China’s Science and Technology Rise: How R&D, AI and Fundamental Research Are Reshaping Global Competition

China is making a major push to strengthen its position in science and technology. At a high-level meeting in Shanghai in April, President Xi Jinping urged regional governments, universities and research institutes to give greater priority to fundamental research.

“We must seize opportunities, rise to challenges, put basic research high on the agenda,” he said.

Xi’s directive is part of a decades-long campaign to expand China’s scientific and technological capabilities. Just one month earlier, the country’s leaders had emphasized the importance of science in China’s latest five-year plan.

The policy blueprint calls for substantial investment in fundamental research and innovation. It also promises to accelerate the development of frontier technologies, including artificial intelligence, quantum applications and controlled nuclear fusion, by the end of this decade.

The drive to expand fundamental research is China’s latest effort to build scientific and technological power — a campaign that began nearly 50 years ago and accelerated sharply after 2000.

In 1978, when China opened itself to the world, it had almost no scientific presence on the global stage. Researchers in the country published fewer than 120 scientific articles in international journals, representing just 0.02% of the global total, according to Elsevier’s Scopus citation database.

Less than 50 years later, China has become a global scientific powerhouse and is on course to lead the world in research and development (R&D). It is now one of the largest R&D spenders, leads in patent applications and dominates research in dozens of crucial technologies, including nuclear energy and synthetic biology. Chinese universities and research institutes are also challenging established academic leaders in the West and topped the Nature Index rankings for the first time.

Beyond rankings and statistics, China’s breakthroughs are attracting global attention. They include the development of advanced artificial-intelligence models and the successful retrieval of rock samples from the far side of the Moon — a first for any country.

China’s scientific rise could accelerate further in the coming years. The country aims to increase total R&D expenditure, including spending by public and private sectors, by at least 7% annually between now and 2030. That would translate into many billions of dollars in additional investment each year.

The target contrasts with forecasts for the United States, where President Donald Trump’s administration is seeking to reduce science funding and, critics say, has weakened research capabilities.

“China has the potential to fundamentally change the global landscape of science production, technology competition and the geopolitical centre of gravity,” says Yanbo Wang, a science-policy researcher at the University of Hong Kong. “For the West, if competing with Japan in the 1980s felt like weathering a storm, then China will bring a tsunami in the years to come.”

Before that happens, however, China will need to address systemic weaknesses in its research ecosystem. Critics say the country’s rapid-growth approach has contributed to widespread scientific misconduct, a problem the government has tried to tackle for more than a decade. Two deaths during clinical trials last year have also raised questions about regulation and ethics in cutting-edge biomedical research.

Other challenges — including the risk of a slowing economy and continuing geopolitical tensions — could also constrain China’s advances in science and technology.

China’s R&D spending is rising rapidly

For the past three decades, China’s leaders have placed science and education at the centre of efforts to increase national prosperity. The country’s total R&D spending grew by roughly 100 times during that period. Over the past decade, spending increased by more than 10% year on year on average, according to statistics published by the Chinese government.

China’s growth in R&D spending far exceeds increases in other countries, according to figures compiled by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

In 2024, China overtook the United States — widely regarded as the world leader in scientific discovery and technological innovation since the end of the Second World War — to become the largest spender on gross domestic expenditure on R&D (GERD). The measure includes spending by both public and private sectors.

The OECD compared the two countries’ GERD values using purchasing power parity (PPP), which accounts for differences in the cost of goods and services between China and the United States.

China-based researchers caution against concluding that China is now definitively the world’s largest R&D spender because comparing national research budgets is complex. When adjusted using exchange rates, another method of calculation, China’s R&D spending was about half that of the United States in 2024. In 2004, it was just 8% of US spending, according to the OECD.

One of China’s major advantages in scientific development is its ability to create long-term plans and pursue them consistently, says Zhang Lin, a science-policy researcher at Wuhan University in China.

“China’s centralized system allows it to focus resources on long-term scientific goals more effectively,” Zhang says. The country’s leadership can sustain investment in strategic fields such as quantum communications over long periods. By contrast, political changes in the United States can cause national priorities to shift.

For many researchers, the precise ranking matters less than China’s strong upward trajectory. The country’s rapidly expanding R&D investment shows that it is trying to move from being primarily a producer of goods to becoming a producer of knowledge and frontier technologies, says Hao Bin, an economist at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou, China.

“Instead of competing mainly through its advantages in low labour costs, China is increasingly competing through its technological abilities, innovation ecosystems and the control of technologies,” Hao says.

Semiconductors become a strategic priority

China’s long-term effort to develop its semiconductor industry provides a clear example of this strategy, according to Hao.

In 2014, China launched a state-backed investment fund to support the semiconductor industry. Its initial funding round was roughly 100 billion yuan, or almost US$16.3 billion at the time.

The fund, combined with coordinated industrial policies, has helped China build capabilities across the semiconductor supply chain, from chip design to the manufacture of chip-making equipment, Hao says.

After the United States imposed a sweeping ban on sales of advanced semiconductor chips to China in 2022, the Chinese government increased its support for the sector, Hao says. The fund’s third round, launched in 2024, is expected to provide 344 billion yuan — roughly $50 billion — to semiconductor companies.

China has also made biotechnology and biomedicine strategic priorities. The government has placed increasing emphasis on the development of original drugs and translational medicine, which aims to turn fundamental research into clinical treatments.

China’s AI race is driven by state support and private innovation

In early 2025, DeepSeek, a small artificial-intelligence company based in Hangzhou, sent shock waves through global markets after releasing a large language model (LLM) that rivalled the performance of leading tools developed by US technology giants.

DeepSeek achieved the result with a fraction of the spending of Western companies and using far fewer computing resources.

The company’s breakthrough followed years of government support for innovation. Historically, state-run universities and research institutes led R&D efforts in China. But since 2010, when the government launched a national campaign to develop “strategic emerging industries” ranging from electric vehicles to pharmaceuticals, private companies have played an increasingly important role in driving innovation.

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“Companies have become more and more active in R&D in China because they realize innovation is key to securing more market shares,” Hao says.

China’s government now wants private companies to play an even larger role. The latest five-year plan promises to give such firms more power and resources to strengthen the country’s innovation, education and research ecosystems.

The policy is partly driven by the success that some Chinese companies have achieved in key technologies, including batteries and artificial intelligence, according to researchers.

AI has served as a “confidence booster” for China in assessing its position in global technological competition, says Meicen Sun, an information scientist at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign.

China’s space programme extends its technology ambitions

Space exploration is another area in which China has gained confidence. In 2022, it completed construction of its own space station, Tiangong, or Heavenly Palace, after three decades of planning and development.

The station was a milestone for China’s space programme, says Xie Gengxin, who studies environmental applications in space at Chongqing University in China.

“It means that China is now capable of conducting mid-to-long-term research in space,” he says.

China has also become the first nation to land a rover on the far side of the Moon. It plans to land astronauts on the lunar surface by 2030 and launch a Mars mission in 2028 that aims to return samples to Earth three years later.

China now regards space research as a key national strategy. Xie expects the government to direct substantial resources into the sector, including funding and talent.

Yuqi Qian, a planetary geologist at the University of Hong Kong, says China views space exploration as a long-term effort to strengthen technological sovereignty and national power, rather than as a short-term race to defeat the United States.

“There is a narrative of an ongoing China–US space race in the US, but not in China,” says Qian, who is participating in China’s lunar and deep-space exploration programme.

Why China is increasing investment in fundamental research

China’s strong support for science is partly motivated by efforts to reduce technological vulnerabilities and dependence on other countries, Hao says.

Global events over the past decade — including the COVID-19 pandemic and US restrictions on semiconductor technology — demonstrated how reliance on foreign technologies could become a strategic weakness for China.

During the pandemic, many foreign experts left China and some scientific equipment could not be imported. As a result, the use of technologies dependent on those specialists and supplies was affected, according to Hao.

“So, R&D spending is increasingly serving as a national security goal,” he says.

Since 2018, when Trump launched a trade war against China during his first term, the country has taken steps to strengthen its ability to make disruptive and original discoveries. Researchers widely regard this as a weak point in China’s scientific system.

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China aims to significantly increase its global influence in fundamental research by 2035 and become a “major global scientific centre and innovation highland” by the middle of this century, according to China’s State Council, the country’s highest administrative authority.

But reaching those goals will be difficult. In 2024, funding for fundamental research accounted for just under 7% of China’s total R&D budget, compared with 14.4% in the United States, according to calculations by Chris Martin, a science-data analyst and president of the Explorative Science Foundation, a non-profit organization in Christchurch, New Zealand. The calculations were based on OECD data.

China also lagged behind Japan, where fundamental research accounted for 11.6% of R&D spending, and South Korea, where it accounted for 14.7%.

Although China’s share reached a record 7.08% last year, it missed the 8% target set by the country’s previous five-year plan, which ended in 2025. China’s new five-year plan does not include a funding target for fundamental research.

Publication pressure challenges China’s research system

A potentially greater obstacle is China’s academic culture, which researchers say can make it difficult for individual scientists to pursue long-term, curiosity-driven projects.

Chinese researchers are regularly evaluated on the number of papers they publish in selected influential journals and the number of national grants they obtain.

“So, the number of papers coming out of China has been growing quickly in recent years,” says Li Jizhen, an innovation-policy researcher at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

The government launched a major reform in 2020 to improve the academic evaluation system. However, several researchers have told Nature that Chinese universities still widely use publication totals when making decisions about staff recruitment and promotion.

China is now the top-ranked country or territory for the number of papers published by researchers in influential journals. It surpassed the United States in 2023, according to the Nature Index, which tracks 178 journals across the natural, applied, social and health sciences.

“But a large volume of papers won’t necessarily lead you to groundbreaking original discoveries that can win you a Nobel prize or a Turing Award, for example,” Li says. “The question is how to free researchers from hitting quantity-based targets and allow them to confidently conduct long-term research that may or may not succeed.”

Pressure to publish is also contributing to research-integrity problems in China, say specialists who study the issue. A Nature investigation of article retractions found that, between 2014 and 2024, nearly 60% of retracted papers included authors with affiliations to China.

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