Science and technology will play a major role in economic and social development in China, Minister of Science and Technology Xu Guanhua has said.

Cooperation with other countries will also be an important part of the work in fields like global climate change and oceanography studies, astronomy and earthquake research.

China will continue to expand multilateral technological cooperation by supporting domestic research institutions to join their overseas peers for technical collaboration, Xu said during a recent interview with China Daily, reviewing the achievements of the National Key Technologies Research and Development Programme gained during the ninth Five-Year Plan (1996-2000) period.

The programme was initiated in 1982 to provide technological support for significant projects related to the national economy, such as infrastructure construction and communications.

Overseas scientists and academic organizations are being encouraged to cooperate with their Chinese counterparts through jointly developing research projects or establishing technological companies or institutes in China, said Xu.

China has achieved remarkable progress in seeking new technological discoveries, which have been important to the national economy over the past few years, said Xu.

Technological progress has been beneficial in the industry, agriculture, energy, transport, natural resources exploration and utilization, environmental protection, health, medical care and disasters prevention and mitigation sectors.

During the ninth Five-Year Plan period, the popularization of high-yield crop seeds and other new technology have helped swell the country's harvest of grain by 150 billion kilograms, statistics from the ministry indicate.

Technological progress has also provided powerful support for industrial development over the past five years. A new oil extraction technology has enabled the Daqing Oilfield in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province and the Shengli Oilfield in eastern Shandong Province to raise oil production threefold over the past five years, according to the ministry's statistics.

Technological progress has laid good foundations for China to conduct international scientific cooperation, sources from the ministry's department for international cooperation have said.

Scientific cooperation between China and developed countries has shifted from former academic exchanges to the present joint collaboration programmes, such as earthquake studies, according to the department.

(China Daily 06/18/2001)