As scientists, we had the uneasy privilege of witnessing China’s rise earlier than most. Long before a country’s regional or global dominance shows up in macroeconomic aggregates and stock valuations, it can be inferred from the kinds of signals that scientists notice: scholarly publications, patents, talent formation, infrastructure investments, industrial coordination, and the growth of capacity in strategic fields.
What many see as a sudden leap forward is really the predictable result of long-term planning and statecraft, all guided by the understanding that technological power rests on fundamental research and strong institutions. With five universities among the world’s top 40, and 35 in the top 500, Chinese institutions will almost certainly come to rival the likes of Oxford, MIT, Harvard, and Cambridge. Their entry into the global top ten is a matter of when, not if.
China’s R&D prowess has been visible in research output, patents, PhDs, and critical technologies for years, even as many investors, commentators, and policymakers continued to dismiss it. The “DeepSeek moment” was a case in point. The launch of a Chinese large language model with capabilities similar to those from the leading US labs looked like a fluke, when in fact it was the downstream outcome of years of accumulated research capacity in China’s AI ecosystem.
Of course, the market tends to react only after such capabilities crystallise into competitive products. But when it does react, it can do so very quickly. The volatility of Nvidia’s stock price after DeepSeek was unveiled illustrates how radically expectations can change when a new player with a competitive advantage arrives. Whether any single model displaces an incumbent is a secondary issue. What matters more is that China’s growing strength in research increases the likelihood of such competitive challenges, with capabilities long evident to scientists suddenly translating into market-moving events.
A key battleground — where science and technology provide the edge in a much larger geopolitical rivalry — is energy. As the world leader in solar, wind, and battery technologies, China is positioned to power the increasingly digital and data-centre-heavy economy of the future with clean electricity. In 2025 alone, China expanded its power capacity by more than 500 gigawatts, 80% of which came from solar and wind. The capacity China has added since 2021 is larger than the entire power capacity of the United States.
While China is anchoring its energy strategy to the scientific frontier, the US is going backwards by promoting coal, oil, and gas, while gratuitously killing off clean-energy projects. This approach not only threatens US dominance in science and technology but also accelerates global warming and diminishes the US economy’s long-term competitiveness. Research increasingly shows that economic development constrained by scientifically defined limits — such as the 1.5° Celsius global warming target set by the Paris climate agreement — leads to greater efficiencies and technological innovation.
Hence, China’s core goal of creating an “ecological civilisation” is likely to accelerate its own scientific achievements. In 2024, scientists at Tsinghua surprised the climate-science community by publishing an analysis of the remaining global carbon budget six months earlier than expected, owing to their use of new big-data methodologies.
While liberal democracies lurch from quarter to quarter, China has steadily been building industrial and research capacities across strategic sectors such as batteries, electric vehicles, solar, telecommunications, advanced manufacturing, and AI-enabling infrastructure. According to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s critical-technology tracker, China leads in 57 of 64 frontier technologies measured over the 2019-23 period, up from just three two decades earlier.
In short, China lays out a strategy and then acts accordingly. Its five-year plans are instruments for aligning finance, infrastructure, education, procurement, and industrial investments over long time horizons. The 15th Five-Year Plan centres on scientific and technological self-reliance, with Chinese leaders framing technology as the backbone of national development and security. OECD data show that China’s R&D spending grew by 8.7% in 2023, far above the OECD average and that of both the United States and the European Union. No wonder the World Intellectual Property Organisation now ranks China among the world’s most innovative economies — especially in terms of knowledge and technology outputs.
To be sure, China has benefited enormously from access to global markets, foreign capital, imported know-how, integration into international supply chains, and access to existing scientific breakthroughs. Combined with domestic investments in education and scientific research capacity, these made the country’s historic development possible. But now the geopolitical tide is shifting, and, having gained from openness, China is pursuing technological independence, especially in strategically sensitive domains.
China successfully pursued a long-term strategy to dominate the technologies that will shape this century, and it is unlikely to share the returns it generated from globalisation. In this year of the Fire Horse, everyone ought to realise what has already been visible to the scientific community for quite some time: China has gone from a trot to a gallop.
Johan Rockström is Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Professor in Earth System Science at the University of Potsdam; Inga Strümke is Associate Professor in Artificial Intelligence at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Project Syndicate