China, ascendent

[Music] Welcome to Science Sessions, the podcast of the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, where we connect you with Academy members, researchers, and policymakers. Join us as we explore the stories behind the science. I'm Paul Gabrielson. China's investment in science in recent decades has advanced its standing in the world's scientific community and led to many international collaborations. Is China poised to become a global scientific leader? In a recent PNAS perspective, James Evans of the University of Chicago and colleagues looked at the nationalities of scientists leading international collaborations. Their analysis shows how the rise of Chinese science is reflected in the scientific literature, and forecasts areas of study where China may achieve parity with the US in the future. James briefly introduced us to the histories of the scientific enterprises in China and in the US. The global center of science shifted surrounding World War II to the United States, from Germany, from other European countries. Chinese science really did not enter the global scene until the mid-1990s, when there was a massive government push to invest in scientists overseas. And so they came over to the United States, to Europe for education, more over one of the things that we identify in this article, which I myself was surprised by, was the number of educating scientists that they're pulling in from around the world. They spend almost as much on bringing scientists from other countries, so Central Asia, Africa, etc., to China, as they do sending Chinese scientists for education in the US in Europe now. How can we measure the scientific leadership of a country? In cross-national collaborations, the participants in science complete different roles. Typically, there are one or a few leaders on projects which conceive of the research. They direct the research. They write up the research. They frame it for publication. And then there are supporters, both direct supports, so people who do the experiments and they take the measurements, and they maybe perform some sub part of the analysis. And others who engage in indirect support. Maybe they provide access to data, or they edit the manuscript after it's been written. It's not their agenda that's driving the research. And so in this project, we basically are looking at Chinese scientists associated with or affiliated with Chinese institutions. They're role in the international teams with which they're engaged. Are they primarily, for example, followers, supporters, indirect or direct? Or are they increasingly leaders on these scientific teams driving the agenda on the placement and the conceptual direction of this research? What data did you look at to evaluate trends in Chinese scientific leadership? We rely on the contributing descriptions where individual contributors are required to describe exactly what it is that they were involved in the research. We looked at all of the features of scientific articles that predicted those roles inside the manuscript. So for example, if you're the first author or the last author on a manuscript or the corresponding author that engaged the relative likelihood that you're directing the manuscript. But it turns out that there are other strong signals. For example, the degree to which concepts in your prior research are focal concepts in this current research. Have you published in a number of different kinds of outlets before? Have you been extremely productive over the context of a scientific career? And we assayed all of the world's scientific papers to assess that agree to which each person, from each country, the role that they played on that scientific manuscript. And then we assessed the degree to which that country contributed to the leadership share among scientific manuscripts. And the leadership premium. So the ratio of those who are leading to those who are supporting across manuscripts. What did you find? Well, we found that systematically and almost linearly over the period that China, for example, has intensified its investments in science. That Chinese scientists are not just increasing their participation in science, but they're increasing their leadership on scientific projects. And again, to be clear, these are not Chinese scientists in the US. These are Chinese scientists in China who are participating from universities, from companies, et cetera, on global collaborative projects. Here we really focus on bilateral collaborations, so between China and the US or between China and a country in Europe. And so we see that they really have become a dominant force in leading scientific and top scientific manuscripts around the world. And they're on the cusp of having a larger lead share than US scientists in European scientists across a range of different scientific areas. In terms of global leadership share, China has been rising rapidly and they're close to the top in the world and the cusp of being absolutely and unequivocally at the top. You write that Chinese science may in the future achieve parity in leadership with the US in 11 critical areas. What are some of these areas? They're already playing a strong leadership role in the computational sciences. So this is artificial intelligence and high performance computing and they're coming up quickly and quantum computing. So that whole space, they have thrown enormous material and human resources at and they are coming to lead. I think we're seeing similar things in energy generation and storage and a number of other areas of material science and chemistry. One thing that's notable is that China really follows much more in the biological sciences. It's not as close to parity in the biological and health sciences as it is in these other areas, although it's accelerating in that space as it is in all others. What key points do you hope policymakers glean from your study? Well, I think one of the things that but can really clear to us in the course of the study is the depth of close and intimate interaction between scientific leadership that's taking place between US scientists and Chinese scientists but also Chinese scientists and European and UK scientists. So there are a lot of policy proposals that suggest additional restrictions and limitations on collaboration and it became clear to us through our own simulation results that those restrictions would hurt the US as much as they would hurt China. In fact, if we reduced our engagement with Chinese science, it would increase their relative rate of leadership with other parts of the world. It would likely also increase the amount of internal China to China collaboration, which has the potential to make areas of science go dark, which is to say make them less visible and less accessible to Western audiences. When Chinese and US scientists are engaged together, increasingly, they're co-leading the projects, meaning that they are materially contributing to the direction and the guidance and the success of these projects in ways that's not just human intellectual labor. It's really human intellectual leadership. And so understanding that helps us I think be more cautious in thinking about certain kinds of policy levers which involve disentangling US from Chinese science. What are the benefits of global science engagement? I've spoken with a number of people in the Middle East, in North Africa and in Central Asia, who when asked about why they're engaging with Chinese science, Chinese scientists and Chinese development, they really state the material benefits, the material investments, the educational connection and invitation that their students have received. China is engaged clearly in an effort of the scientific and societal diplomacy for strong reasons. It increases their trade partnerships and opportunities. It increases the global talent that's flowing to their country. And in the same way, this is something that the US has been the global leader in for since World War II. And I think we want to be very careful not to do anything that would harm all the benefits that that kind of relationship with the world yields. What are the caveats or limitations of your work? There are limitations to our measurement approach. We're kind of predicting leadership. And we get about 80 plus percent of the variation from the data that we have in articles, but obviously 20% of missed variations or missing some things. We do look at the relative leadership in higher and lower impact journals. This paper is focused on the collaborative roles that scientists play, but not the ways in which those scientific papers actually play a role in unfolding scientific advance. If countries are engaging in scientific advance in complementary ways, some are validating other prior advances. Others are exploring new avenues than thinking about them in competition is like comparing apples and oranges. If people are wondering, well, who thinks that Chinese scientists are leaders? And the answer is the scientists with whom they collaborate. The US scientists and the European scientists who put down that they were leaders and conceivers and directors of these projects. Thanks for tuning into science sessions. 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