China says it will build the world's largest super-collider in 2020, in an effort to understand more about the Higgs boson.

Super-colliders are massive systems of tubes and advanced instruments used to smash atomic particles together and dig around in the leftover bits.

The Higgs boson was discovered last year at the Swiss-based CERN; the current largest super-collider.

But now, China wants a closer look at the particle considered one of the fundamental building blocks of the universe.

The facility will have the capacity to generate millions of Higgs boson particles – many more than Europe's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) can, using seven times the energy of the LHC to smash electrons and protons at super high speeds to create the particles on an unprecedented scale.

“LHC is hitting its limits of energy level,” Wang Yifang, director of the Institute of High Energy Physics at the China Academy of Sciences, told the China Daily – a state-owned media outlet.

“It seems not possible to escalate the energy dramatically at the existing facility.”

While austerity measures and uncertain economic times have led many nations to cut research funding for projects without direct industrial uses, China has kept up funding for theoretical and practical science as well.

China’s super-collider has been on the drawing board since 2013, just after the Higgs bososn was uncovered in 2012.

Mr Wang suggested Qinhuangdao - a northern port city at the starting point of the Great Wall – could be an ideal location for the enormous underground facility.

He said China's rapid economic growth and large population could be directed towards a massive increase in basic and advanced scientific research.

“This is a machine for the world and by the world: not a Chinese one,” he said, highlighting the physicists from around the world who have already been in China helping with the project.