Arya News - China’s rapid innovation shows Korea’s structural gaps in batteries, chips, and AI.
SEOUL – For years, South Korea drew comfort from a familiar belief. China might scale faster, but Korea would stay ahead in the technologies that mattered most: semiconductors, precision manufacturing and secondary batteries.
That assumption no longer holds.
China’s rapid innovation shows Korea’s structural gaps in batteries, chips, AI
For years, South Korea drew comfort from a familiar belief. China might scale faster, but Korea would stay ahead in the technologies that mattered most: semiconductors, precision manufacturing and secondary batteries.
That assumption no longer holds.
The latest government assessment points not to a temporary slip, but to a change in direction. China has moved ahead in areas that Korea once treated as defensible ground, and the gap is widening.
A 2024 evaluation reported by the Ministry of Science and ICT shows China’s overall technological capability exceeding Korea’s by 0.7 years, up from 0.2 years just two years earlier.
The symbolic loss is batteries. In 2022, Korea led China by 0.9 years in secondary battery technology. By 2024, China had taken the top position, leaving Korea 0.2 years behind. This was the last strategic field where Korea still held a clear global lead.
Semiconductors tell a similar story. Korea still dominates memory chips, but in chips and displays overall, China has edged ahead in relative standing, reaching 91.5 percent of the US benchmark versus Korea’s 91.2 percent. The margin is narrow, yet the reversal carries weight for the Korean economy built on technological credibility.
The shift is unmistakable. Across 136 core technologies in 11 strategic fields, Korea now ranks last among the US, the EU, China and Japan. In the narrower set of 50 national strategic technologies, Korea leads China in only six, down from 17 in 2022. Areas such as advanced bio and next-generation nuclear power have also slipped away.
What stands out most is speed. Over the past two years, China reduced its technology gap with the US by 0.8 years. Korea managed half that pace. In AI, now the engine of progress across industries, Korea stands at 80.6 percent of the US frontier with a 2.1-year lag. China, at 93 percent, is closer and moving faster.
The explanation lies in structure, not luck. China has treated innovation as a national campaign. Annual research and development spending exceeds 230 trillion won ($159 billion). About 1.44 million researchers work within a dense network of roughly 470 national-level research platforms. China’s technological push is relentless, but it sustains velocity.
More importantly, China has shifted from production to ecosystems. In semiconductors, it has built competitive strength in chip design, advanced packaging and AI chips, even under export controls imposed by the US during President Donald Trump’s first term. AI is no longer a stand-alone sector, but an accelerator for robotics, quantum technologies and advanced bio.
The old vertical model, with Korea as the designer and China as the factory, is finished.
Competition is now horizontal, ecosystem against ecosystem. Yet Korea’s regulation still moves at a manufacturing era pace, slowing experimentation and scale.
Talent is the sharper constraint. This year, students admitted to industry-linked engineering programs at top-rated universities declined enrollment, despite near-guaranteed jobs at major firms such as Samsung Electronics and SK hynix. Many chose medical schools instead.
From an individual perspective, the choice is rational. Medicine offers stability, income and status that research careers no longer promise. From a national perspective, it erodes the science base just as competition intensifies. China produces roughly five million engineering graduates a year and identifies elite talent early. In contrast, Korea’s pipeline is shrinking.
None of this means Korea’s technology story is over. The country still retains strengths in memory chips, advanced processes and global commercialization. But the belief in automatic superiority has faded.
Technology leadership now aligns directly with economic security and national resilience. The question is not whether Korea can outspend China. It cannot. The question is whether it can reorganize around speed, talent and selective focus before the gap becomes entrenched.