The impact and quality of China's scientific papers also left much to be desired. The 2-million-plus papers published by Chinese scientists in the past decade received an average of 10 citations each, ranking China 16th out of the 22 nations that had published more than 200,000 papers during the same period, according to the data for 2018.

To tackle these issues, Bai, from CAS, said in December that China's scientists will need to focus on solving key technical issues that are hampering the nation's socioeconomic development.

"We need to enhance basic and frontier scientific research, thus overcoming our lack of original groundbreaking research and innovation," he said.