Development

Science: China’s ‘uninvited guest’ is its excellence

The Land of the Red Dragon is renowned for its space technology and applied sciences. Yet the West tends to underestimate its role

by Leopoldo Benacchio

16 July 2026

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4' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

4' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

A week ago, China achieved a remarkable space feat: the booster – the lower stage – of a Long March 10B rocket launched just a few minutes earlier re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere and came to rest on a floating platform in the South China Sea. A perfect manoeuvre: the booster slowed down, headed towards the centre of the structure, almost coming to a standstill, and was secured with a network of cables, almost as if it had been lassoed. It will be reused, as SpaceX has been doing for some time with its Falcon 9 rockets. This is an important step for China, which is now hot on the heels of the United States in the space sector and in the new race to the Moon. Whilst it is not directly necessary for reaching our satellite, it demonstrates the technical level that has been achieved.

Western snobbery

China, with its universities teeming with researchers and its state-owned and private industries – whatever that distinction may mean – is now one of the world’s leading powers in science and technology, and is even carrying out projects that have been the subject of debate in the West for years. And yet, it is largely overlooked here: not only in the media, but also in citations of Chinese researchers’ work. This is the key point to understand: why do we in the West behave this way? Is it snobbery, a sense of ‘historical’ superiority, or a fear of comparison?

A few examples will suffice to support this point, without any claim to completeness. In addition to its achievements in space – with probes on the Moon and Mars and a second space station – China has the world’s most sensitive ultra-high-energy cosmic-ray detector, completed in 2021 on the Tibetan Plateau; the largest and most sensitive single-dish radio telescope currently in operation, with a 500-metre dish situated in a karst depression in Guizhou; one of the fastest quantum computers; tens of thousands of patents in the field of artificial intelligence; and the largest medical research centre specialising in primates.

Leading the way in research

Turning to universities, we have seen a steady rise over the last ten years in the leading Chinese institutions, many of which are virtually unknown in the West. Whilst the metrics used to measure scientific productivity are debatable and imperfect, when they all point in the same direction, the trend can at least be considered reliable. Last December, confirmation came from the Nature Index, which published its first-ever ranking dedicated to the applied sciences: China confidently tops the list.

The ranking is based on articles published in 2024 in journals and at conferences specialising in the applied sciences: from engineering to computer science, from materials science to food science. The index is based on a quantitative count of articles published in a selected corpus of peer-reviewed journals and therefore, despite all possible criticisms, its results can be regarded, at least qualitatively, as reliable indicators of global trends.

It emerges that researchers working in China account for over half of the total scientific output in the sector, and that the top ten research institutes in the applied sciences are all Chinese. Just how important university research is – which sooner or later benefits industry and society, even if few outside intellectual circles truly believe this – can be seen in the case of electric car batteries. More than a decade ago, Chinese researchers began to dominate academic work in this field, and today China produces around 80 per cent of the world’s battery cells.

We in the West seem not to give sufficient consideration to the fact that, in 2025, Chinese scientists wrote as many scientific articles in highly reputable journals as those published by Americans, Britons, Germans and Japanese combined. Analyses by ASPI, the independent Australian think tank which also monitors global scientific and technological progress, show that Chinese articles and findings have been largely overlooked by Western researchers. Without going into the details of their report, the conclusions are clear: there is a significant imbalance, because Chinese researchers cite American scientific work more than expected, whilst American researchers cite Chinese work less than expected. This is particularly true in chemistry and engineering, where Chinese laboratories are at the cutting edge.

Of course, there are real problems behind these figures. Chinese researchers have been – and to some extent still are – criticised for behaviour that is not always beyond reproach from the point of view of scientific ethics, and there is no shortage of cases where papers have been retracted. At the same time, the race for funding gives rise to perverse mechanisms everywhere, not just in China: large numbers of cross-citations and pointless citations between groups that often distort the true value of the research. The obsession with numbers has damaged the West and science as a whole: one need only think of Peter Higgs, the man behind the boson that CERN spent years searching for, at a cost of billions. He published very few papers over several decades, yet they revolutionised the physics of the infinitely small.

The impact on the economy

In the Chinese Communist Party’s five-year plan, which runs until the end of 2025, the first and second strategic objectives are ‘to build a modernised industrial system’ and ‘to accelerate high-level scientific and technological self-reliance’. The aim is to master the ongoing scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation, in order to lead the way globally.

As China becomes an increasingly important source of new knowledge, ignoring it will come at an ever-greater cost.