China’s leaders say that science, technology, and innovation will make China strong, and they have devoted jaw-dropping sums to recruit scientists and build new research facilities. At the same time, the West receives growing numbers of reports about China’s rising scientific and technological power, and even about what might be done to halt its rise. But how much is really known about the changes and scale of scientific research in China?
There are many statistics to alarm people weary of China’s scientific rise. Huawei joined the Fortune 500 in 2010 and achieved outright dominance in many markets soon after. Visitors to elite universities encounter vast construction projects, from new buildings at Beijing’s Tsinghua University to a new STEM-focused university in Hangzhou. In 2019, 1.5 million students graduated from science or engineering undergraduate programs at Chinese universities. Nearly 37,000 students graduated from science or engineering doctoral programs in China, compared with around 30,000 doctoral graduates from U.S. universities. In various patent and STEM citation counts, China is now at or near the top. Meanwhile, enough Chinese students return from overseas to fill small cities: while fewer than 10,000 returned in 2000, China’s Ministry of Education reported 580,000 returning in 2019.
These indicators at first appear as strong evidence of China’s scientific rise. Underneath them, it is trickier to judge how much China’s scientific capabilities have improved. Some frequently referenced metrics are in fact far removed from new scientific work. Other measurements attempt to approximate trends in China based on conditions for science in the West, but falter at measuring meaningful scientific work in China.
One all-too-common way to highlight China’s rise in science and innovation is by noting large-scale commercial and industrial indicators. These include the valuation, profits and market share of high-tech firms, or the quantity of an advanced-technology good (like semiconductors) produced in a country. For instance, a Brookings essay connected the boom in WeChat and Chinese fintech firms with “China’s improving science and technology prowess.”
Commercial and industrial success are important to geopolitics. Nevertheless, such successes do not directly or necessarily reflect new science or innovation. Companies can thrive for many reasons unrelated to science, including having a large home market, advantageous financing, or simply a clever business strategy. Technology companies tend to grow largest with massive home markets and financial sectors at their disposal: while Sweden and Israel have generated streams of remarkably wide-ranging technological innovation (think Bluetooth, VoIP calling, drones and the thumb drive), both countries lack the large populations or language groups to foster global giants in the way the U.S. and China have. Commercial might does not always even lead to mastery of the most advanced technologies that are already available: witness Sinopharm’s market heft but slow speed at developing mRNA-based coronavirus vaccines.
Other indicators become misleading when applied to China. This is partly because of the political importance of developing science. As officials have sought to quickly maximize indicators that seem to reflect advances in science, many of those indicators have grown disconnected from the phenomena they were intended to measure.
Counting citations is supposed to approximate a paper’s significance based on the determination of many independent researchers to engage with it. Citation counts are most useful when researchers generally cite papers that they independently believe make a significant contribution or with which they have a meaningful engagement. The count becomes less useful when papers are cited for other reasons. Many Chinese universities have sought to boost citation counts at all costs, with the politics of who to cite crowding out independent judgement around a citation and making the number of citations less relevant for approximating scientific capabilities. As one of China’s most prominent scientists commented in 2012: “In numbers of publications and citations of scholarly papers, I have no doubt that China will be number one in the world in a few years… We have many scientists, and even if we all cite among ourselves, we can easily increase the citation rate… but will China’s scientific capacities grow with the number of publications and the citation rate?”
Commercial and industrial success are important to geopolitics. Nevertheless, such successes do not directly or necessarily reflect new science or innovation.
There are similar problems with measuring China’s scientific rise by counting universities’ STEM graduates. Across the world, most people who receive STEM bachelor’s degrees, and even many who receive doctorates, ultimately do not take jobs involving active or cutting-edge research. There is also no reason to assume that all STEM graduates are trained equally. Outside of top institutions, many Chinese universities are severely lacking in new equipment, expertise to operate equipment and faculty able to convey accurate, up-to-date knowledge and methods to their students. Without these, many of China’s STEM students may struggle to reach the world’s scientific frontiers.
Western universities typically accept new graduate students roughly in proportion to how much funding, faculty availability and lab space a university has to support consistent training standards. In China, universities might admit students based on many factors unrelated to an institution’s capacity to consistently train new scholars — from pressure to increase STEM numbers to officials’ desire to keep more people in schools and out of a stressed labor market. These differences make it harder to tell what exactly is being evaluated when one compares statistics on American and Chinese STEM graduates. Even leaving aside the “quality” comparison, a closer look at Ministry of Education data adds ambiguity about China’s quantitative edge: if one excludes engineering, medicine and “military science,” only 13,562 students received science doctorates from Chinese universities in 2019, less than the parallel figure in the United States.
How else can one measure science in China? One might look at very big achievements, like international prizes or profoundly impactful innovations. In these respects, China is clearly behind: China’s sole domestically-trained science Nobel laureate is now 91 years old (Japan claims at least 22 science Nobelists). Yet plenty of scientific achievements occur slowly, steadily, and in international networks that get little public attention. Only focusing on sudden, groundbreaking achievements therefore undercounts China’s advances and capabilities.
It is better to stay cautious around claims of China’s sudden and triumphal scientific rise. China’s core resources — in facilities and people — for conducting world-class research are doubtless improving, but likely much more slowly and steadily than most headlines insist.
Richard Yarrow is a Fellow in the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School and a Visiting Research Fellow in the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore. He has also been based at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and at the Harvard University Archives.
