China overtakes United States on contribution to research in Nature Index
nature.com
nature.com
Edit:
Digging deeper, it looks like Nature treats the Chinese Academy of Sciences (the Chinese version of US DoE National Labs) as a single institution.
I'd be curious how the US stacks up if National Lab affiliation was included in the same manner. Lots of R&D done by National Lab researchers are affiliated only with their Lab, not a university.
Also a lot of naturalized American academics can also get Chinese Academy of Sciences affiliation due to the murkiness of Chinese nationality renunciation, so that might muddy it further (eg. If I'm an academic at Harvard University with an affiliation to the CAS, which relationship does the Nature Index treat as the primary?)
Edit 2: from the Nature Index itself
"For authors who are affiliated with more than one institution, the author’s Share is split equally between each institution. The total Share for an institution is calculated by summing the Share for individual affiliated authors."
So, if a researcher at Harvard or MIT or Cal is also cross affiliated with the CAS or Tsinghua, their research output would be split equally, even if the relationship is an adjunct one with one or the other.
This sounds like the same kind of statistical gaming NUS and NTU in Singapore and KAUST in Saudi Arabia are famous for to climb up global university rankings.
Chinese gov have affiliated labs like doe national labs
Academy of science has its own graduate school and professor ranks
In the present day, the CAS includes national labs (to use a CN to US comparison), USTC, and UCAS. Being affiliated to CAS doesn't necessarily mean affiliation to UCAS or USTC, hence why you will see researchers from Tsinghua or SJTU affiliated with CAS.
Seems like the opposite from my perspective. Window on a more open China seems to be shrinking fast. What makes you think reasons to leave are shrinking?
A lot of the labor issues in China are impacting those with lackluster qualifications.
There are still plenty of opportunities for those with world class qualifications and experience.
>ignoring the high unemployment
High youth unemployment, and no, it's fundementally a symptom of why PRC is improving in scitech and industry. State over capacity is generating like 4-5M STEM a year, 20% means they're finding jobs for 4M STEM and like 6M (out of 8M) undergrads, that's a stupendous amount of skilled talent entering the workforce relative to anyone else. West and folks who wank over PRC unemployment should be shaking that PRC ONLY has 20% youth unemployement. Is there enough job supply to match talent oversupply? No, but there's still a fucking crazy amount of jobs to compete globally, relative to when PRC was producing 2M stem per year with 10% youth unemployment. The net increase in high end opportunities is doubling per year relative to 00-10s. Hence PRC moving up these innovation indexes and supply chain value. Not to mention youth unemployment is only high because high household savings lets a lot of urban youth lounge around for options, which aren't always good, eventually they'll give up and settle, which is why broader unemployment is like 5%. Or quoting unrelated stats like home foreclosures that doesn't shit like science output, you realize US S&E output increased during GFC and other economic downturns when people were losing their houses right.
I don’t understand the mental gymnastics people go through trying to justify and defend China when the people are suffering.
It’s like believing the covid deaths reported by the CCP and ignoring the 100s of videos of days long queues to cremations that are running 24/7 and saying “oh the 1000 fold increase in deaths is not related to covid”.
> They spent years telling their citizens that their way is the right way
The government doesn't have to work very hard to convince people in China of this. Living standards have increased dramatically in a relatively short period of time. People see how much their own lives have improved, and they don't need further convincing.
> yet India is growing steadily while Chinas population is crippling, ...
Living standards in China are far above those in India. This is like comparing the US to Mexico. That's how large the gulf is.
> I don’t understand the mental gymnastics people go through trying to justify and defend China when the people are suffering.
If you go to China, you'll have a hard time convincing people that they're suffering so much. By and large, people do not feel that way, simply because their standard of living has increased so rapidly.
> It’s like believing the covid deaths reported by the CCP and ignoring the 100s of videos of days long queues to cremations
Zero-CoVID was a real policy, and it really did keep the virus almost completely out of China for more than two years. Anyone who lived in China during that time can confirm this for you. It helps to have some actual on-the-ground experience or connections, rather than trying to interpret random videos of crematoria. Nobody I know in China got CoVID at all until December 2022, when the zero-CoVID policy was lifted. Then, they all got it in the space of one month.
There's no money or prestige for going into academia in the US - quite the opposite, in fact. Unsurprisingly, this is not a winning formula for getting research done.
America just doesn't attract (or retain) the best. Opportunities are quite high in other countries for them to consider American immigration nonsense.
In a survey of scientists from 16 countries <http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...>, the US is the top destination from 13 of the 15 others and the #2 choice from the other two. If you are a Canadian scientist, there is a 16% chance <https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/37lgxg/the...> that you will move to the US. That's not "16% of all Canadian scientists that move out of the country move to the US". Let me repeat: 16% of all Canadian scientists move to the US. They're also likely to be among the top Canadian scientists, too.
I find it utterly baffling that the US is in a position to easily absorb the best and brightest from other countries, and yet shoots itself in the foot with ridiculously restrictive immigration policies.
Sadly, neither side wants to negotiate. On the Federal Dems side reform on skilled immigration needs to also be lumped with undocumented immigrant reform, and on the Federal GOP side due to some semblance of racism plus opposition to negotiating over undocumented immigration. I sadly speak from experience working on this.
Silver lining, just about every other country sucks as skilled immigration as well. But on the negative side, skilled professionals in Israel+India+PRC+SK+ASEAN increasingly prefer to stay put over being in immigration limbo.
[0] - https://www.politico.com/story/2013/12/nancy-pelosi-immigrat...
American cars can't compete with Asian or German cars. No engineers.
American homes aren't built for efficiency. No engineers.
American semiconductor and hardware tech is powered by immigrants. If/When they leave because of backlogged immigration, the companies will see more competition. Already America is resorting to sanctioning Chinese semi companies because American companies can't compete.
American software industry is powered by h1b slaves who can get deported by BS American laws themselves.
America is out of doctors and nurses too.
The only thing America succeeds at is financial engineering and management enriching itself.
Baffling!
Roughly speaking, developed countries want to welcome the immigrants who would contribute to the economy and reject the ones who would be a burden. But it's difficult to achieve that with a single set of policies and a single immigration authority. Usually you end up either encouraging or discouraging immigration categorically. Either the culture in the immigration authority leans towards accepting anyone who could plausibly meet the criteria, or it's constantly looking for excuses to reject any application. Most countries tend to choose the latter.
I agree. The last time we've seen a similar parity in R&D capacity was probably the 1950s-1960s.
That said, a lot of discourse around geopolitical rivalries is kind of stuck in a pre-1990s mindset. Even at its worst, countries with actual military disputes continue to be closely economically connected and (excluding Russia over the past year) we haven't seen the kind of economic decoupling that we saw in the 1970s-90s globally.
So long as nations globally maintain diplomatic contact and continue to be connected via diasporas and economic relations, there is always an off-ramp for political disputes.
P.S. Do NOT quote Russia as a counter example to my final example. Russia has been under severe EU+USA sanctions since 2014. The only difference is that these sanctions did not extend to Belarus until 2022, which was used as a backdoor to maintain EU-Russia economic relations.
Violence isn't gonna come down unless mental health problem and fun couture changed which is very unlikely to happen.
> between 2018 and 2020, Chinese research comprised more of the top 1% of the most frequently cited papers than did US research.
Maybe the current state is optimal. Those talented people often go on to work in industry after all. But how to decide if it’s optimal?
Does that mean that there are also 4X scientists in China? Ratios of total population and particular segments can be very much different.
>"Per capita is more meaningful."
Also questionable as science is totally different product than say how many parts employee produces per month.
Hence if PRC retains domestic best, then PRC has relatively comparable talent pool to draw from as US+west. The trend will favour English base effect over time. Also important to distinguish that it's not just about getting only best, US has had skilled shortage for years, their immigration system doesn't absorb enough talent, vs PRC gets to retain huge % of over produced talent to the point of youth unemployment meme. But that means positions gets filled as PRC ramps up or expands in scitech sectors.
If that were true, why do we keep getting so many good PRC computer scientists in the states? When I was working in China, we lost of a lot of great candidates to Google or Facebook in the USA. China's net emigration rate is still very positive, and that's not mostly migrant workers and people on Chinese restaurant visas.
PRC's lack of access to worldwide talent is a problem, since they aren't exactly keeping their best either. They pay better for software positions than Taiwan and Japan, or even Korea, and they can leverage that, at least.
This is already happening. Yes some good/great talent are and will continue to be drained to SV / west, but they're unlikely to be best, unlike in the past where the state deliberately sent best abroad. Some of them are top tier, but being so + not fluent are increasingly common. Same reason we get lots of "good" PRC students manning tier1 academic labs in the west. It's symptom of generating overabundance of talent. Even 20 years ago, many of the PRC students in tier1 labs I knew weren't really top 1% or even 5% students. They're smart enough for the western institutions and their family can afford to send them abroad. But many will admit much smarter folks stayed in PRC because they didn’t have resources to leave. The result of that is reports like this.
Wasn't until the last decade that domestic opportunities have exploded, still not matching supply of talent generation or compensation of the west, but enough that linguistically / culturally severing ability to integrate abroad will start to affect talent drain. Ultimately, PRC's lack of access to world wide talent is a disadvantage, but I don’t think it's * that * significant. Going forward, I anticipate and see signs of PRC language policies increasingly reducing the west's ability to brain drain, and they're already not draining overwhelmingly the best like pre 00s. Hence IMO indigenous talent pool at PRC scale will be enough. That may still be 100,000s of talent emigrating per year, but it's a single digit percentage and if it ever comes to it, sanctions / exit VISAs / bans on working in unfriendly countries just like US/TW block their semi engineers from working in PRC.
The other point I want to emphasize is quantity matters as well. Quality is limited if (western) immigration caps still result to 5-6 digit technical talent shortage, still need tons of B tier bodies doing the grunt work. That's where PRC has advantage, IMO oversupply of talent better than undersupply.
I don't see that happening for a long time. Very few, if any, kids are turning down MIT to go to Tsinghua instead, and once they are abroad in the states to study, if they are in STEM (ignoring the non-STEM kids who go because they have money), they aren't going to come back unless they get access to some crazy resources. What we settled for in our Beijing Research lab, at least, were some under the radar talent with PhDs from Zhongshan universities, very good people, but even the Tsinghua PhD student (who isn't as good as the PhD undergrad) would go abroad even in the late 2010s.
The lack of worldwide talent hurts China in terms of practices and tech culture. It isn't just access to a wider talent pool, but cultural nuances don't really gets ingrained since you get your workers in the west from a wide variety of countries. China is also becoming less liberal, not more, and that can't help either in terms of retaining talent (under Xi, there are real risks to staying and raising your family in china vs abroad, and there is no end to Xi's rule in sight, things could get really messy without a planned peaceful transition of power). Finally, China's housing bubble has no end in sight. You think a million dollar town home in Seattle is expensive? Try 1.5 million for a two bedroom apartment in Beijing! Unless you can make ALOT more money in Beijing, why not work in Seattle instead? At least you can buy a house.
China is going to do OK with all of this, but I don't think they going to thrive as much as you think they are. They have a lot of big challenges coming up in the next decade.
>thrive / illiberalism / big challenges
IMO above is why PRC is going to thrive because regardless of the domestic environment, the vast majority of talent simply can't leave - barring massive changes in western immigration schemes, particularly US, but that's unlikely to happen especially with respect to PRC nationals. But more broadly, on the topic of "culture", JP/SKR/TW had plenty of time to acclimate to the salaryman grind and QoL squeeze, their productivity is only going to stall and decline because they're already relatively developed and can't/won't be able replace talent at parity of loss. But their strategy worked fine for hard tech, meanwhile PRC 996 worked fine for soft tech, enough that it needed to be cracked down. Now consider PRC has 25% skilled workforce vs 60-80% of advanced economies, that's like another 2-4x Japan's worth of talent potential being spammed at 7-8M tertiary talent production per year that disproportionately bias STEM/techinical - simply far too many to be meaningfully brain drained.
And it's not like PRC or the west hasn't been going through their own host of social ills, but US S&T and innovation sectors were still growing during the GFC when the banks were foreclosing homes on the bottom quartiles. Meanwhile PRC climbed up the value chain and these S&T/innovation indexes amidst all the covid and real estate drama. That’s “thriving” in terms of building comprehensive power and it’s doing so under what folks deem terrible conditions, i.e. it’s the default momentum of upskilling millions of people per year and throwing them into the grind. Sure one can argue benchmarking against potential that's doing ok, but vs peers it's closer to thriving.
I think all the fixation on the “human condition” narrative is overstated, at the end of the day East Asian Tigers aren’t built on 40 hour work weeks. They’re built from hammering skilled human capital 200% harder than privileged west for 10% competitive advantage, and at PRC scale, that’s really enough for next several decades. Or more TLDR I think factors will enable to PRC as a country can thrive even if QoL does not.
> "The thing that differentiates the United States from China is the depth of US capability across the board, whatever the field might be."
these sound like some cope
This would all naturally catch up with us.
The US revolves around capitalism. Make it more financially rewarding to contribute to science and we'll again be #1 in Nature.
Because American professionals expect higher salaries than their peers in most other countries, they can only be competitive with sufficient institutional or educational advantages. If American universities and research institutes no longer have those advantages, they start losing their competitiveness. Either their productivity suffers, because they have to pay more for the same research output, or they can't attract domestic talent, because the opportunity cost of going to the academia is higher in the US than elsewhere. Relying permanently on foreign talent may work, if the rest of the society accepts it.
Research is an activity dominated by labor costs. Capitalism favors doing such activities in the cheapest places where they can be done well enough.