On December 15, MOST published the “China Science and Technology Talent Development Report (2022)”. It shows that the full-time equivalent of China’s R&D personnel has increased from 3.247 million person-years in 2012 to 6.354 million person-years in 2022, firmly ranking first in the world.
The Report is the fifth publication in this series and is prepared and published every two years by the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST).
The Report points out that in recent years, China has been expanding the scale of scientific and technological talents, while focusing on optimizing the structure of scientific and technological talents, creating a diversified, multi-level talent team, accelerating the construction of a clear positioning, enhanced effectiveness, and a reasonable ladder of strategic scientists, scientific and technological leaders, as well as innovation teams, young scientific and technological talents and engineers of excellence, a full range of strategic talent force.
Data show that China’s science and technology, agriculture and medicine graduates have exceeded 2.5 million people. Not only is there a rich reserve of scientific and technological talent resources, but the international academic influence of top scientific and technological talents continues to improve, with more and more Chinese scientists moving to the center of the international academic stage, and the number of highly cited scientists in the world increasing from 111 in 2014 to 1,169 in 2022, ranking second in the world. More outstanding young scientific and technological talents are taking the lead in major national scientific and technological tasks, and more than 80% of the researchers under 45 years old in the National Key R&D Program are researchers.
(Note: “Full-time equivalent of R&D personnel” is an internationally recognized indicator for comparing scientific and technological manpower inputs, referring to the workload of R&D personnel calculated on the basis of the time they actually spend on R&D activities, and the unit is “person-year”.)
In 2022, China had more than 6,3 million researchers (FTE)