| Basic research is the base and fountainhead of the general technological innovation activities, thus it is critical to a nation's long-term development. As one of the main channels that support basic research of our country, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) supports and encourages all scientists in the field of basic research to conduct free exploration. Its democratic management mechanism of relying on scientists and respecting scientific autonomy , combined with the operating mechanism of"fair competition and encouragement of innovation" enable its funding input more efficient compared to other mechanisms. Considering its orientation, scale of investment, financing scope, accuracy of the data and other factors, the funding and application status of NSFC can fully and truly reflect the level and activity of basic research in China.Since the 1990s, the administrative distribution of resources in basic research has changed dramatically. The development of basic research across provinces and municipalities shows a style of non- equilibrium distribution. In this process, what factors affect the activity and research level of basic research in difference provinces and municipalities? What's the geographical distribution of basic research in our country? Will it be a geographical cluster due to the excessive concentration of research resources? As the increasing of investment, how should the funding for basic research be allocated among provinces and municipalities? Research on these issues can not only help us learn more about the characteristics of the basic research input theoretically, but also provide policy basis for the our country's basic research investment. In the existing literatures, the study of basic research has been focused on input intensity, output performance evaluation and so on. It is relatively rare to see quantitative study on the affecting factors to the basic research. There is no quantitative study on the geographical distribution of basic research from provincial perspective.From the perspective of NSFC, this paper studies the issues mentioned above by combining qualitative and quantitative research methods. This paper first introduces the development history and the current management and planning system of our country's basic research ,and analyses the performance of our country's basic research in recent years. Secondly the paper investigates the invest channel, investing characteristics and existing problems of basic research in our country. Thirdly, taking NSFC as an example, the paper studies the main factors that affect the degree and level of provincial basic research using empirical method. Lastly, the paper discusses the geographical correlation issue of provincial basic from an NSFC perspective. The main innovation of this paper is as following compared to the existing research:â‘ It quantitatively studies the main factors that affect the degree and level of basic research in our country form a provincial perspective. The Chinese literature of competitive scientific funds distribution is mainly concentrated on the qualitative research of subject arrangement. A minority of quantitative research is mainly focused on the analyzing of universities. No literature is available on this issue from a provincial perspective. This paper quantitatively analyzes the main factors that affect the degree and level of basic research in our country by using a dynamic panel data of the application and funding of the General Projects of NSFC from 1998 to 2007. The results show that knowledge, scientific human capital and quality of economic development have significant effects on the activity and research level of provincial basic research, and also have positive relationship to the provincial application and funding activities. Provincial total economic scale doesn't necessarily promote basic research activities.â‘¡It quantitatively studies the geographical correlation of provincial basic research by employing spatial statistic method. In examining the regional distribution of the application and funding of NSFC projects, the conclusions of the existing literature are relatively simple due to the usage of only traditional statistic method and analysis of on its static characteristics with no dynamical analysis on its distribution condition. The study on the correlation of geographical distribution to the applying and funding activities of NSFC is still in blank. Whether the non-equilibrium distribution of NSFC funding activity will lead to a series of problems such as cluster needs is to be further discussed. Firstly, this paper discuses the space cluster effect of basic research theoretically. Then, it investigates the spatial distribution characteristic of the applying and funding activities of NSFC from the angle of space distance comprehensively by employing frontier spatial statistical methods and using the data of NSFC from 1998 to 2010. And it also compares the dynamic development trend of NSFC that differs from application technology and economic development. Finally, it focuses on analyzing geographical correlation of general projects among provinces and municipalities. The result shows that the applying activities of NSFC have shown a significant geographical agglomeration effects, and the geographical dependence will continue to increase. The geographical correlation of funding activities is increasing year by year. And it will probably show a significant geographical agglomeration effects around 2015.â‘¢It employs geographical statistical methods to quantitatively analyze the outcome of the implementation of the Fund for Less Developed Regions (FLDR) supported by the NSFC. Worldwide experiences reveal that it is a necessary practice to establish special funds for scientific research in less developed regions, in order to achieve balanced development coordination and sustainable development among regions. The extant researches on FLDR are mostly qualitative. Subject to the limitations of traditional statistical methods, analyses of the effect of FLDR under non-equilibrium geographical distribution have not been deep enough. This work comprehensively explores the results of FLDR in support of the development of basic research in remote areas, and thoroughly studies the role of the Funds in mitigating the geographical clustering phenomenon of basic research by using the recently developed spatial statistical methods. The results show that FLDR effectively balanced the geographical distribution of basic research across the country, namely to some extent they eased the regional concentration of basic research resources towards leading regions. Nonetheless, with the weakening of the role of FLDR, it is necessary to increase the intensity of support or adopt other new measures to reverse this undesired decline.
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