What Do China's Scientific Ambitions Mean for Science--and the World?
In the past two decades China has become a leading international scientific contributor—not only in resources and publications—but also through its ambition to achieve technological leadership in key industrial sectors. In the early 2000s, China’s share of the top 10% most highly cited publications was well below the world average, but forthcoming research shows that it has recently overtaken the 27 countries of the European Union. China’s elite universities place increasingly higher in international rankings, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences consistently tops the Nature Index of institutional scientific output. As the second-largest spender on research and development, in 2019 China’s gross domestic R&D expenditure was $514.8 billion (US dollars), close to the $612.7 billion spent by the United States and higher than the European Union’s $390.5 billion.
Cooperating with China will undoubtedly be important for the future of US and EU—and global—innovation, and, if managed properly, all could benefit. Thus, taking a deep look at how China has transformed its capacity for research and innovation provides a window into the country’s ambitions and possible paths in the future. The mystique of China’s rise has created anxiety in other countries, as they have watched the growth of China’s scientific, economic, and commercial strength, its clear declaration of its ambitions to become a global leader and key player in several strategic technology areas and industries, and its promotion of its Military-Civilian Fusion (junmin ronghe) policy through which the Chinese Communist Party aims to build a world-class military. Apart from strategic and competitive concerns, how China builds on its scientific position and whether it assumes a leadership role in the world’s scientific community to work on global problems such as climate change or pandemics will be felt everywhere.
The rapid increase in China’s scientific strength can be explained by a combination of public and private investments; government priorities and policies; the public’s strongly positive view of (and willingness to invest in) science, technology, and education; and a capacity to take advantage of the opportunities offered by globalization and an open international research system. The former Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping described science and technology as one of the four forces of modernization, and S&T has been closely linked to nation-building as well as social and economic development since the 1970s. Since 1995, when the strategy of revitalizing the nation with science and technology and education (kejiao xingguo) was initiated, China’s expenditure on R&D as a share of its gross domestic product increased, from less than 1% in 1980 to 2.4% in 2020.
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As China’s universities have increased the quality of their programs, they have become leaders in producing scientists. In 2018, Chinese universities granted close to 49,500 doctorates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, significantly more than the United States (42,000) and the European Union (45,000).
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