Anyone who thinks Chinese science isn't catching up extremely fast is dreaming. In my own area accepted papers at top conferences from china have gone from a negligible amount to about 50% in the space of 15 years. It's only a matter of time before the top prizes mentioned will follow in my opinion.
Look at the authors of AI papers from big tech companies, many are authored by Chinese. There are also a lot of teams in some big tech companies (e.g. Meta), who are 100% chinese. I've heard they muscle out non-chinese employees. I bet it's difficult for Zuck. He has to choose between patriotism or business. As we know, in the short term globalisation and business are at odds with America.
I remember when I was in university in the UK (2014). The cohort was atleast 40% Mainland chinese. I bet some had cheated on their English tests to get into the university. One of my Chinese friends told me he planned to learn the cutting edge research in the UK from a well known UK company related to my field and bring it back to his dad's business.
Strategically, not only are we in a bad position, but it is actively getting worse. Economically, there is nothing wrong with Chinese citizens paying £40K a year on university tuition fees, on top of that, spending money on nice accommodation, which has been "great" for the UK economy. We pay for their cheap labour and manufacturing, and they pay for our services. Also, going back to Zuck, chinese employees have a harder working culture (e.g. "996") - that hustle leads to exponential better results (IMHO). The western work life balance does not. Can you start a business in a culture of working 4 hours a day?
Hard times create strong men.
Strong men create good times.
Good times create weak men.
Ultimately America, particularly once you get to the upper middle class is a straight up lazy country.
You see this often in immigrant families. The first gen comes here, knows struggle. The second gen grows up, fails to appreciate anything, drops out of college and blames mom and dad for their failures.
Then again, I don't buy into this neo coldwar propaganda.The fear mongering is getting out of hand. The Military Industry Complex needs fear though, how else would you justify spending trillions.
With a few exceptions, most of the claims coming out of Chinese reserach is immediately suspect. For decades claims were irreproducible or the work not of high quality.
It's certainly improved, and there are a few institutions that produce high quality work, but they make up a few percent of the total coming out of China.
No doubt the quality will continue to improve, but no more than any other developing country.
The number of papers from Chinese teams getting accepted into the top international journals paints a different picture.
Chinese scientists are now publishing more papers in journals like Nature and Science than American scientists are. Those are journals with very difficult peer-reviewing and editorial thresholds.
Counting papers in top journals isn’t a great measure. While top journals do have high standards, not all papers are equal.
I got published in a Nature journal but my paper was not groundbreaking by any means. You have groundbreaking research and you have “we made a slight, but important modification to an existing technology”.
In my area of physical sciences, the big breakthroughs are still coming from the US and Europe.
1. Chinese researchers are catching up and increasingly producing good papers.
and:
2. There is a lot of low-quality junk science spam coming out of China.
Are entirely compatible. Both can be true at the same time.
I don't really know about scientific papers, but the high number of Chinese patents is generally considered a fairly useless metric files mostly for "CV reasons" rather than representing any genuine invention (see e.g. [1]). But here too, "China is producing tons of trash patents" and "China is catching up on innovation" are entirely compatible.
I wonder if those top conferences need updating their process and have stronger verification of submissions. China took fake it till you make it to fake it while you can keep getting away with it.
