> The US led in 60 of 64 technologies in the five years from 2003 to 2007, but in the most recent five years (2019–2023) is leading in seven. China led in just three of 64 technologies in 2003–2007 but is now the lead country in 57 of 64 technologies in 2019–2023, increasing its lead from our rankings last year (2018–2022), where it was leading in 52 technologies.
The flip already was happening before Trump. He absolutely accelerated anti-immigrant, anti-work visa, and other variety of other-hate. But we were losing significant ground in technology to China before this.
Basically, if you want to go into a variety of fields, you learn in China, and you work in China.
That report is just looking at the top 10% of cited published papers. China publishes huge numbers of garbage papers from paper mills and runs lots of citation rings. It also assumes that "tech leadership" comes from academia instead of companies, which don't tend to publish many papers.
In the long term, you were always going to lose the lead just cause China has 1.4B people. Your choices were turn into Western Europe, or turn into Russia.
A "few decades" = a few decades +40-50 years that PRC workforce will hang around, i.e 2070/80, aka most of our/next generations useful lifespans. They're simply going to be milking the greatest high skill demographic divident in recorded history, basically roughly OECD combined in STEM, for any remotely useful extrapolatable/relevant "long term" period. Even then by 2100 their "hammered" demographics, factoring in PRC scale, they are going to produce more tertiary talent with shit TFR than US projected to gain via natural births and immigration (as in pre Trump, immigration rates). Depending on how retirement age extends workforce particapation (which it will, PRC retirement very young), they will still have decisive effective skilled labour pool advantages. That's without mentionining all the shit that suppresses PRC TFR, i.e. real estate prices, high skill absorbtion, are all downstream from current population levels/density. Once they shed 100s of millions, all those stressors will alleviate (abundance of housing, work opportunties) + one child couples will get like 4 wealth transfers from parents, i.e. might not get back to 2.1 replacement TFR, but if it gets to 1.7-1.8 (reasonable range with pronatal policies) that's a few 100m more births to workforce.
You're right, now that I checked, the demographics don't actually look all as bad as I thought. There are very few babies being born at the moment, but there was a surge roughly 10-15 years ago which will support the country for another 40-50 years. Thanks for correcting.
https://www.aspi.org.au/report/aspis-two-decade-critical-tec...
> The US led in 60 of 64 technologies in the five years from 2003 to 2007, but in the most recent five years (2019–2023) is leading in seven. China led in just three of 64 technologies in 2003–2007 but is now the lead country in 57 of 64 technologies in 2019–2023, increasing its lead from our rankings last year (2018–2022), where it was leading in 52 technologies.
The flip already was happening before Trump. He absolutely accelerated anti-immigrant, anti-work visa, and other variety of other-hate. But we were losing significant ground in technology to China before this.
Basically, if you want to go into a variety of fields, you learn in China, and you work in China.
Put simply, they are making factories for quantum chip production. And Photonic chips. https://thequantuminsider.com/2025/06/13/china-ramps-up-phot...
We're basically playing with mud and sand and used to be good at metal casting. Not even good at that any more. I'm embarrassed to be an American.