JNN 06 Dec 2010 : A recent survey shows that Chinese people have a strong sense of optimism and that the country will overtake the US and Japan in innovations by the year 2020.

The poll, conducted by drugmaker AstraZeneca across Britain, the US, Sweden, Japan, India and China, found that the Chinese and the Indians had a growing sense of optimism while people of the developed Western countries showed relative pessimism.
More than half of the participants in China and India said their countries would be the world’s most innovative by 2020, while only one in 20 Britons believed the UK capable of such an achievement.
Asians voted for communications and computing to trigger the most number of innovations, while American and European respondents gave the credit to the invention of vaccines and antibiotics.
China is currently the world’s second-largest economy and biggest manufacturer, Reuters reported.
Based the poll’s results, the United States ranks the world’s most innovative country followed by Japan and China.
Some 27 percent of the 6,000 participants said China will be the number one country in innovations in the next ten years, followed by India with 17 percent, the United States 14 percent and Japan 12 percent.
Experts say China’s success has nothing to do with the United States having less interest in science and technology, but is due to China and India’s doing more.
A report released last month by Thomson Reuters said Europe and Asia were catching up with the US in dominating the world of scientific research.
The study showed that China was now the second-largest producer of scientific papers after the US with nearly 11 percent of the world’s total.