The Trump administration has taken a bulldozer to science funding over the last year and change, wiping out more than 7,800 research grants, cutting 25,000 scientists from government agencies, and proposing tens of billions of dollars in further scientific funding cuts — scientific bloodshed that’s disproportionally targeting research into misinformation, vaccines, infectious diseases, and other crucial topics.
It could easily backfire. The administration’s war on science could greatly undermine the country’s decades-long stance as the global leader in research and development investment since the end of the Second World War, a recent forecast by science policy researchers found. That could allow China, which has dramatically increased public spending on R&D while the US has been pulling back, to surge ahead as the US continues to suffer a stomach-churning brain drain.
As The Atlantic points out, China’s population is four times as large and “unabashedly pro-science,” handing out twice as many STEM degrees compared to the US and almost double the PhDs. While it’s not exclusively a numbers game — more scientific papers don’t necessarily guarantee scientific breakthroughs — the sheer scale of China’s highly-educated pool of scientists and their research will likely give it an edge over the floundering US.
Whether China will stand the chance of overtaking the US as the dominating scientific superpower will likely remain difficult to gauge directly. For one, scientific achievements often take a while to be recognized. The cutting-edge research being done right now may also take years to trickle through peer review.
Nonetheless, the early signs are there. China’s contribution to the Nature Index, which tracks the top papers appearing in natural-science and health-science journals, is expected to be double that of the US by the end of 2026, according to Nature.
Meanwhile, China’s government pledged earlier this month to boost overall R&D expenditure by at least seven percent over the next five years, billions of extra dollars a year that scientists will have at their disposal.
One particularly illustrative example is the country’s booming space program. Over the last two decades, it has successfully sent four robotic spacecraft to the lunar surface and is hoping to land its first astronauts there before the end of the decade.
The meteoric rise has US politicians concerned that China could beat NASA to the Moon, a symbolic victory that could not only signal the nation’s place as the world’s top scientific superpower, but could have much broader geopolitical implications as well.
More on China: The Amount of New Solar Power Production Capacity China Is Manufacturing Is Legitimately Mind-Blowing
The post China Is Rapidly Overtaking the United States as the World’s Scientific Superpower appeared first on Futurism.
