent years to develop the civilian and military applications of emerging technologies such as 5G, semiconductors, microchips, artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing and others to transform the country from an assembly line of low tech manufactured goods into the preeminent economic and technological power manufacturing high tech goods.

Though China has made impressive progress in exploiting several applications, claims being made in some international media that China will be the world leader in these technologies in a few years, are exaggerated and premature. Large Chinese investments have not always translated into technological successes. However, India has to take note of China’s achievements in critical technologies given our adversarial strategic relationship.

China has made an early start in setting up the 5G infrastructure and decided to roll out this technology from 2020, the second country after South Korea. In AI, China has progressed in facial and image recognition, manufacturing drones and robots; on the military side, China is researching air, land, sea and undersea autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles which can assist in reconnaissance and attacks on enemy aircraft and vessels. China’s army is trying to use advances in quantum radar and sensing to gain advantages in stealth technology. Its navy is trying to develop a quantum compass for its submarines which would not require satellite based navigation.

In semiconductors and microchips the Chinese story has, so far, been more of failures than successes. Since the 1990s, it has made numerous efforts to design and fabricate its own chips investing billions of dollars in several companies but mostly not succeeded. China imports about 80% of its microchip requirement; in 2017, it spent $260 billion on imports of semiconductors and chips, more than its imports of crude oil. China is aggressively continuing with its chip making efforts trying to acquire foreign technologies through outright purchase, joint venture, stealth and local innovation; it is believed that China will take about 20 years to reach the current levels of chip specialisation in the West.

In AI, lot of credit for China’s successes goes to American and other non-Chinese researchers and companies. According to a Tsinghua University study, more than half of China’s AI papers were international joint publications. All the software development of Chinese drone maker DJI is performed at DJI’s American office. China’s strength is mainly in AI applications and it is still weak in core technologies of AI, such as hardware and algorithm development.

In quantum computing also, many problems remain unresolved such as mastering materials use, quantum chip design and manufacturing; also the development of a functional quantum computer remains several years away. From here on, progress in these technologies will be slowed down by a number of factors. The US has started denying access to leading Chinese companies in its market, imposed restraints on Chinese students studying robotics, aerospace, semiconductors and quantum computing in US universities, and is urging its allies and friends not to allow Chinese companies in their countries for national security reasons.

However, compared to India, China has made considerable progress in developing several applications of these technologies which will impinge on our economy, defence and foreign policy. India will have to live with a much stronger and aggressive China whose economy is already five times bigger than ours.

Its military will become even more challenging with new weapons in cyber warfare, missiles, drone and robot technologies, space, stealth and quantum technology based platforms. India’s investments and research programmes in these technologies are presently at an incipient stage, very far behind those of China. Our political leadership, defence establishment, scientific and academic institutions, and industry have to work together and craft a suitable strategy to jointly develop select applications at an accelerated pace, to defend our critical interests.

If we lag behind too much, it will lead to further erosion of India’s economic and military standing and marginalisation of India’s position in the regional and global power matrix.