China: The great contender
By Declan Butler for Nature
In the Olympics of scientific and technological performance, China has surged forward from the pack trailing at the back to overtake many of the long-standing pacesetters. Its impetus is such that it is surely only a matter of time before the country secures a place on the podium.
China began going for gold with Deng Xiaoping’s 1978 ‘open door policy’, the first round of post-Maoist reform. The subsequent shift towards a market economy increasingly open to outside investment has sent almost every financial indicator shooting off the graph, with the economy growing consistently by around 10% annually. In foreign direct investment, China now far outperforms Japan or South Korea, and enjoys levels similar to those of the United Kingdom or France. High-technology exports grew from 6% of all manufactured exports in 1992 to 30% in 2006. Its overall gross domestic product (GDP) was 11th in the world in 1980, just behind Mexico; in 2006 it was 4th, behind Germany.
These riches have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, although rural areas have benefited less than the eastern seaboard and megalopolises such as Beijing and Shanghai, where the wealth is concentrated (see map). Research spending is more evenly spread than wealth, yet the majority of it also finds its way to these eastern regions.
Over the past two decades, spending on research has grown by almost 20% each year, increasing from US$7.5 billion (calculated on a basis of purchasing power parity) in 1991 to almost US$90 billion in 2006 (see graph). The proportion of total research money spent on basic research, at just 5%, is far lower than in most advanced economies, where rates reach up to 20%. China is seeking to boost basic research and innovation to secure future economic growth — ‘indigenous innovation’ is the theme of the national science and technology plan for 2006–20.
The number of students taking science or engineering degrees in China each year climbed from 115,000 in 1995 to more than 672,000 in 2004, putting the country ahead of the United States and Japan; about two-thirds of the Chinese degrees were in engineering (see graph). In 2007, Chinese scientists accounted for 32,000, or almost one-quarter, of the 142,000 foreign students receiving PhDs in the United States, more than any other country except India, which accounted for one-third.
China’s share of the world’s published scientific articles soared from 0.2% in 1980, to 7.4% in 2006, when it overtook Japan for the first time (see graph). Productivity in this respect is not yet matched by quality. The citation impact score for Chinese research — a measure defined so that the average for the world is 1.0 — remained stagnant at about 0.35 for decades. In the decade from 1995, it doubled to 0.73, and in materials science and nanotechnology, two of China’s specializations, its score is approaching 1.0.
Source: http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080723/full/454382a.html
