According to recent news from South Korean media, the South Korean Ministry of Science, Technology, Information and Communications (MIIT) released the "2022 Technical Level Assessment Results" on February 29, 2024, which showed that South Korea's development level in 11 key scientific and technological fields was surpassed by China for the first time.

According to Yonhap News Agency, the South Korean Ministry of Science and Technology held the 57th Operations Committee meeting of the National Science and Technology Consulting Conference on the same day and released the above results. It is understood that the evaluation of technological development level is carried out every two years. This time, relevant papers and patents of 136 key technologies in 11 scientific and technological fields of the main five objects were analyzed, and a survey was conducted with 1306 experts.

According to KBS TV, these 11 key scientific and technological fields in the country include: construction/transportation, disaster/safety, aerospace/aviation/ocean, national defense, machinery/manufacturing, materials/nanomaterials, agriculture, forestry and fishery/food, life/healthcare, energy/resources, environment/meteorology, information and communication technology (ICT), and other key scientific and technological fields and software.

The department held the 57th Operations Committee Meeting of the South Korean National Science and Technology Consulting Conference and published the above results. This time, relevant papers and patents of 136 key technologies in 11 science and technology fields from the main five countries were analyzed, and a survey was conducted with 1306 experts.

The results show that, in terms of overall technological level, if the highest technology ownership country is considered 100% by the United States, 94.7% by the European Union (EU), 86.4% by Japan, 82.6% by China, and 81.5% by South Korea. In the 2020 technology level assessment, compared to the United States, South Korea and China reached 80.1% and 80% respectively, but after two years, South Korea was overtaken by China.

In terms of technological gap, South Korea and China were also analyzed to be 3.3 years behind the United States in 2020, but in this evaluation, China (3 years) further narrowed the gap compared to South Korea (3.2 years).

If we only look at 50 national strategic technologies, the level of scientific and technological development in each country/region is ranked in the following order: the United States (100%), the European Union (92.3%), China (86.5%), Japan (85.2%), and South Korea (81.7%). The gap between South Korea and China has further widened.

From the perspective of 11 major fields, South Korea's technological level has improved in 9 areas compared to 2 years ago, but has declined in the fields of space, aviation, ocean, ICT, and software.

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