Not to me. It could as well be an equal split of research and development, or fairly basic research focused mainly on product development.
>I'm neither agreeing nor disagreeing, but this evidence is unreliable. It might be a straight proxy for industrial development.
Industrial development still needs R&D to compete with industrial development in other parts of the world, it's not like statically applying what the state of the art was in the past.
In several areas we've seen the Chinese go from the same path the Taiwanese, South Korean, and Japanese went in the 60s to the 80s and 90s. From copy cats, to high quality manufacturers and eventual innovators.
One example whose products I've used: DJI for example is the leader in drones and perhaps gimbals, and even started to take down GoPro.
“18 JANUARY 2018
China declared world’s largest producer of scientific articles
Report shows increasing international competition, but suggests that United States remains a scientific powerhouse.”
However a mining corporation developing a new coal mine site counts that under their R&D budget - it is development. And I suspect the 'development' part of R&D is both substantial and possibly defined differently in different parts of the world with different norms depending on the industry.
I'm neither agreeing nor disagreeing, but this evidence is unreliable. It might be a straight proxy for industrial development.