China Emphasizes Strategic Forecasting for Frontier Technologies

People's Daily reports that China must strengthen its strategic layout in frontier areas and enhance strategic forecasting capabilities for frontier technologies. General Secretary Xi Jinping emphasized that future industries require scientific planning and overall coordination, with a key focus on enhancing strategic forecasting abilities, exploring diverse technological routes, and conducting dynamic adjustments. This demands grasping multi-path evolution laws to improve scientific validity in direction selection, resource allocation, and policy support. Technological evolution rarely follows a linear process, leading to situations where dominant technological systems are not yet fully established for emerging future industries. Exploring multiple routes concurrently is objectively necessary, as demonstrated in digital life research where brain-computer interfaces have established parallel pathways spanning invasive, semi-invasive, and non-invasive technologies. Determining which route gains dominance depends on more than laboratory metrics, because initial scale advantages can reinforce a path through supporting equipment, standards, talent, supply chains, and user bases. Strategic forecasting requires continuous dynamic judgment of development potential, maturity, supporting conditions, and transition risks under clear national strategic goals, followed by timely adjustments based on scientific progress. To prevent technological forecasting from becoming static, mechanisms for continuous tracking, phased evaluation, and dynamic adjustment must be refined. Relying on rigid, unchanging project lists risks reinforcing existing pathways with policy resources and weakening the capacity to discover new technological routes as market environments and scientific conditions shift.

Strategic forecasting connects specific technological maturity stages with appropriate policy mechanisms, preventing identical policies from being used across different maturity levels. This phased approach guides whether initiatives should center on early basic research, pilot verification in application scenarios, or market competition.