In debates over the rise of China as a major world power, the American imperialists often attempt to introduce a hopeful caveat: “Sure, China’s manufacturing economy is more advanced than ours, but China still sends their ‘best and brightest’ to study at universities here in the United States.”

Having lost their industrial edge, the Americans assure themselves that US scientific institutions will stay on top forever, and that China’s successes will remain reliant on US education. But this, too, has been exposed as wishful thinking.

China certainly still sends students to study at top US universities, but Chinese researchers are increasingly “homegrown.” As with China’s economy in general, the country’s universities have made enormous strides forward, while US scientific academia has entered into relative decline.

This new reality is reflected in global rankings of research universities. As a recent New York Times article explains:

Until recently, Harvard was the most productive research university in the world, according to a global ranking that looks at academic publication.

 

That position may be teetering, the most recent evidence of a troubling trend for American academia.

 

Harvard recently dropped to No. 3 on the ranking. The schools racing up the list are not Harvard’s American peers, but Chinese universities that have been steadily climbing in rankings that emphasize the volume and quality of research they produce.

Chinese academia on the rise

The article goes on to give numerous examples of how Chinese academia has surged forward in the past decade:

Look back to the early 2000s, and a global university ranking based on scientific output, such as published journal articles, would be very different. Seven American schools would be among the top 10, led by Harvard University at No. 1.

 

Only one Chinese school, Zhejiang University, would even make the top 25.
Today, Zhejiang is ranked first on that list, the Leiden Rankings, from the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Seven other Chinese schools are in the top 10.

 

Harvard produces significantly more research now than it did two decades ago, but it has nonetheless fallen to third. And it is the only American university still near the top of the list.

DeepSeek developed its “large language model” with a mere $6 million investment and a team of researchers who were almost entirely educated in China. / Image: In Defence of Marxism

Essentially, although US research universities have increased their production of new research over the past two decades, output by Chinese universities has risen far more. For instance, Zhejiang University only broke into the top 100 globally in 2017, but it now ranks #1 by several measures.

As former M.I.T. President Rafael Reif said last year: “The number of papers and the quality of papers coming from China are outstanding.” China is, according to him, “dwarfing what we’re doing in the US.”

This trend was already clear last year with the launch of DeepSeek, the Chinese alternative to ChatGPT that shocked the US tech industry, demonstrating that the US had lost its dominance in AI. DeepSeek developed its “large language model” despite immense technological restrictions imposed by the US, and with a mere $6 million investment, as compared to the billions that have been poured into US tech giants.

But not only that. The team of researchers who developed DeepSeek, were almost entirely educated in China. Most, if not all, of the “core contributors” on the DeepSeek team were educated in China from undergraduate to graduate school, in many cases by professors who were also educated in China.

In their efforts to uphold the dominance of US capitalism, certain liberals try to pin the blame for the US’s relative losses on Donald Trump for withholding federal funding from universities since his return to office. It is true that, from the perspective of the ruling class, the policy of defunding research institutions is short-sighted in the extreme. But the recent cuts to funding would not factor into the latest rankings, which take into account several years’ worth of academic output.

At the root of this development is not poor “policy” choices by this or that US politician, but rather the emergence of Chinese imperialism as the largest and most modern industrial economy in the world. Scientific prowess, just like military prowess, is ultimately a function of economic strength.

Naturally, China had to borrow certain scientific advancements from the West in an earlier period of its development. But now, it is abundantly clear that a world-class scientific research base that can rival the United States in every important metric has been up and running in China for some time.

Capitalism at an impasse

One would think that novel scientific breakthroughs in China, or in any country, are a positive thing for humanity. But of course, the Western media generally reports on China’s scientific progress as a kind of “problem.”

This is because scientific research under capitalism is motivated not by human needs, but by the ruling class’s need for profits, power, and privileges. Rather than useful international collaboration between these two scientific superpowers, we see a race for scientific “supremacy.” In fact, as imperialist tensions between the US and China have grown in recent years, Democratic and Republican officials alike have applied pressure on US scientists to not collaborate with counterparts in China.

All of this demonstrates the absurdity of capitalism, a system in a historical dead-end which can no longer take humanity forward. Only a world socialist revolution can put an end to this state of affairs and create a society in which scientific research is pursued and harnessed in the interests of our species as a whole.