GoKawiilThe Centrifugal Hyper-gravity and Interdisciplinary Experiment Facility in Hangzhou is one of several major science infrastructure projects to be funded by China’s national government.Credit: VCG via Getty
China is on the cusp of becoming the world’s biggest public funder of research, according to a forecast by US academics, as stalled growth in government investment in the United States coincides with consistent rises in spending by the Chinese authorities.
The analysis — produced exclusively for Nature Index — was the work of researchers from Frontiers in Science and Innovation Policy (FSIP), a programme at the University of California, San Diego, that studies the US research and development (R&D) system and examines the extent to which public and private funding boost technological development.
Government spending on R&D in China increased by 90% to US$133 billion in the decade leading up to 2023, according to the most recent purchasing-power-adjusted data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). By contrast, in the United States, spending rose by just 12%, to $155 billion.
According to the FSIP’s forecast, China’s public spending on research is likely to overtake that of the United States in the next two to three years.
“I think the earliest likely is 2028, plus [or] minus one year,” says Robert Conn, a specialist in research policy and science philanthropy, who co-leads the FSIP. “It could be next year, could be 2029.”
The United States has been the global leader in R&D investment since the end of the Second World War. China taking the lead in public research spending would therefore be a watershed moment. It would set the scene for the emergence of a new “hegemon” in science, says Meghan Ostertag, who studies economic policy at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank in Washington DC.
In the past few years, China has already pulled ahead of the United States on various measures of research performance. In the 145 natural-science and health-science journals tracked by Nature Index, for instance, its contribution is on track to be double that of the United States by the end of 2026.
The FSIP projection is, in some ways, conservative. It predicts that US research spending will remain flat, despite efforts by the administration of President Donald Trump to cut research budgets. At the same time, it incorporates a slowdown in Chinese research spending earlier in this decade, explains Christopher Martin, president of the non-profit organization Explorative Science Foundation in Christchurch, New Zealand, who worked on the analysis for the FSIP.
Martin looked at the growth trajectory in spending from 2020 to 2023 and used that to extrapolate forwards. The annual growth rate of China’s government spending was between 1% and 5% after 2020, compared with an average of 11% between 2005 and 2020.
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