A sharp increase in R&D investment in China

Translator: Maxwell Scott

From Academician for Thinking People

China’s research and development spending in 2024 exceeded 3.6 trillion yuan ($496 billion), an increase of 8.3% from the previous year. Even more impressive is the intensity: in 2024, China’s R&D intensity reached 2.68% of GDP, compared with 2.58% in 2023.

Although the United States is still the leader in absolute spending, amounting to about $823 billion, taking into account economic efficiency, China’s R&D expenditures in 2023 exceeded the actual volume by 2.3 times, approaching 1.8 trillion US dollars. China’s public sector spending on research is already 1.6 times higher than that of the United States and continues to grow, while U.S. government spending is declining.

Numerous forecasts suggest that by 2030, China may surpass the United States in R&D spending by 30% or more, which will radically change the global innovation landscape. Beijing recently announced plans to increase government spending on science and technology by 10% in 2024.

China has been investing in science purposefully for a long time, and it is already yielding results. (https://t.me/worldmarketstudies/803). The country has become a leader in the number of highly cited publications. According to Clarivate, which runs the Web of Science, a platform that indexes leading peer—reviewed journals, scientific books, and research articles, 20 times more highly cited research papers were published in the United States in 2003 than in China. By 2013, this gap had narrowed: about four times as many top-level papers had been published in America. But the data for 2022 showed that China has already surpassed both the United States and the entire European Union (EU). (https://t.me/worldmarketstudies/803)

Thus, China is already a leader in the number of scientific publications on advanced materials by a wide margin. (https://t.me/worldmarketstudies/803)

Moreover, according to the Leiden Ranking, which compares the research contributions of 1,506 universities from 72 countries based on their publications from 2019 to 2022, eight Chinese universities or institutes are among the top ten global leaders.

And ten years ago, we had a ridiculous reform of the Russian Academy of Sciences, (https://scientificrussia.ru/articles/reforma-ili-unictozenie-kak-izmenilas-ran-za-gody-sobstvennoj-perestrojki-mk-vedeneeva-natala ), which led to nothing, creating another useless department of the FANO, which is not clear what it was doing. That’s all…

Note: FANO probably stands for Federal Administration of National Education.