Nobel laureate Reinhard Genzel: cri de coeur

“The US is falling apart… this president and his crew are destroying all of what made America great.” This lament at a recent Hong Kong Laureate Forum from Nobel prizewinning German astrophysicist Reinhard Genzel — who for many years had a part-time full professorship at the University of California, Berkeley — is far from an isolated cri de coeur.

On the crowded conference floor, Trump-induced funding chaos, visa restrictions and tightened security protocols around overseas collaboration were widely discussed by the hundreds of attending early-career researchers and handful of senior scientists.

Such comments are particularly noteworthy given the location of the event in a city that often bills itself as an interface between East and West. If the US has shot itself so disastrously in the foot, the obvious question is whether its place at the top of the global scientific pecking order is about to be taken by China.

By some measures, that has already happened. Volume is one of them. China nearly tripled its output of science and engineering papers between 2012 and 2022, according to the US National Science Foundation’s indicators, accounting for 26.9 percent of global output in 2022, compared with the US’ 13.7 percent.

The quality of Chinese science is rising too. China has led the world on total citations count since 2020, according to Scimago’s 2024 country rankings. It has also led the US on citations per paper since 2021. And, since 2023, it has topped the Nature Index count of papers in top journals; its proportion of the total rose by 12.7 percent in that year (compared with a 5.9 percent fall for the US) and 17.4 percent between 2023 and 2024 (when the US fell by 10.1 percent).

China’s spending on R&D in its economy as a whole is also rising steeply. Although the US was still the largest absolute spender in 2023, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, China spent nearly as much: its expenditure ($917 billion or Rs.83 lakh crore) was 96 percent of the US’, up from 72 percent 10 years earlier — although on market exchange rates China’s spending was only 49 percent of the US’, up from 42 percent in 2013.

“If the question is can China become the next great scientific hub, my answer is yes,” says John Peacock, professor of cosmology at the University of Edinburgh, pointing to the country’s “immensely high” funding levels and the fact that Chinese scientists “have really figured out how to do the things that are needed”, including building major facilities and nurturing talent pipelines.

Yet one China-related metric that has conspicuously failed to maintain a stratospheric trajectory is international collaboration. Indeed, according to data from Clarivate’s annual G20 scorecard, only 20 percent of the more than 700,000 papers published by China-based researchers in 2023 involved international co-authorship — the lowest proportion in the previous decade and down from a peak of 27.4 percent in 2018.