Chinese Nanotech Funding Comparable to U.S.

RobertBradbury writes "Nature is reporting here that the Chinese Academy of Sciences has prompted the government into funding the construction of a new National Nanoscience Center in Beijing. The center is estimated to cost 250-500 million renminbi (yaun) (~8.3 renminbi/$). The overall Chinese funding for nanoscience is 2.5 billion renminbi for the next 5 years ($60 million/yr). If one considers the according to the CIA World Fact Book, the Chinese GDP per person is an order of magnitude less than that of the U.S. and according to this article, salries for skilled scientific workers range from $120-360/month (academic) to $960/month (commercial), that would suggest that labor costs in China are approximately an order of magnitude below those in the U.S. So the Chinese nanotechnology research effort may well be comparable in terms of the number of researchers funded to the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative!"