China’s Rise as a Global Science Power and Europe’s Response

A turning point in global science

Global research is passing through a rare moment of rapid change. Chinese scientists now routinely lead collaborations with top partners, including researchers in the United States, and China has taken the number one position in a key ranking of contributions to world class journals. The shift is evident across fields such as chemistry, materials, physics, and parts of the life sciences. It is powered by scale, investment, and a deliberate strategy to build world class institutions and technology industries. Europe, once confident in its scientific strength, faces a difficult reality check and a choice about how to compete, when to cooperate, and where to protect its interests.

In 2023, Chinese researchers held the leadership role in an estimated 45 percent of joint papers with US counterparts, up from around 30 percent in 2010. China published close to 900,000 scientific articles, roughly three times its output in 2015. In the Nature Index, which tracks contributions to 145 high quality journals in health and the natural sciences, China has moved past the United States in the Research Leaders list, with the gap widening in 2024. This is not just a numbers story. It signals a new balance of influence over which problems get attention, what standards take hold, and how fast new ideas reach the market.

What changed in the last decade?

China trained a very large cohort of scientists and engineers, made sustained investments in research and development, and tied its labs to a fast moving industrial base. Projections for 2025 show Chinese universities graduating roughly 77,000 STEM PhDs per year compared with about 40,000 in the United States. China now employs more researchers than the United States and the European Union combined. The result is more teams, more facilities, and wider coverage across specialties. Policy also mattered. Beijing encouraged strategic research partnerships, built cross border talent networks, and used science diplomacy to link laboratories from Asia to Europe and Africa.

Speed and coordination inside China gave an edge in fields where scale and engineering discipline count. That has delivered breakthroughs in batteries, electric vehicles, clean energy manufacturing, telecommunications equipment, and parts of advanced computing. Central direction can constrain risky or unconventional ideas, which is why the United States retains an advantage in areas that reward bottom up exploration and entrepreneurial science. The trend lines, however, show a closing gap.

How China moved to the front

China’s climb to the top tier has several building blocks. The first is sustained funding. Public and private R and D spending has risen for two decades, underwriting large labs, national research programs, and an expanding fleet of scientific infrastructure. The second is talent. Returnees from elite programs abroad, combined with a growing domestic pipeline, now lead many institutes and large teams. The third is industrial pull. Companies in energy, transport, electronics, and chemicals provide real world problems, funding, and paths to scale. The fourth is a global network. Programs that train and sponsor researchers from Belt and Road partner countries have seeded long term collaborations and built a larger circle of scientific allies.

Leadership shows up in new ways. A study that inferred team leads from author contribution data across millions of papers found a steep rise in Chinese leadership of international collaborations over the past 25 years. If current trajectories hold, parity with the United States in leadership across chemistry, materials, and computer science is plausible by the late 2020s, with mathematics, physics, and engineering reaching level soon after. Partnerships with the United Kingdom already reached equal leadership years ago, and parity with the European Union is expected around now. These patterns shape where methods, datasets, and standards originate.

Why publication counts do not tell the whole story

Publication totals say little about influence. The Nature Index uses a metric called Share that credits institutions and countries for their weighted contributions to articles in a curated set of journals. In 2024, China’s adjusted Share rose while the US figure fell, a reversal of the long standing order. Losses in chemistry and the physical sciences pulled down the US total, though the US still leads in biological sciences. Share is not perfect, but it focuses attention on where high impact research is being produced at scale.

Leadership in strategic fields

China’s strength is most visible in areas that also define economic and security competition. In artificial intelligence, the United States still leads in top tier models and science, but China is catching up quickly and dominates patent applications. In semiconductors, export controls have slowed China’s access to leading edge lithography and high end chips, yet domestic engineering has progressed in mature nodes, chip design tools, and packaging. In materials and chemistry, Chinese labs produce a growing share of high impact work that feeds batteries, solar cells, and advanced alloys. In energy technology, Chinese firms scale new designs at a pace few can match.

Advanced industry assessments show China at or near the global frontier in electric vehicles and batteries, with strong positions in commercial nuclear, robotics, chemicals, displays, and parts of artificial intelligence. Where China still trails, it tends to be in areas requiring highly specialized equipment, niche suppliers, or deeply entrenched ecosystems. That list is shrinking as domestic capacity grows. The strategic effect is twofold: China’s self sufficiency increases, and global supply chains tilt toward Chinese standards and production systems.

Collaboration patterns are shifting

Research collaboration is not immune to geopolitics. A rising scientific nationalism in both the United States and China has complicated joint projects, tightened visa screening, and added compliance layers in universities. US and European funders now separate low risk fields, where cooperation remains welcome, from sensitive domains that are restricted or require extra oversight. China’s policies also stress self reliance and resilience in science and technology, and that has reduced its dependence on Western collaborations in a number of areas.

Even with decoupling pressures, Chinese output and impact continue to rise. A smarter framework is emerging in Washington and European capitals that keeps doors open where the benefits are clear, while protecting research with security relevance. That approach uses transparency, reciprocity, standard intellectual property protections, and regular security reviews to manage risk without cutting off scientific exchange entirely. The aim is to preserve visibility into fast moving fields, uphold integrity, and avoid fragmented standards that slow discovery.

What the data says about Europe

Europe’s strengths are real, but uneven. The Global Innovation Index for 2024 lists Switzerland, Sweden, the United States, Singapore, and the United Kingdom at the top. Europe still hosts many of the world’s innovation leaders, yet performance varies strongly across the continent. A detailed bibliometric analysis of advanced technology and basic medical research shows that the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Switzerland produce highly competitive work, while Germany, France, Italy, and Spain underperform the global average in high impact output. The European Research Council helps raise quality everywhere, but even ERC funded projects in the latter group tend to draw fewer citations than projects in the first group.

The gap is not only about money. Research environments, university governance, incentives for risk taking, and links to industry all shape outcomes. Several continental systems are still too centralized, use rigid career structures, or overemphasize quantity at the expense of quality. Europe’s research area has excellent islands of excellence, but the sea between them is rough. Meanwhile, Chinese institutions have climbed league tables quickly. In the Nature Index institution ranking, seven of the top ten are now Chinese, while only a handful of Western institutions hold their ground at that level.

Europe’s policy response

Brussels has sharpened its approach to China since 2019. The European Commission framed the relationship as a mix of cooperation, competition, and rivalry. A new toolkit includes screening for foreign investments, controls on exports of sensitive technology, rules on foreign subsidies, an instrument to counter economic coercion, and plans to secure critical raw materials. The aim is open strategic autonomy, that is, staying open where possible while reducing exposure in areas that affect security or resilience.

Member states are moving in the same direction, though at different speeds. New measures help protect critical infrastructure and research from unwanted transfer. They also support domestic production in clean tech, digital, and defense. Coordination with the United States has tightened through transatlantic forums, yet the EU wants to preserve its own voice on standards and market access. This balance is hard to strike and requires unity across 27 governments with varied economic ties to China.

The Commission’s 2019 strategic paper summed up the stance that now guides most decisions. In that document, China was described in three roles that sometimes reinforce each other and often clash. As official guidance, it set a template for selective cooperation and careful competition.

In EU strategy documents from 2019, China is described as a cooperation partner, an economic competitor, and a systemic rival.

The China view and openings for cooperation

Chinese officials present a narrative of stability, multilateralism, and shared development, while pushing back against restrictions on technology flows. In a wide ranging press conference in March 2025, Foreign Minister Wang Yi pointed to innovation and cooperation as central to China’s engagement with the world and described China’s preference for multilateral institutions. He also called for respect in managing competition with the United States and underlined the importance of predictable rules in trade and technology.

Areas of practical cooperation remain. Health research, climate and energy, disaster response, materials for sustainability, and open data projects can deliver benefits with limited security risk. Training programs that include students from the Global South can build goodwill and grow the talent pool in areas where the world needs more capacity. Europe will have to calibrate these exchanges, since collaboration can strengthen China’s industrial position in ways that Europe may later regret. Guardrails, clear incentives, and reciprocity conditions reduce those risks.

How Europe can regain an edge

Europe’s challenge is to raise quality and speed across the system while keeping its values and openness. That starts with research environments. University governance needs more autonomy, flexible hiring, and incentives that reward quality and originality. The European Research Council remains the gold standard for discovery grants and should scale further. The European Innovation Council is young and can grow into a better bridge from lab to market with more patient capital and predictable follow on funding. Public procurement rules can do more to reward innovative solutions, giving young firms a first customer and a reason to stay in Europe.

Talent is the next pillar. A continental talent visa with fast track residence for researchers and families would attract scientists who face political or administrative barriers elsewhere. Europe can make better use of its diversity by building cross border institutes with shared infrastructure and rotating leadership. The continent already has strengths in quantum research, fusion, particle physics, and biomedical platforms. Connecting these strengths to deep tech clusters with manufacturing and scale up support would keep more value at home.

Partnerships matter. Europe should expand trusted networks with the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Australia, and India in key fields such as semiconductors, AI safety, clean energy materials, and biotech standards. Joint programs can set open standards, share costly infrastructure, and provide insurance against chokepoints. At the same time, Europe should pursue targeted cooperation with Chinese teams in low risk domains where data sharing and reproducibility improve science for everyone. That requires clear terms on intellectual property, verification of affiliations, and careful screening of dual use exposure.

Guardrails for collaboration with China

Strategic engagement works only with transparent rules. A practical model divides research into tiers by risk and reward, keeps the door open in low risk fields, and sets strict conditions in sensitive areas. The following elements can anchor that approach.

• Risk tiers and approvals. Define low, medium, and high risk domains with matching review processes. Use independent panels with security expertise for higher tiers.
• Transparency and reciprocity. Require full disclosure of funding sources, affiliations, and data access terms. Expect the same from partners.
• Standard intellectual property terms. Use clear IP agreements, including background and foreground IP, licensing, and dispute resolution in neutral venues.
• Data protection and integrity. Mandate data retention, audit trails, and reproducibility checks. Share preprints and code when possible in low risk projects.
• Research security reviews. Conduct annual audits of labs engaged in higher tier collaborations and update risk assessments as technology evolves.
• Infrastructure and equipment controls. Track access to specialized tools and materials that have security relevance. Use trusted suppliers and service contracts.
• Talent mobility safeguards. Provide support for whistleblowers, conflict of interest declarations, and training on research security for visiting scholars.

These steps allow Europe to benefit from scientific exchange while protecting critical knowledge. They also give clarity to universities and companies that need simple, stable rules for cross border work.

What to Know

• Chinese researchers led about 45 percent of China US joint studies in 2023, up from around 30 percent in 2010.
• China now tops the Nature Index Research Leaders list and increased its adjusted Share as the US figure declined.
• Parity with the United States in leadership across several fields, including chemistry, materials, and computer science, is plausible by the late 2020s.
• China produces large cohorts of STEM PhDs, employs more researchers than the US and EU combined, and leads in AI patent filings.
• Europe’s performance is uneven, with the UK, the Netherlands, and Switzerland highly competitive, and Germany, France, Italy, and Spain lagging in high impact output.
• The EU frames China as a cooperation partner, an economic competitor, and a systemic rival, and has rolled out new tools for investment screening and export controls.
• Smarter engagement models keep low risk collaborations open while setting strict guardrails for sensitive research.
• Europe can regain an edge by reforming research environments, scaling ERC and EIC programs, attracting global talent, building deep tech clusters, and coordinating with trusted partners.