I would like to share my perspectives on the home bias in citation in China. For context, I am a native Chinese with a BS from China and a PhD from the US. My background is in psychology, but I have recently conducted research on metascience (or science of science), on topics like authorship inflation, diversity, etc. I have also collaborated with several researchers in mainland China.
You mentioned two accounts explaining home bias in citations: 1) Chinese science of higher quality than people outside China realize; and 2) China’s government directive.
There is a third one in play here: Chinese researchers may cite coworkers -- particularly those senior and with power -- so as not to offend them and to please them. Indeed, in one of my recent collaborations with a Chinese professor, I was curious about the presence of several citations of a senior professor from Tsinghua, and was basically told the reason. Of course, the citations are relevant, so there is no ill-play here, but it's also completely fine to not cite some of those.
H index hacking is a massive issue in China. A bunch of journals just had to purge thousands of papers because it seemed the experiments they reported on were never performed.
"In 2023, Wiley announced after over 7000 article retractions in Hindawi journals related to the publication of articles originating from paper mills that it will cease using the Hindawi brand and will integrate Hindawi’s 200 remaining journals into its main portfolio.[7][8] The Wiley CEO who initiated the Hindawi acquisition stepped down in the wake of those retractions.[9]"
It's a bit surprising this isn't mentioned in your article tbh. I kept reading and expected it to be mentioned because it's a big story that fits into a wider context of systematic and massive-scale research fraud coming out of Asia, that throws all metrics about their progress into question, but maybe the news sources you use don't report on it.
To summarize: Chinese research output turns out to be swamped with entirely fake papers. As in, it reports on experiments that never happened, with evidence that is photoshopped or re-used between supposedly unrelated papers. The papers aren't forged by the named researchers directly. They buy the papers pre-made from an ecosystem of professional forgers, the "paper mills" mentioned in the Wikipedia article, who for a fee will write you a fake paper and guarantee publication via networks of corrupted journal editors.
This problem is especially prevalent in the life sciences, and above all in Chinese life sciences. This happens because practicing Chinese doctors are required by the CCP to publish research in order to get promoted, but they can't do that because they're overloaded with work healing people. Yet without a promotion they can't earn enough to start a family, usually. So they buy papers and publish "research". Because academia is wide open to fraud and doesn't care about stopping it this stuff is mostly found by volunteers, so the extant reports are really just the tip of the iceberg and nobody knows the true extent. Ironically some of the best reporting on this phenomenon comes from the news arms of Science and Nature, who are editorially independent of the paper publishing arms, but these articles often choose to leave out the national affiliations of the authors who are doing this (because, y'know, it'd be racist). If you check the names on the papers doing this though you see there's a crystal clear trend.
So Chinese research progress may be largely illusory. It certainly needs to be considered carefully.
really funny of you to assume that this only happens in china.
In my time in grad school - Seen plenty citation rings and fealty networks in US academia - including top universities like stanford/montreal etc.
I'm sorry to say this, and I'm sure the pesky asians are gaming the system, but the writings here seriously sounds like high grade copium - and nothing it going to change unless you start giving your competitors their fair due instead of finding excuses for indicator metrics traditionally used for evaluation (that you, i.e. the west, designed and selected!) not being what you want them to be.
BTW, 'getting ahead in science' is a brain dead dick measuring exercise - for the practical purposes of military power, the chinese don't need to be qualitatively number 1 - they just need to be roughly comparable and they will still be able to pull dramatically ahead of the US in any military conflict due to their superior manufacturing industry.
I should clarify that by "coworkers", I meant not just colleagues working within the same department, but colleagues working on the same topic (so mostly in other universities/institutes).
Implicit in discussions like, how does the US catch up to Chinese manufacturing capacity or weapons production capacity or E.V. technology or applied sciences, or… you get the point… is the failure of globalism in business to nurture democracy and commitment to rules based foreign policy around the world. If China was a democratic nation we wouldn’t have nearly the adversarial relationship we have today. We compete with Germany, Japan and Korea but they are democratic nations with substantial commitment to international law.
Globalization (of both trade and capital) allows companies to best pursue profit opportunity, laser focus on competitive advantage and added value (and also on what shareholder reward companies for, which is not manufacturing breadth and vertical integration but rather high profit margins, low overhead and high efficiency) and optimize costs. It also expands the range of good available to consumers while keeping costs as low as possible.
It is a vehicle for profit, shareholder value and consumption growth. It is not at all oriented toward optimized outcomes for domestic labor, domestic manufacturing capability, national security, social cohesion or gini coefficents (domestically - it can help those globally).
In fact, while globalization is great for global populations and for tycoons and entrepreneurs hoping to become tycoons and wealthy investors and shareholders (many of whom see themselves as “global citizens”, rather than as part of the domestic national fabric with obligations to their countrymen/women), it is obviously sub-optimal domestically in labor, manufacturing, security, social cohesion and domestic gini coefficients.
Thousands of reasonably bright and thoughtful individuals have thrown out some logical ideas to counter this, but too much is steeped in politics. The types of people who wanted protectionism or union jobs or 80 percent tax rates and socialist distribution 30 years ago still want them now and just use globalization as an excuse. Also, there are others who argue all this is a yesterday problem - AI will change the world in ways we can’t predict and solve all of these issues. Sure- because a system but on maximizing ad revenues and human engagement will certainly maximize rainbows and global peace. 😊
I largely agree, but the point I was trying to make was that economic development doesn’t necessarily lead to democratic governments and respect for international law. For a while there, I believe this was the operating assumption… that it did.
Interesting and somewhat trigging article. Several Points:
1) Scientific Publications: This whole space is a disaster right now. Yes...there is an explosion of dubious Chinese authors/conferences. However, because of academic metrics, there is a similar process in the US. Let's call it the "spamification" of scientific literature. A huge amount is repetitive, self serving, and often plain wrong. The space needs to be reformed. Any high-level conclusions based on metrics from this space are highly suspect... including yours on physical sciences.
2) Quality vs Quantity: If there is a space where quality matter, it is this space. Especially when the focus is 3-sigma discoveries. This is not to say that these cannot happen in China, but one of the interesting aspects is that these sorts of discoveries typically come of out "curiosity based research" vs "directed research." Also, while scale matters to some degree, it tops out after some threshold. This IS the reason that Germany can compete with China. In my experience, this is not too different from VC investing. BTW... Israel is the obvious counter example.
3) Research==> Economic Impact: Truely interesting breakthrough research enables disruptive economic impact. What does this mean? you have to tolerate massive instability in your labor markets while technology transforms your economy. Is this really going to happen in China ?
4) Private vs Public Funding: Public is best for basic research and Private to scale. Though, it appears the private markets are tolerating very long runways these days (AI LLM as an example).
Finally, more funding for basic sciences would be goodness, but the real way to maintain an advantage is to solve the immigration problem. Attract/Keep the world's best scientists in the US... underneath it all it is about a war for talent.
"Yes...there is an explosion of dubious Chinese authors/conferences. However, because of academic metrics, there is a similar process in the US...Any high-level conclusions based on metrics from this space are highly suspect... including yours on physical sciences."
I see a possible contradiction here. If the U.S. is playing a similar "spamification" game to China, then that *supports* the idea that China is ahead in the applied physical sciences, even if both have inflated numbers.
LOL .... the only problem is that if you don't know what is real in either case, the comparison is pretty arbitrary. The "real" science vs "spam" science ratio has a big uncertainty bound. In actuality, there is a severe need for journals to do yearly updates of how the state-of-art has advanced in their field. This would be actually useful.
Some thoughts following more than 40 years in American physics and related fields, including substantial interactions with Chinese scientists and service on editorial boards:
1. It is an easy decision for a congressman to placate advocates by voting for authorization. And it is common to see a change that is authorized reversed in the course of appropriation. This has been going on at least since the 1970s and likely much longer than that.
2. Physics-oriented western journals have seen a massive increase in submissions from China over recent decades. Most of them are rejected at the first screening phase, many over language but many also over the quality of what the paper tries to do (hard to describe this briefly). One consequence has been the rise of journals published in China. Overall, just beware of studies based on citations and publications.
3. There are outstanding Chinese scientists. But also many who are imitative and incremental. In my view the authoritarian culture inhibits the growth of the young there (also very true in Japan).
4. I would agree that science funding in the US is screwed up. It is also far from easy to "fix".
"the authoritarian culture inhibits the growth of the young there (also very true in Japan)" <-- I was with you until I saw this part. Japanese science is extremely high-quality and there are a bunch of important breakthroughs. Graduate students and young profs in Japan are overworked, but also given wide latitude to pursue their interests -- for example, the technique for creating induced pluripotent stem cells was actually discovered by a student, Takahashi Kazutoshi.
That is quite fascinating. I would not describe the particular fields familiar to me with your words. However, the impact of authority I saw in both countries did have more to do with collaborations and group efforts in research fields where these were central.
Interesting backstory to the CHIPS act. In current form, 80% of spending is for economic development, attracting semiconductor fabs to the US. This is good industrial policy, but not a direct funding of science. About 20% is for R&D (a little over $10B). A far cry from the original form, and there is still a major hole there in the support of science in the US
On the topic of science policy, it’s worth mentioning the large number of Chinese students and postdocs that make up the science workforce in the US. This seems like it may be a significant backdoor for know-how transfer from the US to China. If more of these students could become US citizens that would benefit us, but invariably many will go back to China. Making it easier for more students from India and allied countries would help. One challenge is that students need to he accepted in graduate programs in order to get visas, but I wonder if non-Chinese international students may be at a disadvantage in that regard. Anectodally, I’ve noticed that some labs with Chinese-American PIs seem to disproportionately hire Chinese graduate students. In some cases it seems kind of obvious discrimination that wouldn’t be tolerated if say a German-American PI only hired German international students. I’m sure in many cases this is innocent in some ways—PIs may be more comfortable conversing with students in their natuve language, for example, but from a science policy perspective it’s not optimal to be overly dependent on Chinese nationals, or to have a back-door for tech-transfer back to China when students return to China to start their own labs. Ensuring that admission and hiring in graduate programs complies with non-discriminration rules and flagging labs where there is evidence of statistical discrimination (in any form, nationality or gender) seems like a good place to start and one that seems to have been overlooked despite the stringent DEI policies in place at many academic institutions.
For retaining foreign talent, one obvious suggestion is to reform immigration laws so that, e.g. foreign nationals with a PhD from an accredited US university can all become permanent residents. Much better for retaining talent trained in US universities than a visa lottery where many PhDs are forced to return to their home countries.
It does mean that PhDs who are already US citizens face fiercer competition for jobs, but this can be partially counteracted by increasing research funding.
And if our concern is for the scientific and technological output of the US, the country gains if some of the less successful citizens with PhDs are driven out of research by more skilled immigrant PhDs.
I’ve also heard stories of non-Chinese PIs focusing on hiring Chinese students and postdocs because they think they can extract more work with less complaint from them. Particularly if the person wants to game quantity of publications and citations more than caring about quality or interest of the work (since caring about student and worker welfare is often related to those latter points).
Yes, me as well, a grad school friend told me that his postdoc lab, which was mainly Chinese and had a Chinese-American PI had a separate meeting conducted in Mandarin and that the PI used threats about losing employment/immigration status to ensure the Chinese students worked long hours.
> I’ve also heard stories of non-Chinese PIs focusing on hiring Chinese students and postdocs because they think they can extract more work with less complaint from them.
Not to excuse abusive PIs, but let me put this in a better light: Chinese students tend to appreciate the awesome opportunity they have been given to study and do research in the US and want to maximize it. American students tend to focus more on "work-life balance", emphasis on life.
I work in an industrial R&D lab and read a lot of papers as part of that. So, this topic is near and dear to my heart. There's no point in increasing federal funding whilst this part of Noah's article is true:
> [W]e find that abstract public knowledge per se— publications in scientific journals—has little effect on the various components of corporate R&D. This means that corporate innovation is largely unresponsive to “pure” knowledge spillovers.
As Noah rightly observes, "if research spending never makes its way into the creation of new commercializable products, it’s less likely to raise material living standards or to strengthen the national defense". We can actually tighten that statement considerably. It's not less likely to do those things: it is guaranteed to never do those things. University research doesn't produce anything that people can use directly. The justification for their existence is to supply ideas to the corporations who do (and I say corporations as governments don't develop tech directly, even in defense it's primarily contractors who do that).
But grants are a bad way to fund research that others find useful. Corporates mostly ignore research funded by governments and charities. Most of my paper reading time goes on papers published or directly funded by other corporate labs, because those are where the real value can be found. Flicking through an edition of a scientific journal feels like dumpster diving in comparison. You might get lucky and find a thought provoking paper, but the expected return is sharply negative. Mostly you'll have just wasted your time. And that's in computer science, which isn't badly affected by fraud in the way many other fields are.
People who aren't close to research often make handwavey claims about the importance of "basic" or "fundamental" science. My experience has been that there's no such distinction in reality. Try and nail down this epistemic jello and you're just going to make a mess: nobody agrees on what counts as basic/fundamental, nor what the definitions of these terms are, and it's easy to argue either side for any given subject. For example, are self-driving cars fundamental research? If not, why not? It's certainly very long term, risky and requires solving many hard scientific sub-problems. Some people (typically the left) will intuit that it's not because it's for a specific consumer product, or because it's done by corporations. Try pointing out that a cure for cancer is also a consumer product worked on by corporations and they get frustrated/upset.
The usual endpoint is people define basic research as research that appears to be useless. In which case, well, duh, that's why nobody pays any attention to it. Increasing the volume of such research won't yield any actual advantage in peacetime nor wartime, as everyone is already deafened by it and tuned it out a long time ago.
Wish I could debate this over a beer with you, because I absolutely agree that corporations turning basic science into valuable tools and technologies and physical things are most important! However, I respectfully disagree with you re: the nature and value of “basic” research.
Especially in biology and physics, we can’t really do/make sh*t until we fully understand every permutation of the core concept. Pfizer and BioNTech and Moderna couldn’t have made an mRNA vaccine without the research which discovered mRNA, then the papers figuring out what exactly it does and under what circumstances. This highlights the importance of “basic” research, often at universities, being like construction companies who prime the land and infrastructure before another company comes in and builds the sellable house.
Also, Noah specifically points out materials science, which absolutely does create things people can use directly without further corporate modification. So do chemistry labs, microbiology labs, etc etc. Most of the time, the university labs simply obtain a patent and take a corporate/manufacturing licensing fee rather than bothering with creating the business end of a company, putting together a scalable supply chain to manufacture their product, etc. Funnily enough, the same can even be said for food science; trace it all the way back, and you find even something as low-tech as gelatin was a lab discovery too.
Not at all wanting this to come off as a gotcha comment reply, but I do hope it reduces your likelihood of speaking in absolutes like “it’s guaranteed never to” raise living standards! (Unless you truly hate Jell-O of course)
> materials science, which absolutely does create things people can use directly without further corporate modification
Ah, but I didn't say modification. Universities don't run factories, so no, materials science departments can't make anything people use directly. Their ideas have to be picked up and implemented by companies. And that's often where things go wrong, or why ideas get ignored. Manufacturability is a huge deal in such fields. It turns out to be quite easy to make discoveries in a university lab that work but are hard/impossible to manufacture at scale. A lot of battery research is like this. There have been decades of regular announcements by universities that they've made "breakthroughs" in battery tech, but look at actual battery performance and it improves fairly steadily and predictably. There's no real signs of breakthroughs happening there, which would show up as sudden step changes in price/performance. That's because often what universities come up with (when it's real and not non-replicable) relies on very exotic input materials or processes that are far too expensive to ever be worth it. All the real heavy lifting gets done by commercial scientists because they take into account all the constraints that matter.
Unfortunately this kind of cheating is a big part of how governments manufacture consent for their science spending. Ignore critical constraints, then announce a steady stream of pseudo-discoveries that are useless because you didn't take into account everything that actually matters. Of course it's easy to seem innovative if you arbitrarily descope dozens of important criteria that everyone else has to care about.
Taking out patents does not impress me. If they did all the work without public funding then fine but then. they wouldn't be a university anymore. Given public funding, patenting their work after taking tax money to develop it is merely extortion of those who actually do the heavy lifting. Secondly and more importantly nobody in my field respects the patent system. Notice how the tech industry is remarkably short on patent lawsuits and licensing arrangements, despite being literally called the tech industry. That's because the patent system is hopelessly corrupted and routinely grants patents that either aren't valid when tested in court or shouldn't be. Companies that just try to engage in patent licensing are called "patent trolls" and widely reviled. The respectable companies take out patents purely for defensive purposes; it's become a tax on business and little more.
I recently attended a symposium of academic/industry researchers and execs to discuss how to better commercialize university research and grow industry sponsored programs. One of the industry folks made an interesting point about how the problem isn't finding cool science or cool scientists but finding people who can knit that science into industrial *operations*, which is distinct from both scientific discovery and research administration (eg IP/licensing), the only two areas universities ever focus on. Its not clear if you'd want to stand up a Department of [insert tech discipline] Operations or just hire individual faculty within relevant departments, but its apparently a need!
I'm not sure how faculty can learn operations without actually doing it though. This is similar the problem in computer science where AI research moved almost immediately from academia to industry because it requires significant operational capability to build large clusters and more importantly run them/optimize them 24/7. Operational capability and research ability are intricately linked and can't really be separated.
Agreed, that's why I think they were suggesting trying to hire operations people out of industry and integrate operations into the curriculum (this was mostly in the life sciences). I have no ideas about how to actually pull that off.
Replicating papers findings does not seem to be a metric. Japanese papers are most reliable in validated results. Papers produced that have validatable results are a missing metric and are a meterstick of progress. :-)
We do a pretty good job of that already. And a bad job of policing espionage by the grad students and corporate researchers and engineers brought on. I would argue the latter should be ramped up before the former. The FBI and DOJ, unfortunately, have politicized priorities that don’t seem to align with national security interest. Maybe we can get Chinese spies and Hamas operatives to hang out at abortion clinics or churches or school board meetings?
It seems like China has a virtuous cycle going on in physical science. They have a strong, and growing, manufacturing sector, which creates a huge demand for people with physical science education. That includes very large factories and corporations that can afford to take people with general education and train them in the specifics of like, how to manufacture a tire. Students study those subjects confident that there will be a job waiting for them when they graduate, and investors build factories knowing there will be skilled workers to work in them for long enough to pay back the investment. And a few of the students become professors so that they can teach others and create more skilled graduates in the future, while also doing some fundamental research work.
The US seems to have a much more leaky pipeline. There isn't much of a manufacturing sector left to hire, and they don't want to take a new grad and teach them the more specific skills. So you can't just walk in with a degree in "applied physics" and get trained in how to do the job. You have to get an advanced degree in a very specific form of engineering and hope there will still be a relevant job when you finish. Otherwise, it's off to the coding mines for you- teach yourself to code and work at some unrelated company, probably doing something related to marketing, sales, or finance, because that's what really drives profits in the US now. So then fewer students major in those degrees, which creates less of a demand for professors, and turns it into a vicious game of musical chairs for the people still getting PhDs and fighting each other for the limited academic positions still open.
What we need is for the government to not just subsidize academic education, but also industrial training. Have corporate internships backed by federal grant monehy, so that there's a place for new grads to go instead of just "this position requires 10+ years of highly specific experience that you could only get by working here" or "idk maybe go to grad school again."
I think your opinion here is pretty great, but I just want to share my perspectives:
1. Educating more people in STEM might not be actually that good, without any good environment to make sure that STEM scientists could flourish. A good example is that Soviet Union, even though having more graduated engineers each year compared to the US, could not surpass the US in the majority of technological domain (just look at Soviet computers, or other consumer goods though!) Even Iran, if you look in the graph, has similar number of STEM students per capita compared to the US, yet with their underdeveloped economy, all it got was large-scale brain drain to the West though.
2. Rather than encouraging more R&D spending from government, especially during the coming age of austerity, maybe more tax incentives and grants for private labs, to encourage big corporate labs (similar to Bell Labs) could be encouraged?
BTW, the argument that you raised about age of austerity for the US is very interesting; a similar example is Argentina now, where its president (Milei) is also doing austerity measures, and he is cutting the budget for its national science agency (CONICET) now. Though when he is doing that with public unis, one of the biggest protests in recent years happened in Buenos Aires, so he has to backtrack somewhat; so perhaps you could educate the people about the importance of US government spending in R&D to prevent further cut in that budget?
I’m always dubious about patents being used as a proxy for innovation or commercialization, since there are incentives for private sector companies and employees to patent anything and everything
The key question is: does China allow their scientists to freely publish ALL of their research? This is especially important in AI research. The West must prevail.
Even better- it allows them to publish research they haven’t even done yet along with other people’s research. And you are the right sort of person you can pay someone else to publish research under your name. Does anyone think Xi wrote his own thesis?
Like any system, it responds to incentives and demands. If research papers are demanded, and in quantity (rather than quality), they will be supplied. Pretty much describes the US PhD system, too
Advancements in fundamental science look to have a large multi-national component to me - the global aggregation of everyone's (openly published) science advances science everywhere. An important paper, no matter which nation's researchers write it, will influence researchers everywhere. Science by the business sector seems more likely to invoke commercial-in-confidence - so will not published for others to see until much later, when it will have less impact.
A big economy does seem required to develop new industries - to take some commercial risks and tolerate the failures.
Government policy matters and perhaps China seems less likely to simply give their biggest companies what they want and more likely to demand from them what the government wants. Giving the vehicle manufacturing sector what they want - don't want to, don't have to (produce low emissions vehicles) - is looking like the way to lose a race in Aesop style, resting on their ICE laurels. Fears of China making EV's too cheap and flooding markets with them and calls to lock them out of markets for it is something you can't make up.
And yet, when push comes to shove, the U.S. has proven it can out-innovate in many instances. Russia puts up Sputnik. Americans can watch it cross the night sky. It’s decided we need to know where this satellite is located, to track it. Within weeks, DARPA has developed a technology to do just that, but the manager of the teams immediately asks: “Is there a way to track someone or something on the Earth’s surface. Within weeks, DARPA has reverse-engineered GPS. And it’s decided the U.S. will put a man on the Moon before the end of the decade. A pandemic strikes the world, and the U.S. government instigates Operation Warp Speed. A few months later, China gives the U.S. the Covid-19 genome. Within less than a week, an eight-year-old U.S. pharmaceutical company that has never brought a drug to market, has used AI and mRNA to create a vaccine it knows will work. The only delay was to concurrently run Phase 1, Phase 2, and Phase 3 testing on patient study groups to ensure the vaccine’s safety.
There are no guarantees going forward, but what other country can compress such important world-leading innovations in such condensed time periods? I’m short, I wouldn’t bet against the U.S. making world-leading innovations in material sciences, etc. I think within the next 3-5 years the U.S. will be producing the world’s best batteries, as well as the world’s safest batteries, and by using cheaper, more readily available materials. As for weapons R&D development, I think we’ll be surprised by what can be invented and rapidly deployed.
This is not to say, other U.S. allies will be sitting on their hands. The leading chip lithography technology, the most complicated machine ever designed/built, is made possible by parts created in many Western countries and U.S. softwares.
Just because a country can educate more scientists and engineers doesn’t automatically translate to innovations. The good work environments and incentivized cultures act as the best incubators of technologies. Until a couple of years ago, we frequently heard China would win the AI War? Again, such a sudden shift happened in only two years. It’s enough to give the scolds whiplash.
By the end of the decade, it will be apparent all of this means nothing when compared to the challenge of adapting to global warming.
I would caution against the idea that the U.S. is *inherently* better at this sort of innovation. Yes we sometimes do quite well. But the successes you mention required a lot of money and government action!
I wrote: “. . . when push comes to shove, the U.S. has proven it can out-innovate in many instances.”
I also wrote: “There are no guarantees going forward, but what other country can compress such important world-leading innovations in such condensed time periods?”
Where is the successful Chinese or Russian Covid-19 vaccine? Where is the innovation of fracking formations to extract oil and gas and horizontally drill in six directions from one well head (six times the product for the same capex)? Where was the innovation of GPS?
When China was a country open to the world, it created the greatest technologies known to that world: compass, gunpowder, and paper/printing. It created an incredible trade and supply chain: The Great Silk Road.
Before the Muslim religion became a vengeful religion, the Persian Empire (Iran) was open to the world, leading in mathematics, art, and literature.
Essentially, what I wrote wasn’t that the U.S. is ‘inherently” better at innovation. What I wrote is that when pushed into a corner by an adversary, the U.S. has a consistent history of out-innovating its adversaries. And the U.S. was every bit as good as China at stealing technology and people with knowledge of that technology, smuggling textile mill technology and operators into the U.S. from England, kicking off the Industrial Revolution. To this day, we celebrate our greatest pirate, Alexander Hamilton on our currency and on Broadway.
Once again, Ukraine showed this ability to innovate when push came to shove with an adversary, stopping a 41-mile-long convoy of billions of dollars of military equipment, weapons, and trained personnel with 30 drone hobbyists on bicycles. I keep repeating this point because it seems to be lost on so many military planners/strategists and mainstream media experts — none of whom even dreamed of such a strategy. The perceived great strategist Putin has proven to be overrated. Now we read he’s pivoted the Russian economy to a military economy. So, why is Putin showing up in North Korea with his tin cup? Putin has greatly weakened Russia: losing the EU energy market, being forced to sell his oil cheap to China.
“Biden has responded to these threats by shoring up NATO and welcoming to it Finland and Sweden, with their powerful militaries. His support has enabled Ukraine to decimate the Russian military, which has lost at least 87% of the 360,000 troops it had when it attacked Ukraine in February 2022, thus dramatically weakening a nation seen as a key foe in 2021.”
— Heather Cox Richardson
This alliance of China is with three subservient countries and economies (Russia, Iran, and North Korea). Note Iran’s telegraphed missile/drone response to Israel, announcing that was the end of this “escalation.” The fact is Iran was scared spitless that missiles might be fired into Tehran and other military installations. Note the joint cooperation of intelligence, etc. of Israel, France, Britain, and the U.S. Where was the joint response of Russia, China, and North Korea in support of Iran? If China is supplying Russia with adequate weapons and ammunition, why is Putin searching for those same things in North Korea?
Something doesn’t add up.
Why would Xi risk an invasion of Taiwan at this point? I thought China played the long game? Or is it that the bullying and blustering Xi has painted himself into a corner with China’s hardliners who want an invasion of Taiwan on Xi’s watch without taking into account the economic consequences? It makes no sense for China to invade Taiwan. Perhaps China’s leadership has no common sense.
US should just invest more in espionage to steal Chinese research. Why do all the hard work when we can just copy them with a few years delay at most? Do the Czechs for instance lack the internet, because it was the Americans who did all the early hard work(and money)? They might even have better internet than the US! I am kind of joking but also not really.
Only problem with that plan is, even if it either proved the legitimacy of their research claims or smoked the Chinese out as frauds, the public wouldn’t ever know about it and we’d all still be debating/questioning in our little online/offline town squares…that’s the nature of espionage ;-)
I would like to share my perspectives on the home bias in citation in China. For context, I am a native Chinese with a BS from China and a PhD from the US. My background is in psychology, but I have recently conducted research on metascience (or science of science), on topics like authorship inflation, diversity, etc. I have also collaborated with several researchers in mainland China.
You mentioned two accounts explaining home bias in citations: 1) Chinese science of higher quality than people outside China realize; and 2) China’s government directive.
There is a third one in play here: Chinese researchers may cite coworkers -- particularly those senior and with power -- so as not to offend them and to please them. Indeed, in one of my recent collaborations with a Chinese professor, I was curious about the presence of several citations of a senior professor from Tsinghua, and was basically told the reason. Of course, the citations are relevant, so there is no ill-play here, but it's also completely fine to not cite some of those.
That's a great point.
OK, I updated the main post to mention this!
H index hacking is a massive issue in China. A bunch of journals just had to purge thousands of papers because it seemed the experiments they reported on were never performed.
Wow. Got a link to that story?
He's probably talking about the Wiley purge of Hindawi journals, but there have been a lot of others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindawi_(publisher)
"In 2023, Wiley announced after over 7000 article retractions in Hindawi journals related to the publication of articles originating from paper mills that it will cease using the Hindawi brand and will integrate Hindawi’s 200 remaining journals into its main portfolio.[7][8] The Wiley CEO who initiated the Hindawi acquisition stepped down in the wake of those retractions.[9]"
https://www.science.org/content/article/paper-mills-bribing-editors-scholarly-journals-science-investigation-finds
It's a bit surprising this isn't mentioned in your article tbh. I kept reading and expected it to be mentioned because it's a big story that fits into a wider context of systematic and massive-scale research fraud coming out of Asia, that throws all metrics about their progress into question, but maybe the news sources you use don't report on it.
To summarize: Chinese research output turns out to be swamped with entirely fake papers. As in, it reports on experiments that never happened, with evidence that is photoshopped or re-used between supposedly unrelated papers. The papers aren't forged by the named researchers directly. They buy the papers pre-made from an ecosystem of professional forgers, the "paper mills" mentioned in the Wikipedia article, who for a fee will write you a fake paper and guarantee publication via networks of corrupted journal editors.
This problem is especially prevalent in the life sciences, and above all in Chinese life sciences. This happens because practicing Chinese doctors are required by the CCP to publish research in order to get promoted, but they can't do that because they're overloaded with work healing people. Yet without a promotion they can't earn enough to start a family, usually. So they buy papers and publish "research". Because academia is wide open to fraud and doesn't care about stopping it this stuff is mostly found by volunteers, so the extant reports are really just the tip of the iceberg and nobody knows the true extent. Ironically some of the best reporting on this phenomenon comes from the news arms of Science and Nature, who are editorially independent of the paper publishing arms, but these articles often choose to leave out the national affiliations of the authors who are doing this (because, y'know, it'd be racist). If you check the names on the papers doing this though you see there's a crystal clear trend.
So Chinese research progress may be largely illusory. It certainly needs to be considered carefully.
That’s the one. Chinese research is a lot like Chinese property. Looks good from a distance but I wouldn’t test it too hard.
Oh wow. Yeah I even wrote about that, but didn't realize the purge was China-related.
really funny of you to assume that this only happens in china.
In my time in grad school - Seen plenty citation rings and fealty networks in US academia - including top universities like stanford/montreal etc.
I'm sorry to say this, and I'm sure the pesky asians are gaming the system, but the writings here seriously sounds like high grade copium - and nothing it going to change unless you start giving your competitors their fair due instead of finding excuses for indicator metrics traditionally used for evaluation (that you, i.e. the west, designed and selected!) not being what you want them to be.
BTW, 'getting ahead in science' is a brain dead dick measuring exercise - for the practical purposes of military power, the chinese don't need to be qualitatively number 1 - they just need to be roughly comparable and they will still be able to pull dramatically ahead of the US in any military conflict due to their superior manufacturing industry.
I should clarify that by "coworkers", I meant not just colleagues working within the same department, but colleagues working on the same topic (so mostly in other universities/institutes).
Implicit in discussions like, how does the US catch up to Chinese manufacturing capacity or weapons production capacity or E.V. technology or applied sciences, or… you get the point… is the failure of globalism in business to nurture democracy and commitment to rules based foreign policy around the world. If China was a democratic nation we wouldn’t have nearly the adversarial relationship we have today. We compete with Germany, Japan and Korea but they are democratic nations with substantial commitment to international law.
Globalization (of both trade and capital) allows companies to best pursue profit opportunity, laser focus on competitive advantage and added value (and also on what shareholder reward companies for, which is not manufacturing breadth and vertical integration but rather high profit margins, low overhead and high efficiency) and optimize costs. It also expands the range of good available to consumers while keeping costs as low as possible.
It is a vehicle for profit, shareholder value and consumption growth. It is not at all oriented toward optimized outcomes for domestic labor, domestic manufacturing capability, national security, social cohesion or gini coefficents (domestically - it can help those globally).
In fact, while globalization is great for global populations and for tycoons and entrepreneurs hoping to become tycoons and wealthy investors and shareholders (many of whom see themselves as “global citizens”, rather than as part of the domestic national fabric with obligations to their countrymen/women), it is obviously sub-optimal domestically in labor, manufacturing, security, social cohesion and domestic gini coefficients.
Thousands of reasonably bright and thoughtful individuals have thrown out some logical ideas to counter this, but too much is steeped in politics. The types of people who wanted protectionism or union jobs or 80 percent tax rates and socialist distribution 30 years ago still want them now and just use globalization as an excuse. Also, there are others who argue all this is a yesterday problem - AI will change the world in ways we can’t predict and solve all of these issues. Sure- because a system but on maximizing ad revenues and human engagement will certainly maximize rainbows and global peace. 😊
I largely agree, but the point I was trying to make was that economic development doesn’t necessarily lead to democratic governments and respect for international law. For a while there, I believe this was the operating assumption… that it did.
Very true
Interesting and somewhat trigging article. Several Points:
1) Scientific Publications: This whole space is a disaster right now. Yes...there is an explosion of dubious Chinese authors/conferences. However, because of academic metrics, there is a similar process in the US. Let's call it the "spamification" of scientific literature. A huge amount is repetitive, self serving, and often plain wrong. The space needs to be reformed. Any high-level conclusions based on metrics from this space are highly suspect... including yours on physical sciences.
2) Quality vs Quantity: If there is a space where quality matter, it is this space. Especially when the focus is 3-sigma discoveries. This is not to say that these cannot happen in China, but one of the interesting aspects is that these sorts of discoveries typically come of out "curiosity based research" vs "directed research." Also, while scale matters to some degree, it tops out after some threshold. This IS the reason that Germany can compete with China. In my experience, this is not too different from VC investing. BTW... Israel is the obvious counter example.
3) Research==> Economic Impact: Truely interesting breakthrough research enables disruptive economic impact. What does this mean? you have to tolerate massive instability in your labor markets while technology transforms your economy. Is this really going to happen in China ?
4) Private vs Public Funding: Public is best for basic research and Private to scale. Though, it appears the private markets are tolerating very long runways these days (AI LLM as an example).
Finally, more funding for basic sciences would be goodness, but the real way to maintain an advantage is to solve the immigration problem. Attract/Keep the world's best scientists in the US... underneath it all it is about a war for talent.
"Yes...there is an explosion of dubious Chinese authors/conferences. However, because of academic metrics, there is a similar process in the US...Any high-level conclusions based on metrics from this space are highly suspect... including yours on physical sciences."
I see a possible contradiction here. If the U.S. is playing a similar "spamification" game to China, then that *supports* the idea that China is ahead in the applied physical sciences, even if both have inflated numbers.
LOL .... the only problem is that if you don't know what is real in either case, the comparison is pretty arbitrary. The "real" science vs "spam" science ratio has a big uncertainty bound. In actuality, there is a severe need for journals to do yearly updates of how the state-of-art has advanced in their field. This would be actually useful.
Some thoughts following more than 40 years in American physics and related fields, including substantial interactions with Chinese scientists and service on editorial boards:
1. It is an easy decision for a congressman to placate advocates by voting for authorization. And it is common to see a change that is authorized reversed in the course of appropriation. This has been going on at least since the 1970s and likely much longer than that.
2. Physics-oriented western journals have seen a massive increase in submissions from China over recent decades. Most of them are rejected at the first screening phase, many over language but many also over the quality of what the paper tries to do (hard to describe this briefly). One consequence has been the rise of journals published in China. Overall, just beware of studies based on citations and publications.
3. There are outstanding Chinese scientists. But also many who are imitative and incremental. In my view the authoritarian culture inhibits the growth of the young there (also very true in Japan).
4. I would agree that science funding in the US is screwed up. It is also far from easy to "fix".
"the authoritarian culture inhibits the growth of the young there (also very true in Japan)" <-- I was with you until I saw this part. Japanese science is extremely high-quality and there are a bunch of important breakthroughs. Graduate students and young profs in Japan are overworked, but also given wide latitude to pursue their interests -- for example, the technique for creating induced pluripotent stem cells was actually discovered by a student, Takahashi Kazutoshi.
That is quite fascinating. I would not describe the particular fields familiar to me with your words. However, the impact of authority I saw in both countries did have more to do with collaborations and group efforts in research fields where these were central.
Interesting backstory to the CHIPS act. In current form, 80% of spending is for economic development, attracting semiconductor fabs to the US. This is good industrial policy, but not a direct funding of science. About 20% is for R&D (a little over $10B). A far cry from the original form, and there is still a major hole there in the support of science in the US
On the topic of science policy, it’s worth mentioning the large number of Chinese students and postdocs that make up the science workforce in the US. This seems like it may be a significant backdoor for know-how transfer from the US to China. If more of these students could become US citizens that would benefit us, but invariably many will go back to China. Making it easier for more students from India and allied countries would help. One challenge is that students need to he accepted in graduate programs in order to get visas, but I wonder if non-Chinese international students may be at a disadvantage in that regard. Anectodally, I’ve noticed that some labs with Chinese-American PIs seem to disproportionately hire Chinese graduate students. In some cases it seems kind of obvious discrimination that wouldn’t be tolerated if say a German-American PI only hired German international students. I’m sure in many cases this is innocent in some ways—PIs may be more comfortable conversing with students in their natuve language, for example, but from a science policy perspective it’s not optimal to be overly dependent on Chinese nationals, or to have a back-door for tech-transfer back to China when students return to China to start their own labs. Ensuring that admission and hiring in graduate programs complies with non-discriminration rules and flagging labs where there is evidence of statistical discrimination (in any form, nationality or gender) seems like a good place to start and one that seems to have been overlooked despite the stringent DEI policies in place at many academic institutions.
For retaining foreign talent, one obvious suggestion is to reform immigration laws so that, e.g. foreign nationals with a PhD from an accredited US university can all become permanent residents. Much better for retaining talent trained in US universities than a visa lottery where many PhDs are forced to return to their home countries.
It does mean that PhDs who are already US citizens face fiercer competition for jobs, but this can be partially counteracted by increasing research funding.
And if our concern is for the scientific and technological output of the US, the country gains if some of the less successful citizens with PhDs are driven out of research by more skilled immigrant PhDs.
I’ve also heard stories of non-Chinese PIs focusing on hiring Chinese students and postdocs because they think they can extract more work with less complaint from them. Particularly if the person wants to game quantity of publications and citations more than caring about quality or interest of the work (since caring about student and worker welfare is often related to those latter points).
Yes, me as well, a grad school friend told me that his postdoc lab, which was mainly Chinese and had a Chinese-American PI had a separate meeting conducted in Mandarin and that the PI used threats about losing employment/immigration status to ensure the Chinese students worked long hours.
> I’ve also heard stories of non-Chinese PIs focusing on hiring Chinese students and postdocs because they think they can extract more work with less complaint from them.
Not to excuse abusive PIs, but let me put this in a better light: Chinese students tend to appreciate the awesome opportunity they have been given to study and do research in the US and want to maximize it. American students tend to focus more on "work-life balance", emphasis on life.
I work in an industrial R&D lab and read a lot of papers as part of that. So, this topic is near and dear to my heart. There's no point in increasing federal funding whilst this part of Noah's article is true:
> [W]e find that abstract public knowledge per se— publications in scientific journals—has little effect on the various components of corporate R&D. This means that corporate innovation is largely unresponsive to “pure” knowledge spillovers.
As Noah rightly observes, "if research spending never makes its way into the creation of new commercializable products, it’s less likely to raise material living standards or to strengthen the national defense". We can actually tighten that statement considerably. It's not less likely to do those things: it is guaranteed to never do those things. University research doesn't produce anything that people can use directly. The justification for their existence is to supply ideas to the corporations who do (and I say corporations as governments don't develop tech directly, even in defense it's primarily contractors who do that).
But grants are a bad way to fund research that others find useful. Corporates mostly ignore research funded by governments and charities. Most of my paper reading time goes on papers published or directly funded by other corporate labs, because those are where the real value can be found. Flicking through an edition of a scientific journal feels like dumpster diving in comparison. You might get lucky and find a thought provoking paper, but the expected return is sharply negative. Mostly you'll have just wasted your time. And that's in computer science, which isn't badly affected by fraud in the way many other fields are.
People who aren't close to research often make handwavey claims about the importance of "basic" or "fundamental" science. My experience has been that there's no such distinction in reality. Try and nail down this epistemic jello and you're just going to make a mess: nobody agrees on what counts as basic/fundamental, nor what the definitions of these terms are, and it's easy to argue either side for any given subject. For example, are self-driving cars fundamental research? If not, why not? It's certainly very long term, risky and requires solving many hard scientific sub-problems. Some people (typically the left) will intuit that it's not because it's for a specific consumer product, or because it's done by corporations. Try pointing out that a cure for cancer is also a consumer product worked on by corporations and they get frustrated/upset.
The usual endpoint is people define basic research as research that appears to be useless. In which case, well, duh, that's why nobody pays any attention to it. Increasing the volume of such research won't yield any actual advantage in peacetime nor wartime, as everyone is already deafened by it and tuned it out a long time ago.
Wish I could debate this over a beer with you, because I absolutely agree that corporations turning basic science into valuable tools and technologies and physical things are most important! However, I respectfully disagree with you re: the nature and value of “basic” research.
Especially in biology and physics, we can’t really do/make sh*t until we fully understand every permutation of the core concept. Pfizer and BioNTech and Moderna couldn’t have made an mRNA vaccine without the research which discovered mRNA, then the papers figuring out what exactly it does and under what circumstances. This highlights the importance of “basic” research, often at universities, being like construction companies who prime the land and infrastructure before another company comes in and builds the sellable house.
Also, Noah specifically points out materials science, which absolutely does create things people can use directly without further corporate modification. So do chemistry labs, microbiology labs, etc etc. Most of the time, the university labs simply obtain a patent and take a corporate/manufacturing licensing fee rather than bothering with creating the business end of a company, putting together a scalable supply chain to manufacture their product, etc. Funnily enough, the same can even be said for food science; trace it all the way back, and you find even something as low-tech as gelatin was a lab discovery too.
Not at all wanting this to come off as a gotcha comment reply, but I do hope it reduces your likelihood of speaking in absolutes like “it’s guaranteed never to” raise living standards! (Unless you truly hate Jell-O of course)
> materials science, which absolutely does create things people can use directly without further corporate modification
Ah, but I didn't say modification. Universities don't run factories, so no, materials science departments can't make anything people use directly. Their ideas have to be picked up and implemented by companies. And that's often where things go wrong, or why ideas get ignored. Manufacturability is a huge deal in such fields. It turns out to be quite easy to make discoveries in a university lab that work but are hard/impossible to manufacture at scale. A lot of battery research is like this. There have been decades of regular announcements by universities that they've made "breakthroughs" in battery tech, but look at actual battery performance and it improves fairly steadily and predictably. There's no real signs of breakthroughs happening there, which would show up as sudden step changes in price/performance. That's because often what universities come up with (when it's real and not non-replicable) relies on very exotic input materials or processes that are far too expensive to ever be worth it. All the real heavy lifting gets done by commercial scientists because they take into account all the constraints that matter.
Unfortunately this kind of cheating is a big part of how governments manufacture consent for their science spending. Ignore critical constraints, then announce a steady stream of pseudo-discoveries that are useless because you didn't take into account everything that actually matters. Of course it's easy to seem innovative if you arbitrarily descope dozens of important criteria that everyone else has to care about.
Taking out patents does not impress me. If they did all the work without public funding then fine but then. they wouldn't be a university anymore. Given public funding, patenting their work after taking tax money to develop it is merely extortion of those who actually do the heavy lifting. Secondly and more importantly nobody in my field respects the patent system. Notice how the tech industry is remarkably short on patent lawsuits and licensing arrangements, despite being literally called the tech industry. That's because the patent system is hopelessly corrupted and routinely grants patents that either aren't valid when tested in court or shouldn't be. Companies that just try to engage in patent licensing are called "patent trolls" and widely reviled. The respectable companies take out patents purely for defensive purposes; it's become a tax on business and little more.
I recently attended a symposium of academic/industry researchers and execs to discuss how to better commercialize university research and grow industry sponsored programs. One of the industry folks made an interesting point about how the problem isn't finding cool science or cool scientists but finding people who can knit that science into industrial *operations*, which is distinct from both scientific discovery and research administration (eg IP/licensing), the only two areas universities ever focus on. Its not clear if you'd want to stand up a Department of [insert tech discipline] Operations or just hire individual faculty within relevant departments, but its apparently a need!
I'm not sure how faculty can learn operations without actually doing it though. This is similar the problem in computer science where AI research moved almost immediately from academia to industry because it requires significant operational capability to build large clusters and more importantly run them/optimize them 24/7. Operational capability and research ability are intricately linked and can't really be separated.
Agreed, that's why I think they were suggesting trying to hire operations people out of industry and integrate operations into the curriculum (this was mostly in the life sciences). I have no ideas about how to actually pull that off.
Replicating papers findings does not seem to be a metric. Japanese papers are most reliable in validated results. Papers produced that have validatable results are a missing metric and are a meterstick of progress. :-)
Japanese papers are the most reliable? I want to believe that, but where did you see that?
Attracting more students and researchers especially including from China should be another part of the US strategy.
We do a pretty good job of that already. And a bad job of policing espionage by the grad students and corporate researchers and engineers brought on. I would argue the latter should be ramped up before the former. The FBI and DOJ, unfortunately, have politicized priorities that don’t seem to align with national security interest. Maybe we can get Chinese spies and Hamas operatives to hang out at abortion clinics or churches or school board meetings?
General point to "likers:" please consider subscribing to my substack.
Do we and Do we? :)
It seems like China has a virtuous cycle going on in physical science. They have a strong, and growing, manufacturing sector, which creates a huge demand for people with physical science education. That includes very large factories and corporations that can afford to take people with general education and train them in the specifics of like, how to manufacture a tire. Students study those subjects confident that there will be a job waiting for them when they graduate, and investors build factories knowing there will be skilled workers to work in them for long enough to pay back the investment. And a few of the students become professors so that they can teach others and create more skilled graduates in the future, while also doing some fundamental research work.
The US seems to have a much more leaky pipeline. There isn't much of a manufacturing sector left to hire, and they don't want to take a new grad and teach them the more specific skills. So you can't just walk in with a degree in "applied physics" and get trained in how to do the job. You have to get an advanced degree in a very specific form of engineering and hope there will still be a relevant job when you finish. Otherwise, it's off to the coding mines for you- teach yourself to code and work at some unrelated company, probably doing something related to marketing, sales, or finance, because that's what really drives profits in the US now. So then fewer students major in those degrees, which creates less of a demand for professors, and turns it into a vicious game of musical chairs for the people still getting PhDs and fighting each other for the limited academic positions still open.
What we need is for the government to not just subsidize academic education, but also industrial training. Have corporate internships backed by federal grant monehy, so that there's a place for new grads to go instead of just "this position requires 10+ years of highly specific experience that you could only get by working here" or "idk maybe go to grad school again."
Yep
I think your opinion here is pretty great, but I just want to share my perspectives:
1. Educating more people in STEM might not be actually that good, without any good environment to make sure that STEM scientists could flourish. A good example is that Soviet Union, even though having more graduated engineers each year compared to the US, could not surpass the US in the majority of technological domain (just look at Soviet computers, or other consumer goods though!) Even Iran, if you look in the graph, has similar number of STEM students per capita compared to the US, yet with their underdeveloped economy, all it got was large-scale brain drain to the West though.
2. Rather than encouraging more R&D spending from government, especially during the coming age of austerity, maybe more tax incentives and grants for private labs, to encourage big corporate labs (similar to Bell Labs) could be encouraged?
BTW, the argument that you raised about age of austerity for the US is very interesting; a similar example is Argentina now, where its president (Milei) is also doing austerity measures, and he is cutting the budget for its national science agency (CONICET) now. Though when he is doing that with public unis, one of the biggest protests in recent years happened in Buenos Aires, so he has to backtrack somewhat; so perhaps you could educate the people about the importance of US government spending in R&D to prevent further cut in that budget?
I’m always dubious about patents being used as a proxy for innovation or commercialization, since there are incentives for private sector companies and employees to patent anything and everything
The key question is: does China allow their scientists to freely publish ALL of their research? This is especially important in AI research. The West must prevail.
See the Leopold interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdbVtZIn9IM&t=362s
Even better- it allows them to publish research they haven’t even done yet along with other people’s research. And you are the right sort of person you can pay someone else to publish research under your name. Does anyone think Xi wrote his own thesis?
Like any system, it responds to incentives and demands. If research papers are demanded, and in quantity (rather than quality), they will be supplied. Pretty much describes the US PhD system, too
Advancements in fundamental science look to have a large multi-national component to me - the global aggregation of everyone's (openly published) science advances science everywhere. An important paper, no matter which nation's researchers write it, will influence researchers everywhere. Science by the business sector seems more likely to invoke commercial-in-confidence - so will not published for others to see until much later, when it will have less impact.
A big economy does seem required to develop new industries - to take some commercial risks and tolerate the failures.
Government policy matters and perhaps China seems less likely to simply give their biggest companies what they want and more likely to demand from them what the government wants. Giving the vehicle manufacturing sector what they want - don't want to, don't have to (produce low emissions vehicles) - is looking like the way to lose a race in Aesop style, resting on their ICE laurels. Fears of China making EV's too cheap and flooding markets with them and calls to lock them out of markets for it is something you can't make up.
And yet, when push comes to shove, the U.S. has proven it can out-innovate in many instances. Russia puts up Sputnik. Americans can watch it cross the night sky. It’s decided we need to know where this satellite is located, to track it. Within weeks, DARPA has developed a technology to do just that, but the manager of the teams immediately asks: “Is there a way to track someone or something on the Earth’s surface. Within weeks, DARPA has reverse-engineered GPS. And it’s decided the U.S. will put a man on the Moon before the end of the decade. A pandemic strikes the world, and the U.S. government instigates Operation Warp Speed. A few months later, China gives the U.S. the Covid-19 genome. Within less than a week, an eight-year-old U.S. pharmaceutical company that has never brought a drug to market, has used AI and mRNA to create a vaccine it knows will work. The only delay was to concurrently run Phase 1, Phase 2, and Phase 3 testing on patient study groups to ensure the vaccine’s safety.
There are no guarantees going forward, but what other country can compress such important world-leading innovations in such condensed time periods? I’m short, I wouldn’t bet against the U.S. making world-leading innovations in material sciences, etc. I think within the next 3-5 years the U.S. will be producing the world’s best batteries, as well as the world’s safest batteries, and by using cheaper, more readily available materials. As for weapons R&D development, I think we’ll be surprised by what can be invented and rapidly deployed.
This is not to say, other U.S. allies will be sitting on their hands. The leading chip lithography technology, the most complicated machine ever designed/built, is made possible by parts created in many Western countries and U.S. softwares.
Just because a country can educate more scientists and engineers doesn’t automatically translate to innovations. The good work environments and incentivized cultures act as the best incubators of technologies. Until a couple of years ago, we frequently heard China would win the AI War? Again, such a sudden shift happened in only two years. It’s enough to give the scolds whiplash.
By the end of the decade, it will be apparent all of this means nothing when compared to the challenge of adapting to global warming.
I would caution against the idea that the U.S. is *inherently* better at this sort of innovation. Yes we sometimes do quite well. But the successes you mention required a lot of money and government action!
I didn’t say the U.S. was ‘inherently’ better.
I wrote: “. . . when push comes to shove, the U.S. has proven it can out-innovate in many instances.”
I also wrote: “There are no guarantees going forward, but what other country can compress such important world-leading innovations in such condensed time periods?”
Where is the successful Chinese or Russian Covid-19 vaccine? Where is the innovation of fracking formations to extract oil and gas and horizontally drill in six directions from one well head (six times the product for the same capex)? Where was the innovation of GPS?
When China was a country open to the world, it created the greatest technologies known to that world: compass, gunpowder, and paper/printing. It created an incredible trade and supply chain: The Great Silk Road.
Before the Muslim religion became a vengeful religion, the Persian Empire (Iran) was open to the world, leading in mathematics, art, and literature.
Essentially, what I wrote wasn’t that the U.S. is ‘inherently” better at innovation. What I wrote is that when pushed into a corner by an adversary, the U.S. has a consistent history of out-innovating its adversaries. And the U.S. was every bit as good as China at stealing technology and people with knowledge of that technology, smuggling textile mill technology and operators into the U.S. from England, kicking off the Industrial Revolution. To this day, we celebrate our greatest pirate, Alexander Hamilton on our currency and on Broadway.
Once again, Ukraine showed this ability to innovate when push came to shove with an adversary, stopping a 41-mile-long convoy of billions of dollars of military equipment, weapons, and trained personnel with 30 drone hobbyists on bicycles. I keep repeating this point because it seems to be lost on so many military planners/strategists and mainstream media experts — none of whom even dreamed of such a strategy. The perceived great strategist Putin has proven to be overrated. Now we read he’s pivoted the Russian economy to a military economy. So, why is Putin showing up in North Korea with his tin cup? Putin has greatly weakened Russia: losing the EU energy market, being forced to sell his oil cheap to China.
“Biden has responded to these threats by shoring up NATO and welcoming to it Finland and Sweden, with their powerful militaries. His support has enabled Ukraine to decimate the Russian military, which has lost at least 87% of the 360,000 troops it had when it attacked Ukraine in February 2022, thus dramatically weakening a nation seen as a key foe in 2021.”
— Heather Cox Richardson
This alliance of China is with three subservient countries and economies (Russia, Iran, and North Korea). Note Iran’s telegraphed missile/drone response to Israel, announcing that was the end of this “escalation.” The fact is Iran was scared spitless that missiles might be fired into Tehran and other military installations. Note the joint cooperation of intelligence, etc. of Israel, France, Britain, and the U.S. Where was the joint response of Russia, China, and North Korea in support of Iran? If China is supplying Russia with adequate weapons and ammunition, why is Putin searching for those same things in North Korea?
Something doesn’t add up.
Why would Xi risk an invasion of Taiwan at this point? I thought China played the long game? Or is it that the bullying and blustering Xi has painted himself into a corner with China’s hardliners who want an invasion of Taiwan on Xi’s watch without taking into account the economic consequences? It makes no sense for China to invade Taiwan. Perhaps China’s leadership has no common sense.
Time will tell.
US should just invest more in espionage to steal Chinese research. Why do all the hard work when we can just copy them with a few years delay at most? Do the Czechs for instance lack the internet, because it was the Americans who did all the early hard work(and money)? They might even have better internet than the US! I am kind of joking but also not really.
Only problem with that plan is, even if it either proved the legitimacy of their research claims or smoked the Chinese out as frauds, the public wouldn’t ever know about it and we’d all still be debating/questioning in our little online/offline town squares…that’s the nature of espionage ;-)