China leads tech race as Xi urges nation to ‘strive for scientific dominance’
China has widened its lead over the US as the centre of global innovation, dominating 90 per cent of the critical technologies that will define the coming era.
China has widened its lead over the US as the centre of global innovation, dominating 90 per cent of the critical technologies that will define the coming era including artificial intelligence, autonomous systems and electric batteries.
As Xi Jinping leverages the full resources of the Chinese state in its strategic contest with the West, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s new Critical Technology Tracker reveals the US is trailing China in “high impact research” across 66 of 74 advanced tech fields.
The ASPI tool, now in its third edition, shows Australia ranks in the world’s top five nations in just seven critical technologies, including cloud computing, cyber security, additive manufacturing and hydrogen power.
It shows the Chinese Academy of Sciences is now the world’s premier research institution, ranking first in 31 critical technologies, while the US’s venerable Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a top-10 performer in just 10 critical technologies.
The tracker, which focuses on the top 10 per cent of the world’s most-cited research papers, suggests the US leads China in just eight critical technologies, including quantum computing, genetic engineering and nuclear medicine.
China dominates seven of eight AI categories analysed by the Critical Technology Tracker, as well as 13 advanced manufacturing technologies, seven defence and space research areas, and nine of 10 energy and environmental science fields.
The release of the updated technology tracker comes just weeks after the Chinese Communist Party released its latest five-year plan, in which President Xi Jinping urged cadres to “seize the historic opportunity presented by the new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation”.
“We should enhance the overall performance of China’s innovation system, raise our innovation capacity across the board, strive to take a leading position in scientific and technological development, and keep fostering new quality productive forces,” the CCP’s Fourth Plenum Communique said.
The world scientific community was shocked earlier this year when Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek revealed it had developed an advanced large-language model with a fraction of the computing power of its US rivals.
US President Donald Trump, meanwhile, ordered US researchers last week to harness AI to accelerate scientific breakthroughs as part of a new “Genesis mission”. However, his administration remains locked in a war with America’s elite universities, which have historically been the engine room for US innovation.
In Australia, the scientific community has lashed out in recent weeks over mass lay-offs at the CSIRO, which is set to shed 350 positions or about 6 per cent of its staff.
The move comes amid persistently low investment in scientific innovation by the Australian government, which has left the nation languishing in second last position among OECD countries when it comes to research and development spending.
The ASPI critical technology team said China’s “exceptional gains” in high-impact research followed an early and often overwhelming advantage by the US at the start of the millennium.
“This imbalance underscores the need for trusted partners to act together to leverage comparative advantages, reduce concentration risk, and shape the trajectory of critical technologies together,” they said.
“The tracker’s results reinforce a clear message: governments around the world need to step up investment in research and technology to avoid future strategic dependencies, particularly as one country more than any other continues to outpace the field across a widening set of critical technologies. Incremental or marginal policy adjustments are insufficient to shift the balance. For partners and allies, more investment, more co-ordinated and ambitious collaborations are needed to stay collectively ahead.”
ASPI executive director Justin Bassi said the West had never had a strategic adversary that was so technologically dominant.
“America was the manufacturing powerhouse in WWII and the Cold War. But it is now China that dominates manufacturing of goods and materials and, unfortunately, not just in non-critical areas like clothing – though those carry with them another story of modern slavery,” Mr Bassi said.
“From the global dominance perspective, it is China’s research and development of tech, including in many of the fields our own government considers critical and on which our society relies – smart cars, drones, batteries, solar panels, social media, and now AI.
“That dominance is being leveraged by China’s use of predatory trade practices to first push Western companies out of business, then ensure our nations are so dependent on China that we cannot stand up to China’s aggression and coercion. Resistance is futile is their message.
“It will take years for Australia and allies like the US to re-establish a level of competitiveness. But we have to be willing to do it.”
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