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Science and technology | Red moon risen

China has become a scientific

superpower
From plant biology to superconductor physics the country is at the cutting edge

photograph: liu xu/polaris/eyevine

Jun 12th 2024 | london and beijing Share

Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android.

I n the atrium of a research building at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (cas) in

Beijing is a wall of patents. Around five metres wide and two storeys high, the wall
displays 192 certificates, positioned in neat rows and tastefully lit from behind. At
ground level, behind a velvet rope, an array of glass jars contain the innovations that
the patents protect: seeds.

cas—the world’s largest research organisation—and institutions around China

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 cas—the world’s largest research organisation—and institutions around China
produce a huge amount of research into the biology of food crops. In the past few years
Chinese scientists have discovered a gene that, when removed, boosts the length and
weight of wheat grains, another that improves the ability of crops like sorghum and
millet to grow in salty soils and one that can increase the yield of maize by around 10%.
In autumn last year, farmers in Guizhou completed the second harvest of genetically
modified giant rice that was developed by scientists at cas.

The Chinese Communist Party (ccp) has made agricultural research—which it sees as
key to ensuring the country’s food security—a priority for scientists. Over the past
decade the quality and the quantity of crop research that China produces has grown
immensely, and now the country is widely regarded as a leader in the field. According
to an editor of a prestigious European plant-sciences journal, there are some months
when half of the submissions can come from China.

A journey of a thousand miles

The rise of plant-science research is not unique in China. In 2019 The Economist
surveyed the research landscape in the country and asked whether China could one
day become a scientific superpower. Today, that question has been unequivocally
answered: “yes”. Chinese scientists recently gained the edge in two closely watched
measures of high-quality science, and the country’s growth in top-notch research
shows no sign of slowing. The old science world order, dominated by America, Europe
and Japan, is coming to an end.

One way to measure the quality of a

country’s scientific research is to tally the
number of high-impact papers produced
each year—that is, publications that are
cited most often by other scientists in their
own, later work. In 2003 America produced
20 times more of these high-impact papers
than China, according to data from
Clarivate, a science analytics company (see
chart 1). By 2013 America produced about
four times the number of top papers and, in
the most recent release of data, which
examines papers from 2022, China had
surpassed both America and the entire
European Union (eu).

Metrics based on citations can be gamed,

of course. Scientists can, and do, find ways
to boost the number of times their paper is
mentioned in other studies, and a recent
working paper, by Qui Shumin, Claudia
Steinwender and Pierre Azoulay, three
economists, argues that Chinese
researchers cite their compatriots far more
than Western researchers do theirs. But
China now leads the world on other
chart: the economist benchmarks that are less prone to being
gamed. It tops the Nature Index, created by
the publisher of the same name, which counts the contributions to articles that appear

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 the publisher of the same name, which counts the contributions to articles that appear
in a set of prestigious journals. To be selected for publication, papers must be approved
by a panel of peer reviewers who assess the study’s quality, novelty and potential for
impact. When the index was first launched, in 2014, China came second, but its
contribution to eligible papers was less than a third of America’s. By 2023 China had
reached the top spot.

According to the Leiden Ranking of the volume of scientific research output, there are
now six Chinese universities or institutions in the world top ten, and seven according
to the Nature Index. They may not be household names in the West yet, but get used to
hearing about Shanghai Jiao Tong, Zhejiang and Peking (Beida) Universities in the
same breath as Cambridge, Harvard and eth Zurich. “Tsinghua is now the number one
science and technology university in the world,” says Simon Marginson, a professor of
higher education at Oxford University. “That’s amazing. They’ve done that in a
generation.”

Today China leads the world in the physical

sciences, chemistry and Earth and
environmental sciences, according to both
the Nature Index and citation measures
(see chart 2). But America and Europe still
have substantial leads in both general
biology and medical sciences. “Engineering
is the ultimate Chinese discipline in the
modern period,” says Professor Marginson,
“I think that’s partly about military
technology and partly because that’s what
you need to develop a nation.”

Applied research is a Chinese strength. The

country dominates publications on
perovskite solar panels, for example, which
o!er the possibility of being far more
e"cient than conventional silicon cells at
converting sunlight into electricity. Chinese
chemists have developed a new way to
extract hydrogen from seawater using a
chart: the economist
specialised membrane to separate out pure
water, which can then be split by electrolysis. In May 2023 it was announced that the
scientists, in collaboration with a state-owned Chinese energy company, had
developed a pilot floating hydrogen farm o! the country’s south-eastern coast.

China also now produces more patents than any other country, although many are for
incremental tweaks to designs, as opposed to truly original inventions. New
developments tend to spread and be adopted more slowly in China than in the West.
But its strong industrial base, combined with cheap energy, means that it can quickly
spin up large-scale production of physical innovations like materials. “That’s where
China really has an advantage on Western countries,” says Jonathan Bean, ceo of
Materials Nexus, a British firm that uses ai to discover new materials.

The country is also signalling its scientific prowess in more conspicuous ways. Earlier
this month, China’s Chang’e-6 robotic spacecraft touched down in a gigantic crater on

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 this month, China’s Chang’e-6 robotic spacecraft touched down in a gigantic crater on
the far side of the Moon, scooped up some samples of rock, planted a Chinese flag and
set o! back towards Earth. If it successfully returns to Earth at the end of the month, it
will be the first mission to bring back samples from this hard-to-reach side of the
Moon.

First, sharpen your tools

The reshaping of Chinese science has been achieved by focusing on three areas:
money, equipment and people. In real terms, China’s spending on research and
development (r&d) has grown 16-fold since 2000. According to the most recent data
from the oecd, from 2021, China still lagged behind America on overall r&d
spending, dishing out $668bn, compared with $806bn for America at purchasing-
power parity. But in terms of spending by universities and government institutions
only, China has nudged ahead. In these places America still spends around 50% more
on basic research, accounting for costs, but China is splashing the cash on applied
research and experimental development (see chart 3).

Money is meticulously directed into

strategic areas. In 2006 the ccp published
its vision for how science should develop
over the next 15 years. Blueprints for
science have since been included in the
ccp’s five-year development plans. The
current plan, published in 2021, aims to
boost research in quantum technologies, ai,
semiconductors, neuroscience, genetics
and biotechnology, regenerative medicine,
and exploration of “frontier areas” like deep
space, deep oceans and Earth’s poles.

Creating world-class universities and

government institutions has also been a
chart: the economist
part of China’s scientific development plan.
Initiatives like “Project 211”, the “985
programme” and the “China Nine League” gave money to selected labs to develop their
research capabilities. Universities paid sta! bonuses—estimated at an average of
$44,000 each, and up to a whopping $165,000—if they published in high-impact
international journals.

Building the workforce has been a priority. Between 2000 and 2019, more than 6m
Chinese students left the country to study abroad, according to China’s education
ministry. In recent years they have flooded back, bringing their newly acquired skills
and knowledge with them. Data from the oecd suggest that, since the late 2000s,
more scientists have been returning to the country than leaving. China now employs
more researchers than both America and the entire eu.

Many of China’s returning scientists, often referred to as “sea turtles” (a play on the
Chinese homonym haigui, meaning “to return from abroad”) have been drawn home by
incentives. One such programme launched in 2010, the “Youth Thousand Talents”,
o!ered researchers under 40 one-o! bonuses of up to 500,000 yuan (equivalent to
roughly $150,000 at purchasing-power parity) and grants of up to 3m yuan to get labs
up and running back home. And it worked. A study published in Science last year found

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 up and running back home. And it worked. A study published in Science last year found
that the scheme brought back high-calibre young researchers—they were, on average,
in the most productive 15% of their peers (although the real superstar class tended to
turn down o!ers). Within a few years, thanks to access to more resources and academic
manpower, these returnees were lead scientists on 2.5 times more papers than
equivalent researchers who had remained in America.

As well as pull, there has been a degree of push. Chinese scientists working abroad
have been subject to increased suspicion in recent years. In 2018 America launched the
China Initiative, a largely unsuccessful attempt to root out Chinese spies from industry
and academia. There have also been reports of students being deported because of
their association with China’s “military-civilian fusion strategy”. A recent survey of
current and former Chinese students studying in America found that the share who
had experienced racial abuse or discrimination was rising.

The availability of scientists in China means that, for example in quantum computing,
some of the country’s academic labs are more like commercial labs in the West, in
terms of scale. “They have research teams of 20, 30, even 40 people working on the
same experiments, and they make really good progress,” says Christian Andersen, a
quantum researcher at Delft University. In 2023 researchers working in China broke
the record for the number of quantum bits, or qubits, entangled inside a quantum
computer.

China has also splurged on scientific kit. In 2019, when The Economist last surveyed the
state of the country’s scientific research, it already had an enviable inventory of flashy
hardware including supercomputers, the world’s largest filled-aperture radio telescope
and an underground dark-matter detector. The list has only grown since then. The
country is now home to the world’s most sensitive ultra-high-energy cosmic-ray
detector (which has recently been used to test aspects of Albert Einstein’s special
theory of relativity), the world’s strongest steady-state magnetic field (which can probe
the properties of materials) and soon will have one of the world’s most sensitive
neutrino detectors (which will be used to work out which type of these fundamental
subatomic particles has the highest mass). Europe and America have plenty of cool kit
of their own, but China is rapidly adding hardware.

Individual labs in China’s top institutions are also well equipped. Niko McCarty, a
journalist and former researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was
recently given a tour of synthetic biology labs in China, was struck by how, in academic
institutions, “the machines are just more impressive and more expansive” than in
America. At the Advanced Biofoundry at the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced
Technology, which the country hopes will be the centre of China’s answer to Silicon
Valley, Mr McCarty described an “amazing building with four floors of robots”. As
Chinese universities fill with state-of-the-art equipment and elite researchers, and
salaries become increasingly competitive, Western institutions look less appealing to
young and ambitious Chinese scientists. “Students in China don’t think about America
as some “scientific Mecca” in the same way their advisers might have done,” said Mr
McCarty.

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 All the flowers of all the tomorrows photograph: alamy

Take ai, for example. In 2019 just 34% of Chinese students working in the field stayed
in the country for graduate school or work. By 2022 that number was 58%, according to
data from the ai talent tracker by MacroPolo, an American think-tank (in America the
figure for 2022 was around 98%). China now contributes to around 40% of the world’s
research papers on ai, compared with around 10% for America and 15% for the eu and
Britain combined. One of the most highly cited research papers of all time,
demonstrating how deep neural networks could be trained on image recognition, was
written by ai researchers working in China, albeit for Microsoft, an American
company. “China’s ai research is world-class,” said Zachary Arnold, an ai analyst at the
Georgetown Centre for Emerging Security and Technology. “In areas like computer
vision and robotics, they have a significant lead in research publications.”

Growth in the quality and quantity of Chinese science looks unlikely to stop anytime
soon. Spending on science and technology research is still increasing—the government
has announced a 10% increase in funding in 2024. And the country is training an
enormous number of young scientists. In 2020 Chinese universities awarded 1.4m
engineering degrees, seven times more than America did. China has now educated, at
undergraduate level, 2.5 times more of the top-tier ai researchers than America has.
And by 2025, Chinese universities are expected to produce nearly twice as many phd
graduates in science and technology as America.

To see further, ascend another floor

Although China is producing more top-tier work, it still produces a vast amount of
lower-quality science too. On average, papers from China tend to have lower impact, as
measured by citations, than those from America, Britain or the eu. And while the
chosen few universities have advanced, mid-level universities have been left behind.
China’s second-tier institutions still produce work that is of relatively poor quality
compared with their equivalents in Europe or America. “While China has fantastic
quality at the top level, it’s on a weak base,” explains Caroline Wagner, professor of
science policy at Ohio State University.

When it comes to basic, curiosity-driven research (rather than applied) China is still
playing catch-up—the country publishes far fewer papers than America in the two
most prestigious science journals, Nature and Science. This may partly explain why
China seems to punch below its weight in the discovery of completely new
technologies. Basic research is particularly scant within Chinese companies, creating a
gap between the scientists making discoveries and the industries that could end up
using them. “For more original innovation, that might be a minus,” says Xu Xixiang,
chief scientist at longi Green Energy Technology, a Chinese solar company.

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 chief scientist at longi Green Energy Technology, a Chinese solar company.

Incentives to publish papers have created a market for fake scientific publications. A
study published earlier this year in the journal Research Ethics, featured anonymous
interviews from Chinese academics, one of whom said he had “no choice but to
commit [research] misconduct”, to keep up with pressures to publish and retain his job.
“Citation cartels” have emerged, where groups of researchers band together to write
low-quality papers that cite each other’s work in an e!ort to drive up their metrics. In
2020 China’s science agencies announced that such cash-for-publication schemes
should end and, in 2021, the country announced a nationwide review of research
misconduct. That has led to improvements—the rate at which Chinese researchers cite
themselves, for example, is falling, according to research published in 2023. And
China’s middle-ranking universities are slowly catching up with their Western
equivalents, too.

The areas where America and Europe still hold the lead are, therefore, unlikely to be
safe for long. Biological and health sciences rely more heavily on deep subject-specific
knowledge and have historically been harder for China to “bring back and accelerate”,
says Tim Da!orn, a professor of biotechnology at University of Birmingham and
former adviser to Britain’s department for business. But China’s profile is growing in
these fields. Although America currently produces roughly four times more highly
influential papers in clinical medicine, in many areas China is producing the most
papers that cite this core research, a sign of developing interest that presages future
expansion. “On the biology side, China is growing remarkably quickly,” says Jonathan
Adams, chief scientist at the Institute for Scientific Information at Clarivate. “Its ability
to switch focus into a new area is quite remarkable.”

The rise of Chinese science is a double-edged sword for Western governments. China’s
science system is inextricably linked with its state and armed forces—many Chinese
universities have labs explicitly working on defence and several have been accused of
engaging in espionage or cyber-attacks. China has also been accused of intellectual-
property theft and increasingly stringent regulations have made it more di"cult for
international collaborators to take data out of the country; notoriously, in 2019, the
country cut o! access to American-funded work on coronaviruses at the Wuhan
Institute of Virology. There are also cases of Chinese researchers failing to adhere to
the ethical standards expected by Western scientists.

Despite the concerns, Chinese collaborations are common for Western researchers.
Roughly a third of papers on telecommunications by American authors involve
Chinese collaborators. In imaging science, remote sensing, applied chemistry and
geological engineering, the figures are between 25% and 30%. In Europe the numbers
are lower, around 10%, but still significant. These partnerships are beneficial for both
countries. China tends to collaborate more in areas where it is already strong like
materials and physics. A preprint study, released last year, found that for ai research,
having a co-author from America or China was equally beneficial to authors from the
other country, conferring on average 75% more citations.

Several notable successes have come from working together, too. During the covid-19
pandemic a joint venture between Oxford University’s Engineering Department and
the Oxford Suzhou Centre for Advanced Research developed a rapid covid test that
was used across British airports. In 2015 researchers at University of Cardi! and South
China Agricultural University identified a gene that made bacteria resistant to the
antibiotic colistin. Following this, China, the biggest consumer of the drug, banned its
use in animal feed, and levels of colistin resistance in both animals and humans

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 use in animal feed, and levels of colistin resistance in both animals and humans
declined.

In America and Europe, political pressure is limiting collaborations with China. In

March, America’s Science and Technology Agreement with China, which states that
scientists from both countries can collaborate on topics of mutual benefit, was quietly
renewed for a further six months. Although Beijing appears keen to renew the 45-year-
old agreement, many Republicans fear that collaboration with China is helping the
country achieve its national-security goals. In Europe, with the exception of
environmental and climate projects, Chinese universities have been e!ectively barred
from accessing funding through the Horizon programme, a huge European research
initiative.

There are also concerns among scientists that China is turning inwards. The country
has explicit aims to become self-reliant in many areas of science and technology and
also shift away from international publications as a way of measuring research output.
Many researchers cannot talk to the press—finding sources in China for this story was
challenging. One Chinese plant scientist, who asked to remain anonymous, said that
she had to seek permission a year in advance to attend overseas conferences. “It’s
contradictory—on the one hand, they set restrictions so that scientists don’t have
freedoms like being able to go abroad to communicate with their colleagues. But on the
other hand, they don’t want China to fall behind.”

Live until old, learn until old

The overwhelming opinion of scientists in China and the West is that collaboration
must continue or, better, increase. And there is room to do more. Though China’s
science output has grown dramatically, the share that is conducted with international
collaborators has remained stable at around 20%—Western scientists tend to have far
more international collaborations. Western researchers could pay more attention to the
newest science from China, too. Data from a study published last year in Nature
Human Behaviour showed that, for work of equivalent quality, Chinese scientists cite
Western papers far more than vice versa. Western scientists rarely visit, work or study
in China, depriving them of opportunities to learn from Chinese colleagues in the way
Chinese scientists have done so well in the West.

Closing the door to Chinese students and researchers wishing to come to Western labs
would also be disastrous for Western science. Chinese researchers form the backbone
of many departments in top American and European universities. In 2022 more of the
top-tier ai researchers working in America hailed from China than from America. The
West’s model of science currently depends on a huge number of students, often from
overseas, to carry out most day-to-day research.

There is little to suggest that the Chinese scientific behemoth will not continue
growing stronger. China’s ailing economy may eventually force the ccp to slow
spending on research, and if the country were to become completely cut o! from the
Western science community its research would su!er. But neither of these looks
imminent. In 2019 we also asked if research could flourish in an authoritarian system.
Perhaps over time its limits will become clear. But for now, and at least for the hard
sciences, the answer is that it can thrive. “I think it’d be very unwise to call limits on the
Chinese miracle,” says Prof Marginson. “Because it has had no limits up until now.” ■

Curious about the world? To enjoy our mind-expanding science coverage, sign up to Simply
Science, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.

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 Explore more China

This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “Soaring dragons”

From the June 15th 2024

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