The NYTimes has a good data-driven piece on How China Went From Clean Energy Copycat to Global Innovator, the upshot of which is that the old view of China as simply copying (“stealing” in some eyes) no longer describes reality. In some fields, including solar, batteries and hydrogen, China is now the leading innovator as measured by high-quality patents and scientific citations.
None of this should surprise anyone. China employs roughly 2.6 million full-time equivalent (FTE) researchers versus about 1.7 million in the United States. On a per-capita basis the U.S. is ahead—about 4,500 researchers per million people versus China’s 1,700—but population scale tips the balance. China simply has more researchers in absolute terms. If you frame it in terms of rare cognitive talent, as in my post on The Extreme Shortage of High IQ Workers—the arithmetic is the same: ~170,000 1-in-1,000 workers (≈IQ 145) in the U.S. labor force and ~770,000 in China. Scale matters.
In the 20th century the world’s most populous countries were poor but that was neither the case historically nor will it be true in the 21st century. The standard of living in China remains well below that in the United States and China may never catch U.S. GDP per capita, but quantity is a quality of its own. More people means more ideas.
To be clear, the rise of China and India as scientific superpowers is not a threat, it’s a windfall. Whiners complain about US pharmaceutical R&D “subsidizing” the world. Well, Chinese pharmaceutical innovation is now saving American lives. Terrific. Ideas don’t stop at borders, and their spread raises living standards everywhere. It would be wonderful if an American cured cancer. It would be 99% as wonderful if a Chinese scientist did. What matters is that when more scientists attack the problem, the odds of a cure rise so we should look favorably on a world with more scientists. That is progress.
The danger is not China’s rise but America’s mindset. Treat science as zero-sum and every Chinese patent looks like a loss. But ideas are nonrival: a Chinese breakthrough doesn’t make Americans poorer, it makes the world richer. A multi-polar scientific world means faster growth, greater wealth, and accelerating technology—even if America wins a smaller share of the Nobels.
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