Tech Updates from Two Sessions and National Computing Platform
Issue 22, 14 March 2022
I. Military and Warfare
Nothing here this time!
II. SinoSync
Updates From Two Sessions
Last week was pretty much dominated by the developments of "Two Sessions" (Liǎnghuì 两会). It refers to the annual sessions of the National People's Congress (NPC) and Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). The fifth session of the 13th NPC and the Fifth session of the 13th CPPCC were held between 4 March 2022 to 11 March 2022.
According to the Report on the Execution of the Central and Local Budgets for 2021 presented at the 13th NPC by the Ministry of Finance of China, spending on science and technology in 2021 amounted to 320.554 billion yuan, 99.3% of the budgeted figure. The report said that in 2021, the central government increased spending on basic research in its general public budget by 15.3%. To unleash "creativity" in enterprises, the report suggests that extra tax deductions were raised from 75% on manufacturing enterprises’ R&D costs to 100%, and enterprises were permitted to settle taxes in advance to allow them to benefit from this policy as soon as possible. Other measures for SMEs and "little giants" were also mentioned in the report.
According to a government work report, China's high-tech manufacturing grew 18.2 percent in 2021. The Government work report also mentions implementing a three-year action plan for reforming the science and technology management system, reinforcing China’s strategic science and technology capabilities, further developing national laboratories and key national laboratories, and leveraging the strengths of universities, colleges, and research institutes.
The government work report also emphasized on development of the digital economy. This includes projects to develop an integrated national system of big data centers step by step, apply 5G technology on a larger scale, digitalization of industries, build smart cities and digital villages, etc.
A few lawmakers also raised issues related to cybersecurity in the sessions. For example, Pi Jianlong reportedly spoke on combatting cyber violence and the underground industry.
Metaverse is also featured in discussions of lawmakers. For example, Gao Yu, deputy to the National People’s Congress (NPC) expressed her concerns on metaverse. Metaverse fever has gripped China. Many tech companies are joining the metaverse bandwagon with Shanghai Data Exchange's latest addition to the list. While some expressed concerns, some delegates like Liu Wei, a CPPCC delegate and president of PCI Technology Group urged that the central government should lead the development of and applications for the metaverse. Kong Falong, an NPC delegate and party official from the Rural Credit Cooperatives of southern Jiangxi province suggested that government should set up a national metaverse research and development center. Some NPC and CPPCC delegates have also suggested additional measures to curb video game addictions and urged tighter government restrictions on the gaming industry.
National Computing Network
A plan released by China's National Development Reforms Commission (NDRC) to develop a "national computing network" generated a buzz among the delegates to the "Two Sessions" (Liǎnghuì 两会).
As SCMP reported, multiple delegates at the “two sessions” political gathering have made suggestions as to how China should build the mega-network leveraging the proposed national computing network. The news report further states that China’s major tech giants such as Tencent Holdings, Huawei Technologies Co, and Alibaba Group Holding’s cloud unit have all answered the call and vowed to build their own data computing centers in the network.
A representative of Nixingia, one of the regions part of the national computing network, said that this initiative will provide a new growth engine for these regions.
"Data from East Computing at West" Project
This computer network is being implemented as "Data from East Computing at West" (Dōng shù xī suàn 东数西算) (also referred to as "East Data West Calculation") project jointly released by the Central Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), and the National Energy Administration (NEA) on 17 February 2022.
The project has four objectives:
Improving China's overall computing power level. (是有利于提升国家整体算力水平)
It is conducive to promoting green development. (是有利于促进绿色发展)
It is conducive to expanding effective investment. (是有利于扩大有效投资)
It is conducive to promoting coordinated regional development. (是有利于推动区域协调发展)
Under the East and West initiative, the plan is to relocate computing resources from the country’s eastern regions to less-developed western regions. The Eastern region in China is wealthy and many tech hubs and clusters are concentrated in this region. A side effect of the reforms initiated in the late 1970s, China's eastern region flourished while the inner region and western region remained underdeveloped. As this disparity became evident in later decades, China's policymakers have scrambled to attract more investment and development in western regions. The proposed computing network is expected to redirect capital, talent, and technologies to the western part of the country.
Currently, most data centers in China are in eastern regions. Which has also increased energy consumption demand in these regions. The western region of China has many energy-rich renewable resources which can fulfill the power demand of these data centers. The push to develop a national computing network is also expected to improve cloud computing and big data capabilities.
In the initial stage, 10 data center clusters and
8 computing power hubs have been planned. Eight integrated computing hubs planned under this project are in:
Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region
Zhangjiakou data center cluster
Yangtze River Delta region
Yangtze River Delta ecological green integrated development demonstration zone data center cluster
Wuhu data center cluster
Southwestern Chengdu-Chongqing region
Tianfu data center cluster
Chongqing data center cluster
Southern Greater Bay region
A data center in Shaoguan
Guizhou Province
Gansu Province
Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (IMAR)
Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region (NHAR)
Businesses that do not require high network requirements, such as back-end processing, offline analysis, and storage backup, could be the first to move western hubs. Eastern hubs will serve businesses that cannot work with a delay caused by long-distance network transmission and where western data centers cannot meet computing power requirements. Such businesses include industrial Internet, financial securities, disaster warning, telemedicine, video calls, artificial intelligence reasoning, etc.
The next stage of the project is expected to fulfill four objectives:
To strengthen the connectivity of internet facilities and accelerate the data exchange connection between the east and the west.
To strengthen the linkage of energy distribution and promote renewable energy power generation companies to supply power to data centers.
To support technological innovation and integration including heterogeneous computing power integration, cloud network integration, multi-cloud scheduling, data security flow, and other technological innovations and model innovations.
To promote the data center industry ecosystem including supporting the western computing power hub to develop labor-intensive industries such as data processing, data cleaning, and data content services.
China's computing demands are increasing with incased digitalization. The NDRC data suggests that China's combined computing power has reached 130EFLOPS (1.3 trillion floating-point operations per second). Demand for computing power in China is expected to grow at a rate of more than 20% every year. Hence this plan is expected to boost the integrated and coordinated development of computing power in China.
Computing demands also come with the baggage of huge energy consumption. Moving data centers to the west with a focus on renewable energy will also contribute to China's carbon neutrality goals. In the 2020 UN Climate Ambition Summit, Xi Jinping had announced that China's carbon dioxide emissions will peak before 2030 and China aims to achieve carbon neutrality before 2060.
Additional Reading:
Two UK Huawei directors resign after company keeps silent on the Russian attack
China’s top chipmaker SMIC keeping a low profile after US warning over Russian sanctions
III. Before You Go
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Megha Pardhi is a Research Analyst at The Takshashila Institution. She tweets at @pardhimegha21.