‘Seize historical opportunities’, the president says as China’s highest scientific honour goes to lithium battery and military radar trailblazers

Each 2025 laureate received 5 million yuan (about US$736,000) in prize money at the national science assembly held at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.

The 2026-2030 plan period was a critical phase for building a tech powerhouse, Xi noted, stressing the need for breakthrough innovation to drive Chinese modernisation.

However, this required overcoming entrenched structural hurdles, he said, admitting that China’s tech sector still suffered from “insufficient original innovation capability in certain fields, an irrational talent structure, and low efficiency in tech investment”, alongside institutional bottlenecks that clogged progress.

Xi linked the domestic push to the shifting global power dynamics. With global competition intensifying, “technological strength and innovation capability have increasingly become a nation’s core competitiveness”, he said.

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) – driven by data, computing power and algorithms, and rooted in cross-disciplinary breakthroughs like neuroscience and mathematics – presented a “pressing” situation, he cautioned, calling on China to “seize historical opportunities to accelerate high-level self-reliance”.