China’s number 1 scientific superpower? Report (funded by the US State Department)
Conducted by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and funded by the US State Department, the study reveals that China leads the way in 37 of the 44 research fields monitored, including electric batteries, hypersonic technology and wireless communications. advanced radio frequencies such as 5G and 6G.
China is becoming the No. 1 superpower. 1 in the strategic field of scientific research? This is what would emerge from a study carried out by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which examined the high-impact scientific papers produced by the major global research institutions, among which those of Beijing stand out.
Australian think tank research.
The news of the existence of a study according to which the US and other Western powers are losing the race with China in the development of the most advanced technologies has gone around the world, earning articles and mentions in various media and publications such as Reuters , Wall Street Journal and Guardian .
Conducted by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and funded by the US State Department, the study reveals that China leads the way in 37 of the 44 research fields monitored, including electric batteries, hypersonic technology and wireless communications. advanced radio frequencies such as 5G and 6G.
These results emerged by analyzing the "high-impact" papers published in first-rate scientific journals that gained a high number of citations.
Through this criterion it was possible to detect, as the think tank writes, that "China has built the foundations for positioning itself as the world's leading superpower in science and technology, establishing a sometimes surprising leading position in high-impact research in the majority of critical and emerging technology domains”.
The authors of the study have created an interactive database, called critical technology tracker , which ranks the universities and research institutes of the various countries in order of importance; it, in the words of the study, "shows that, for some technologies, the world's top ten research institutions are located in China and are collectively generating more high-impact research papers than the institutions that are in second place, much some of which are located in the USA".
For example, the tracker shows that the Chinese Academy of Sciences ranks first or second in most of the 44 research fields tracked, including defense, space, robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), and biotechnology.
That's not all: according to the Australian institute, it cannot now be ruled out that China will establish a real monopoly in eight critical technological fields such as hydrogen, synthetic biology and the construction of nanometric-scale materials.
In any case, the US maintains a leadership position in areas such as vaccines, quantum computing and space launch systems.
The overtaking of Chinese universities in global rankings.
The ASPI study only confirms what emerged from the latest edition of the Best Global Universities rankings created by the US News & World Report, a leading institution in the evaluation of the performance of educational institutions.
In the 2022-2023 ranking, Chinese universities overtook American ones for the first time: 338 Chinese universities appear in the ranking against 280 in the USA. Next in the ranking we find Japan with 105 institutes, Great Britain with 92 and India with 81.
If there has been overtaking, it has not however concerned the leading positions, firmly occupied by American universities, which conquer eight places in the top ten.
The slide is also recorded in another very popular ranking, the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, which evaluates and indexes the performance of 1,799 universities in 104 countries.
In the 2023 edition, many American universities dropped out of the Top 100 in contrast to what happens for the Chinese ones, which instead gain positions. It should be noted in particular that from 2018 to today the US universities in the Top 100 have dropped from 43 to 34, while the Chinese ones have dropped from 2 to 7.
Despite this change of balance, the primacy of US training institutions in the Top 10 remains unchanged, with the presence of 7 universities out of 10.
The competition between the US and China for the leadership in AI.
In the penultimate issue of Limes magazine , there are two essays that compare the development of the various AI sectors in China and the United States in comparative terms, with the aim of identifying who holds the leadership.
In the contribution signed by two Chinese analysts, He Tian and You Ji , it is recalled how Beijing is investing billions of dollars a year in the development of these sectors by financing private companies that conduct experimental and applied research.
Thanks to political support, Chinese companies have greatly advanced the state of the art of AI in the country. In this regard, the authors recall that "in 2020 the number of strategic companies in the context of AI exceeded 3 thousand with an increase of 19%" compared to the previous year.
The great march of AI in China has ensured that companies in the country today have a competitive advantage in the field of algorithms and application software: here are the cases of Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, which have made massive investments in the construction of the ten largest national centers of computing and data processing.
Notable progress has also been made in the semiconductor area. In this regard, He and You write that the "intelligent chip companies such as HiSidicon (Huawei), Cambricon, Smic and Ziguang Zhanrui have promoted the integration of AI in intelligent terminals and security devices as well as in urban projects (smart cities)”.
But it is precisely in the field of semiconductors that the author of Limes' second essay, Paul Triolo , points out a bottleneck that will prevent the full development of AI in China.
Triolo reviews all the political and bureaucratic measures taken by the Biden Administration to prevent China from acquiring those advanced semiconductors which are indispensable for the functioning of AI and over which Western industry still has primacy.
That is why it is still too early to determine who will soon dominate the technologies that are changing the face of the world.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/cina-superpotenza-scientifica-numero-1-report-finanziato-dal-dipartimento-di-stato-usa/ on Sat, 04 Mar 2023 13:33:50 +0000.