By JOHN RICHARD SCHROCK
The Belfer Center for Science & International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School has just published “The Great Tech Rivalry: China versus the U.S.” It documents how the U.S. is falling behind China in many areas of technology including AI, 5G, solar power, and a list of other fields.
This report fully supports the fact that the U.S. is increasingly suffering from widespread science illiteracy and low production of scientists due to low amounts of science education K-12, dating back four decades.
This report’s executive summary states that China “...has displaced the U.S. as the world’s top high-tech manufacturer, producing 250 million computers, 25 million automobiles, and 1.5 billion smartphones in 2020.”
“Beyond becoming a manufacturing powerhouse, China has become a serious competitor in the foundational technologies of the 21st century: artificial intelligence (AI), 5G, quantum information science (QIS), semiconductors, biotechnology, and green energy. In some races, it has already become No. 1. In others, on current trajectories, it will overtake the U.S. within the next decade.”
“The reality is that China is laying the intellectual groundwork for a generational advantage in AI. The Air Force’s former Chief Software Officer, Nicolas Chaillan, even went so far as to claim that China’s victory in the AI race is ‘already a done deal.’ Last year, China overtook the U.S. for overall AI citations, with a 35% increase from 2019. In AI’s hottest subfield—deep learning—China has six times more patent publications than the United States.”
The Belfer Center report comes on the heels of the “Highly Cited Researchers” report released annually by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) at Clarivate in London. This report analyses authors that rank in the top one percent of citations in the prior year on the Web of Science™.
Over the last three years, China almost doubled it’s portion of Highly Cited Researchers. The United States still leads but its portion has dropped nearly 12 percent. The senior citation analyst at ISI stated that the decline for the US and gain for mainland China “reflect a transformational rebalancing of scientific and scholarly contributions at the top level through the globalisation of the research enterprise.”
Following the U.S. and China, the United Kingdom was third in numbers of much-cited researchers at 7.5 percent. Australia was fourth with over five percent, and Germany is fifth with just five percent. The Netherlands is sixth at 3.1 percent followed by Canada (3 percent), France (2.2 percent), Spain (1.7 percent) and Switzerland (1.5 percent) to complete the top ten. Out of 70 countries, these top 10 produced 82.9 percent of the most-cited research in this last year.
Additional reports have associated this U.S. drop in research and development with a decline of per capita government research and development (R&D) funding. Abysmal levels of K–12 science education are likewise a major contributor.
The United States has made a clear choice to decrease the amount of research and development spending as a percent of GDP. In 1964, the U.S. spent 1.8 percent on R&D. Today, we have dropped to 0.65 percent. Meanwhile China is spending 1.4 percent, followed by South Korea (1.1), Norway (0.9), Germany (0.85), Sweden (0.8) and Japan (0.7).
In science and math education, other countries have substantially more STEM coursework. Singapore leads the world in having 51 percent of its college students pursing STEM fields, followed by China at 50 percent. The United States has under 18 percent of college students studying STEM. This shortage of American students entering science fields will take several generations to solve. The Belfer Report notes that “in the world’s most prestigious computer science competition for secondary school students, the International Olympiad in Informatics, Chinese have won 88 gold medals while Americans have won 55.”
The claim that China steals new ideas from us no longer holds up when China is up to five years ahead of us in many technologies. Their surge is clearly based on a higher investment in education.
. . .
The full Belfer Center report can be found at:
https://www.belfercenter.org/sites/default/files/GreatTechRivalry_ChinavsUS_211207.pdf
John Richard Schrock has trained biology teachers for more than 30 years in Kansas. He also has lectured at 27 universities in 20 trips to China. He holds the distinction of “Faculty Emeritus” at Emporia State University.