Elderly women in Shanghai, China, suffering?from dementia, one of the diseases the new effort may tackle. Qilai Shen/In Pictures Ltd./Corbis/Getty Images

The nascent China Brain Project took another step toward reality last week with the launch of the Shanghai Research Center for Brain Science and Brain-Inspired Intelligence. The new center and its Beijing counterpart, launched 2 months ago, are expected to become part of an ambitious national effort to bring China to the forefront of neuroscience. But details of that 15-year project—expected to rival similar U.S. and EU efforts in scale and ambition—are still being worked out, 2 years after the government made it a priority.

Preparation for the national effort “was taking quite a long time,” says Zhang Xu, a neuroscientist and executive director of the new center here. So Beijing and Shanghai got started on their own plans, he says. China’s growing research prowess and an increasing societal interest in neuroscience—triggered in part by an aging population—as well as commercial opportunities and government support are all coming together to make this “a good time for China’s brain science efforts,” Zhang says.

Government planners called for brain research to be a key science and technology project in the nation’s 13th Five-Year Plan, adopted in spring 2016. The effort would have three main pillars, according to a November 2016 Neuron paper from a group that included Poo Mu-ming, director of Shanghai’s Institute of Neuroscience (ION), part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). It would focus on basic research on neural mechanisms underlying cognition, translational studies of neurological diseases with an emphasis on early diagnosis and intervention, and brain simulations to advance artificial intelligence and robotics. Support under the 5-year plan was just the start of a 15-year program, the group wrote.

Please refer to http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/05/heres-how-china-challenging-us-and-european-brain-initiatives to read more.