China's rise as a global science and technology superpower

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OPINION

By Nnanda Kizito Sseruwagi

President Xi Jinping has articulated the strategy of China in the 21^st Century as including adherence to science and technology as the number-one productive force, talent as the number-one resource, and innovation as the number-one driving force. China's national strategy is to be the world leader in AI by 2030.

Today, the United States and other Western nations are no longer distant leaders in Artificial Intelligence (AI) research. Chinese Universities like Tsinghua and Peking publish more research on AI than any other academic institution in the world. In terms of publishing AI research, China has the most highly cited and impressive papers. Chinese academic and research institutions publish almost five times more AI papers than the US, and more than the US, UK, India, and Germany combined.

China’s investment in fundamental technologies like bioscience and cleantech is peerless. By 2008, China had overtaken the US in the number of PhDs produced, while at the same time producing double the number of STEM PhDs as America. Since 2020, China’s R&D spending has been 90% of the US’, and it remains in a distant lead on the number of patent applications registered.

China has more of the world’s top 500 supercomputers than any other country in the world. China is home to the BGI group – one of the world's leading life science and genomics organisations. BGI has extraordinary DNA sequencing capabilities and capacity, employs thousands of scientists, and holds vast reserves of DNA data and computing capacity. The rest of the world altogether has fewer robots than China. In terms of technology, the US is several years behind China’s supersonic missiles development.

China remains the world leader in 6G communications and photovoltaics – the technology that converts light into electricity using semiconducting materials. China’s expertise in quantum computing is also notable. Since 2018, China has filed twice as many patents in quantum technology as the United States.

In 2016, China launched the Quantum Science Experiment Satellite. The Quantum Experiments at Space Scale (QUESS) project was designed to facilitate quantum optics experiments over long distances to allow the development of quantum encryption and quantum teleportation technology. Under this project, China sent the world's first quantum satellite, Micius, into space. Micius is expected to provide a more secure communications infrastructure.

In 20117, China built a two-thousand-kilometre quantum link between Shanghai and Beijing for transmitting secure financial and military information. The country is also building the National Laboratory for Quantum Information Sciences in Hefei, which will be the world's biggest such facility. Hefei scientists even claimed to have built a quantum computer that is ten times faster than Google’s Sycamore superconducting quantum processor.

The persistent stereotype against China, circulated by the West, was that China is just good at mimicking, lacks creative capabilities and is too restricted for transformative ingenuity. All this turns out to have been wrong. China has instead emerged as a contemporary titan of science and engineering.

In the field of synthetic biology, China is also leading innovative medical applications. In 2025, the Children's Hospital of Fudan University in Shanghai successfully treated a 4-year-old Pakistani girl with severe thalassemia. Using a Chinese-developed gene-editing drug, her dependency on blood transfusions ended, and she has returned to living a normal life. The treatment used a base-editing drug called CS-101, designed to target severe beta-thalassemia. Professor Zhai Xiaowen, in collaboration with CorrectSequence Therapeutics, a Shanghai-based biotech company, had launched the clinical research project in 2023.

Chinese scientists have showcased the possibility of integrating AI with synthetic biology to speed up innovation. They have reduced the process of designing novel proteins to weeks rather than months, and there is potential applicability for these lad-ready proteins in drug development, diagnostics, and other biotech tools. China’s advanced cell and gene therapies are also top-notch, ranking the country second globally. By 2020, it had conducted approximately 1,000 clinical trials, targeting diseases like cancer, HIV, and hereditary disorders.

The field of nanotechnology is also being conquered by Chinese researchers. Recently in June 2025, researchers at the College of Integrated Circuits and Micro-Nano Electronics at Fudan University in Shanghai harnessed the mineral tellurium to create nanowire implants used in a biocompatible device that restored vision in genetically blind mice as well as a monkey, while giving them the ability to see “invisible” light. By this innovation, China has been able to not only create an artificial retina that restores sight but one capable of giving super vision – the extraordinary ability to see infrared light.

The author is a senior research fellow at the Development Watch Centre