China and the Future of Science

[The following post is a polished transcript of a speech I recently gave to a private gathering of American technologists. Its contents may be of interest to a larger audience. -TG.]

THE CHINESE SOCIO-POLITICAL SYSTEM differs from our own. From the perspective of the topic of this conference, here is the most salient distinction: the Chinese system has a telos. The Chinese party-state is fundamentally a set of goal-oriented institutions. This is not unique to China—it is in fact a distinguishing feature of all Leninist systems. I sometimes think of Leninist systems as a little bit like that bus in the movie Speed. Who here has seen it? For those who haven’t, here is basic gist of that film: an extortionist attaches a bomb to the speedometer of a bus. If the bus ever slows below 50 miles per hour, everyone blows up. So it is with your average communist system. Either it hurtles towards some clearly defined goal or things start to fall apart.¹

In the early days of Mao, the overarching aim of the communist system was to seize state power, first through subversion and insurgency, then through more regular combined arms warfare. In the later days of Mao the newly established Chinese state and the society it intertwined were oriented around class struggle, both at home and abroad. From the 1980s through the 2010s the Chinese system orbited a different yet still very explicitly stated goal: getting rich. In theory, if not always in practice, every action taken by every cadre, every soldier, and every state employee was subordinate to this larger, unifying aim. We must make China rich.

That is no longer the animating telos of the Chinese system. There is a new goal, one that has been articulated with great clarity by Chairman Xi and the Chinese central committee: In 2026, the aim of China’s communist enterprise is to lead humanity through what they call “the next round of techno scientific revolution and industrial transformation.”² The Chinese leadership believes humanity stands on the cusp of the next industrial revolution. China can only be restored to its ancestral greatness if it is the pioneer of this revolution. All machinery of party and state bend towards this end. All 100 million members of the Communist Party of China, all 50 million government employees of the PRC, all two million soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army, and ultimately all of the 1.4 billion people that call China home must be mobilized to accomplish this aim. That is the ambition. China will be the greatest scientific power the world has ever seen—or bust.³

The communists are deadly serious about their pursuit of this aim. Statistics provide one window into the seriousness of their intent. Now I don’t intend for the remainder of this speech to be a laundry list of numbers, but I think the numbers are useful for helping us see the scale of what China has already accomplished and the speed with which they have accomplished it. They are also strong signal of future intent—it is difficult to survey the numbers and not appreciate just how ironclad China’s commitment to scientific achievement really is.

Now scientific achievement is difficult to measure. One common metric is to count the so-called “high impact papers” – journal articles highly cited by other leading lights in a given scientific field. Count up these papers over the course of a year, see who wrote them, see where those authors work, and—voila!—you have a ranked list of which institutions are putting out the most high-impact science in a given year. Had you done this counting exercise in the year 2005, you would have discovered that six of the world’s ten most productive universities were in the United States.⁴ Today only one of those universities is in the United States. That university is Harvard, coming in at spot number three on the list. At spot number one? Zhejiang University.

How many of you have heard of Zhejiang University? Can I get a show of hands?

And of course, Zhejiang University is just one of the Chinese institutions on this top ten list. China claims not just the number-one spot, but also the number-two spot. And not just the number-one and number-two spots, but also the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eight, ninth spots go to the Chinese.⁵

The scientific publisher Nature makes a similar catalog on a slightly more granular level, looking at specific fields of science. According to Nature’s most recent rankings, 18 of the top 25 most productive research institutes in the physical sciences, 19 of the top 20 in geosciences, and a full 25 out of 25 in chemistry are Chinese. Only in the biosciences do American scientists still have a lead—but even on that list three of the top ten are Chinese.⁶

The kicker is, none of that was true even just a decade ago.

The most granular analysis of all is published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, or ASPI. ASPI publishes a neat research tracker that surveys new publications in 74 distinct high-end technologies. Unlike the statistics I just discussed, their tracker includes research published by scientists working in national laboratories and private institutions as well as those published by academic scientists. For each category they make a list of the ten institutions that are publishing the most high-impact science in that particular topic. What have they found? For 66 of the 74 categories tracked, a majority of the institutions that are now publishing the highest-impact science are Chinese. In many areas of science the dominance is total: For example, ten of then most productive research institutions in the fields of nanoscale material manufacturing, photonic sensors, chemical coating, drone operations, automated swarms, and undersea communications are Chinese. The number is nine out of ten for work on supercapacitors, advanced composite materials, inertial navigation systems, and satellite positioning, eight out of ten in advanced optical communications, advanced radiofrequency communications, and new chemical coatings, and seven out of ten for directed energy technologies, nuclear engineering, and nuclear waste treatment.⁷

The scale of Chinese scientific production is in part a story about people. China graduates five times the number of medical and biomedical students than we do every year, seven times the number of engineers, and two-and-a-half times the number of undergraduates with research experience in artificial intelligence. Last year China graduated almost double the number of STEM PhD students than we did—and that number is actually worse than it sounds because—depending on the exact year you do the counting—between one sixth and one fifth of our STEM graduates are themselves Chinese.⁸

Many of these researchers go back. They go back partially because they are well compensated for doing so. They also go back because of the research opportunities afforded to them. A recent study found that returning Chinese scientists go on to become the lead author on 2.5 times more papers than their colleagues who stay in the United States.⁹ Many Chinese research labs have 30 or 40 people attached to them—the equivalent to a commercial research lab in the United States. Ask any scientist who has gone to China in the past three years to visit academic colleagues and they will tell you how astounded they are at the quality of the laboratory equipment and machinery that their Chinese colleagues have access to. If in the not-so-distant past Chinese localities competed with each other to lay the most asphalt, now that funding pours into laboratory equipment, scientific instruments, and advanced scientific facilities. Thus China now has the world’s most sensitive ultra-high-energy cosmic-ray detector, the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope, the world’s strongest steady-state magnetic field, the world’s fastest quantum computer by computational advantage, and the world’s most sensitive neutrino detector. Just yesterday an attendee at this conference informed me of another I should add to my list: the world’s largest primate medical research center.

Now I can already hear some of your objections. “Tanner, these measures don’t include classified research. They don’t include the proprietary research by private companies—that is the stuff that actually pushes technology forward. American companies are not publishing billion-dollar trade secrets in the latest journals. The Chinese scientists are under insane publish or perish pressures—they are far more likely to lie and cheat. Don’t you know Chinese scientists take part in citation cartels? Haven’t you read those bitter critiques of the new system written by China’s own disgruntled scientists?”

My main response to this: you guys have lost the thread. I am reminded of a similar style of argument we often see in AI development. Every time a new model is released people play around with it for a bit and then start to catalog the flaws of this model. But the real story, the story historians will tell a generation from now, is never about the model of the moment. What matters is movement between those moments. History is made by the trend-line. What capabilities did the models have four years ago? What capabilities do they have now? What might they reasonably be expected to have in a decade hence?

Something similar might be said for science and China.

Moreover, it is not hard so hard to find examples of dominance in the scientific literature leading to dominance in the world of applied technology. More than a decade ago Chinese researchers began to dominate academic work on batteries. Today China produces 80% of the world’s battery cells.¹⁰ Around that same time Chinese researchers took the lead on factory robots and factory automation. Today Chinese firms buy more robots than the rest of the world combined. They have a higher robot density than almost every other country in world, despite being the world’s second largest nation.¹¹ Another example: China is the only place where the unit cost of building a new nuclear reactor has gone down over the last decade.¹² Do you think this is unrelated to the number of nuclear engineers they train and the amount of basic research they publish on nuclear engineering? Again I beg you to look at the trend-line: In 2026 China has 102 nuclear reactors either in operation or under construction. How many did they have 15 years ago? Less than 30.¹³

Why is China pouring so many resources into scientific and technological advance? Here is a 30-second thumbnail sketch: Xi Jinping and those around him have a specific view of history.¹⁴ Like most Chinese, they remember with fondness past eras when their nation was the centerpiece of human civilization. They mourn China’s fall from those grand heights. They remember with bitterness the “century of humiliation” in which their people were exploited by foreign powers and wasted by vicious warlords. The Communist Party of China was founded to save China from that fate. From its inception it has seen itself as the vehicle for the salvation of the Chinese nation and thence the restoration of this nation to its rightful place at the center of the human story.

But why was China displaced from its spot “at the center of the world stage” in the first place? Chinese intellectuals have been asking this question for more than a century. Here is their most common answer: science and technology. Today Party-affiliated thinkers often describe modern human history as punctuated by discrete revolutionary moments when a new technological regime comes into being. They call these moments “rounds of techno-scientific revolution and industrial transformation.” In such moments the material basis of human civilization changes. Those who master this transition master… well, just about everything.

Thus Britain, author of the first industrial revolution, was the most powerful country of the 19th century. Thus the United States, whose technologists pioneered both the second industrial revolution and the computer revolution, was the 20^th century’s most powerful nation. Now it is China’s turn.

Xi Jinping insists that we have reached one of these rare hinge points in human history. The material basis of human civilization is about to change. Humanity stands at the cusp of a revolution—and it is China that will lead humanity through it. By these means China’s sovereignty may be secured, China’s economic troubles will be resolved, and the Chinese nation will return in glory to its proper place at the center of the human pageant. And if China fails in this great enterprise? Well, his countrymen need only look at their nation’s own history to see the viciousness that visits those who fall too far behind the technological frontier.

So that is what China is trying to do. China’s communist leadership clearly believes that scientific dominance will deliver all sorts of boons to their nation. They have bet the growth of their economy, the strength of their military, and the health of their citizenry on this quest. I do not have space within my allotted time to discuss whether or under what conditions that bet might pay off—so on that count I will say only the following: even if you believe that political instability or economic uncertainty might arrest China’s upward climb, that might not change the trajectory of Chinese science. All of those Chinese scientists and engineers will still be there. Their labs and facilities have already been built. Their equipment and instruments have already been bought. Their technicians are already trained. That will still be true if Xi Jinping dies of a stroke tomorrow.

The more relevant question, especially for this audience, is what does all of this means for us? I encourage you to ponder what China’s scientific trajectory means for yourselves, your research fields, your companies, and our country. Does it matter if the Chinese are the pioneers of the 21st century’s greatest technologies? What would it take for America to come back in this “race?” How will your life be different if the future of science is Chinese?

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Your support makes this blog possible. To get updates on new posts published at the Scholar’s Stage, you can join the Scholar’s Stage Substack mailing list, follow my twitter feed, or support my writing through Patreon. If you found this post worth reading, you might find some of my other essays on Chinese attitudes towards science worth reading: “Mr. Science, Meet Mr. Stability,” “Xi Jinping’s Plan to Save China Through Science,” and “Wang Huning and the Eternal Return to 1975.” I have also written about the history of science and technology more generally: “Science Proceeds One Question at a Time,” “Has Technological Progress Stalled?,” “For God and Progress” and “Lessons from the 19th Century.”

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1. The conception of the Leninist party as a goal-oriented mobilizational organization was laid out in Ken Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), and applied to Chinese politics by Joseph Fewsmith, Rethinking Chinese Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). But the most accessible and perhaps the best treatments of this theme, however, are two blog posts by Andrew Batson: “Mobilization and Modules: What’s Changing in China,” The Tangled Woof, October 13, 2021, and “Socialist, Capitalist, Leninist: What to Call China?,” The Tangled Woof, February 8, 2022.

2. For the China nerds out there: this claim could be a post of its own and deserves a larger treatment than this footnote allows. Since the 1980s, the Party’s formal “Basic Line” (基本路线) has stated that “economic construction is the central task” (以经济建设为中心). This has not changed. There was a moment where it looked like Xi was going to try and change this (see my essay “Watch Xi Jinping Slowly Strangle the Dengist Economic Paradigm,” Scholar’s Stage [11 March 2023]), but he has decided instead to shift the operative meaning of the Basic Line instead. The groundwork for this was laid at the 19th Party Congress in 2017, when Xi redefined the “principal contradiction” (主要矛盾) facing Chinese society. Under Deng, this was a contradiction between the people’s needs and “backward social production” (落后的社会生产) — a formulation that made GDP growth the overriding imperative. Xi replaced it with a contradiction between “unbalanced and inadequate development” (不平衡不充分的发展) and the people’s needs for “a better life” (美好生活), effectively declaring the old problem of backwardness solved and opening space for goals beyond raw growth.

The 20th Party Congress in 2022 filled that space. It declared the Party’s “overall task” (总任务) to be achieving the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” (中华民族伟大复兴) through “Chinese-style modernization” (中国式现代化), and identified a “modernized industrial system” (现代化产业体系) as the essential “material-technological foundation” (物质技术基础) of that modernization. Xi declared that innovation—a stand in for technological invention and development—now “holds the core position in the overall picture of China’s modernization” (坚持创新在我国现代化建设全局中的核心地位). Remember, modernization is the overall task. By the time of the 15th Five-Year Plan recommendations in October 2025, the logic had been made fully explicit: “building a modernized industrial system” and “accelerating high-level science and technology self-reliance” (高水平科技自立自强) were ranked as the Party’s first and second strategic tasks. In his explanatory remarks, Xi stated that for high-quality development, “the most important thing” (最重要) is techno-scientific self-reliance. While the Basic Line is itself unchanged—it still directs the Party to focus on “economic construction”—this Basic Line now means pioneering the next industrial revolution—or as the Party calls it, a “new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation” (新一轮科技革命和产业变革).

3. Xi often speaks of the Party’s ambition to lead humanity to new frontiers (e.g, often invoked phrases like “今天,我们实现了从”赶上时代”到”引领时代”的伟大跨越” and “中国人民历来把自己的前途命运同各国人民的前途命运紧密联系在一起,中国共产党始终把为人类作出新的更大的贡献作为自己的使命”), which planning documents must then narrow into goals achievable in their select time frames. For example, here is how this month’s new Five Year Plan—“a common program of action for all of the peoples of our country全国各族人民共同的行动纲领”—lays out China’s scientific ambitions over that span:

“The level of self-reliance and strength in science and technology will be greatly improved. The overall effectiveness of the national innovation system will be significantly enhanced, with nationwide R&D expenditure growing at an annual average of more than 7%... The capacity for basic research and original innovation will be significantly strengthened, key core technologies in priority fields will achieve rapid breakthroughs, and a number of major original, landmark, and leading scientific and technological achievements will be produced, with areas where China runs alongside or leads the world significantly increasing.”

科技自立自强水平大幅提高。国家创新体系整体效能显著提升，全社会研发经费投入年均增长7%以上...基础研究和原始创新能力显著增强，重点领域关键核心技术快速突破，产出一批重大原创性、标志性、引领性科技成果，并跑领跑领域明显增多.

Source: Xinhua, “两会受权发布丨中华人民共和国国民经济和社会发展第十五个五年规划纲要,” 13 March 2026.

4. WTS Leiden Ranking 2025, Traditional Edition, P(top 10%) indicator, period 2006–2009, All sciences. Available at: https://traditional.leidenranking.com/ranking/2025/list (select time period 2006–2009, order by P(top 10%)). Note that the Leiden Ranking measures volume of high-impact papers tracks the number of a university’s publications in the top 10% most-cited. Proportion-based metrics are far friendlier to the United States. But I don’t really think that changes my argument here.

5. ibid., The universities that have dropped from the top ten include the University of Michigan, UCLA, Johns Hopkins University, Washington University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Stanford University.

6. "2025 Research Leaders: Leading Institutions," Nature Index, accessed February 19, 2026, Subject-level rankings are available by selecting individual fields. Data covers January–December 2024.

7. Jenny Wong Leung, Stephan Robin, and Danielle Cave, ASPI's Two-Decade Critical Technology Tracker: The Rewards of Long-Term Research Investment (Canberra: Australian Strategic Policy Institute, August 2024); Jenny Wong-Leung, Stephan Robin, and Linus Cohen, "ASPI's Critical Technology Tracker: 2025 Updates and 10 New Technologies," The Strategist (blog), Australian Strategic Policy Institute, December 1, 2025.

8. Jacob Feldgoise and Remco Zwetsloot, Estimating the Number of Chinese STEM Students in the United States, CSET Issue Brief (Washington, DC: Center for Security and Emerging Technology, Georgetown University, October 2020); Brendan Oliss, Cole McFaul, and Jaret C. Riddick, "The Global Distribution of STEM Graduates: Which Countries Lead the Way?," Center for Security and Emerging Technology, Georgetown University, November 27, 2023; .Council of Economic Advisers, AI Talent Report (Washington, DC: The White House, January 14, 2025); Vivian Wang, "China Really Wants to Attract Talented Scientists. Trump Just Helped.," New York Times, June 4, 2025; Qiang Zhu et al., "Medical Education in China: Progress in the Past 70 Years and a Vision for the Future," BMC Medical Education 21, no. 453 (2021).

9. Dongbo Shi, Weishu Liu, and Yanbo Wang, "Has China's Young Thousand Talents Program Been Successful in Recruiting and Nurturing Top-Caliber Scientists?," Science 379, no. 6627 (January 6, 2023): 62–65,

10. “The Battery Industry Has Entered a New Phase," International Energy Agency, February 2025. Or more specifically, 85% of anodes, 82% of electrolytes, 74% of separators, 70% of cathodes. See : U.S. Energy Information Administration, "China Dominates Global Trade of Battery Minerals," EIA, April 2025

11. "China Installed Nearly 300,000 Industrial Robots in 2024, More Than All Other Markets Combined," October 2, 2025; International Federation of Robotics, "World Robotics 2025: Global Robot Demand in Factories Doubles over 10 Years," IFR press release, September 25, 2025.

12. Liu Shangwei, "Can China Break Nuclear Power's Cost Curse—and What Can the US Learn?," Roosevelt Institute, September 17, 2025.

13. China Nuclear Energy Association (中国核能行业协会), in association with CNNC Strategic Planning Research Institute (中核战略规划研究总院) and China Institute of Science and Technology Evaluation (中智科学技术评价研究中心), 中国核能发展报告（2025） [China Nuclear Energy Development Report 2025, Blue Book], released at the 2025 Spring International Forum on Sustainable Nuclear Energy Development, Beijing, April 27, 2025; for an English summary see "China Tops Global Ranking of Overall Nuclear Power Capacity, Report Says," China Daily, April 28, 2025; "500 GW by 2050? Inside China's Massive Nuclear Expansion,"

14. Tanner Greer and Nancy Yu, "Xi Believes China Can Win a Scientific Revolution," Foreign Policy, April 30, 2024