Surrounded by kick-boxing, piano-playing humanoid robots at a high-tech fair in Shenzhen last month, some tech influencers were asking: can the west catch up with China?
That question would have sounded absurd two decades ago, but it is anything but today. This week, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute published its latest critical technology tracker, covering high-impact global research in 74 areas. It found that China now leads in 66 of those technologies, in fields as varied as computer vision, quantum sensors and nuclear energy, with the US ahead in the other eight.
ASPI’s researchers highlighted a familiar story across many technologies. An early and overwhelming US lead in research output in the first decade of this century has been surpassed by China’s persistent long-term investment in fundamental research. In 2005, China accounted for just 6 per cent of the world’s most highly cited research papers but that share had risen to 48 per cent this year. The comparable proportion of US publications fell from 43 per cent to 9 per cent. At a time when the US is defunding many federal science programmes, China is doing the opposite by “building the whole technology ecosystem”, says Jenny Wong-Leung, one of the report’s authors.