China's R&D spending up 8.2 pct in 2025

An employee works at Hebei Chenguang Detection Technology Service Co., Ltd. in Handan, north China's Hebei Province, on June 26, 2026. (Photo by Liang Jiayuan/Xinhua)

BEIJING, Oct. 16 (Xinhua) -- China's research and development (R&D) expenditure rose 8.2 percent year on year to 3.93 trillion yuan (about 584.5 billion U.S. dollars) in 2025, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said on Friday.

Over the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-2025), the country's R&D spending rose at an average annual rate of 10 percent, making China the world's second-largest R&D investor, said Luo Qiushi, an NBS statistician.

China's R&D intensity, which measures spending as a share of GDP, rose 0.11 percentage points to 2.8 percent last year, exceeding the OECD average of 2.72 percent for the first time and ranking 12th in the world.

By type of R&D activity, spending on basic research, applied research and experimental development grew 13.3 percent, 3.2 percent and 8.4 percent year on year to 283.46 billion yuan, 444.16 billion yuan and 3.2 trillion yuan, respectively.

Enterprise R&D spending exceeded 3 trillion yuan for the first time, accounting for 77.4 percent of the total.

Enterprises have accounted for more than 77 percent of the country's total R&D spending for four consecutive years, and their contribution to the overall increase reached 73.7 percent, cementing their role as the main engine of China's R&D spending expansion, according to the NBS.