China Innovation Index 2025 shows: The talent pool for science and engineering continues to expand

China News Service, Beijing, October 23 (Reporter Wang Enbo) The National Bureau of Statistics of China announced on the 23rd that China's innovation index in 2025 will be 185.5 (based on 100 in 2015), an increase of 6.4% over the previous year, and an increase of 1.1 percentage points over the previous year. The index shows that China’s talent pool in science and engineering continues to expand.

Looking at different fields, the innovation environment index, innovation input index, innovation output index and innovation effectiveness index were 199.9, 172.2, 233.0 and 137.0 respectively, an increase of 7.5%, 5.9%, 8.0% and 2.9% respectively over the previous year.

Lin Mei, a statistician at the Department of Social Science and Culture of the National Bureau of Statistics, said that among the 18 evaluation indexes in four sub-fields, two indexes, including the proportion index of enterprises enjoying super tax deductions and exemptions and the ownership index of high-value invention patents per 10,000 R&D (research and experimental development) personnel, achieved double-digit growth.

Among the evaluation indicators, the proportion index of science and engineering graduates in the working-age population increased by 8.7% compared with the previous year. In recent years, the integrated development of China's education, science and technology talents has been steadily advancing, and science and engineering graduates have maintained steady growth. In 2025, the number of graduates with bachelor's degrees or above in science, engineering, agriculture and medicine will reach 3.306 million, an increase of 161,000 from the previous year, accounting for 51.7%, an increase of 1.0 percentage points from the previous year, providing important talent support for scientific and technological innovation.

Investment in innovation has also increased steadily. In 2025, China's basic research funding will reach 283.46 billion yuan, an increase of 13.3% over the previous year, continuing the double-digit rapid growth momentum, 5.1 percentage points higher than the growth rate of R&D funding; accounting for 7.21% of R&D funding, an increase of 0.33 percentage points from the previous year, and the proportion of basic research has steadily increased.

In terms of innovation output, as of the end of 2025, China's number of high-value invention patents reached 2.292 million, accounting for 43.1% of the total number of valid domestic invention patents, an increase of 1.5 percentage points from the previous year; the number of high-value invention patents per 10,000 people was 16, an increase of 2 from the previous year.