When the Center of Gravity in Science Shifts Eastward

On China, the United States, and the New Geography of Research

I am accustomed to thinking of the United States as the center of research.

The great universities. Harvard, Stanford, MIT. The leading laboratories, the Nobel Prizes, the journals. Researchers from all over the world have travelled to the United States to learn, work, and build their careers.

This is what much of the scientific world has looked like in the post-war era.

That is why there is something remarkable about the editorial Dan Wang has written in the latest issue of Science. Its title is China’s ultimate orchestration—integrating the science.

Wang’s point is not that China has already surpassed the United States in every scientific field. The United States and Europe still hold strong positions in some of the most scientifically demanding industries, particularly semiconductors and the production of large passenger aircraft. But China has become a near-peer competitor to the United States across many scientific disciplines. At the same time, it possesses something the United States has largely surrendered: an enormous capacity to turn knowledge into production.

China is already the world leader in advanced manufacturing. The country plays a central role in the production of electronics, electric vehicles, solar cells, large batteries, and a wide range of industrial components. Surrounding this production are vast networks of suppliers, specialists, infrastructure, and capital.

What is new is that scientific capacity is now growing into this industrial system.

Orchestration.

That may be the key word.

From the World’s Factory to a Scientific Power

For many years, the West could regard China as the world’s factory. The ideas emerged elsewhere, the research was carried out at American and European universities, the technology was developed by Western companies – and China manufactured the products.

That picture is no longer sufficient.

Wang describes how, over the past decade, China has invested steadily increasing sums in its scientific system. Chinese universities attract internationally leading researchers. In chemistry and several branches of engineering, Chinese researchers now produce large quantities of highly cited research, while the country has also demonstrated scientific capacity in fields such as quantum communication, lunar exploration, and fusion research.

The Nature Index shows how extensive this shift has become. In its 2026 ranking, based on publications from 2025 in the journals it tracks, China is ranked first and the United States second. China has a Share of 52,735, compared with 26,006 for the United States. The difference is also substantial in the natural sciences.

But such figures must be read with caution.

The Nature Index does not measure who has the most original ideas, who makes the greatest breakthroughs, or where the most important research necessarily takes place. The index tracks a selection of 178 journals and conference publications and uses, among other measures, Share, in which authorship of each article is divided among the institutions and countries that contributed. Nature Index itself emphasizes that the figures are not normalized for factors such as institutional size and disciplinary composition, and that the index should not be used on its own to assess research quality.

Another figure shows why this caution is necessary. If we look only at articles published in Nature and Science, the United States still lies clearly ahead of China: 938 compared with 295, measured by Nature Index Share for 2025.

It is therefore too simple to say that China has overtaken the United States as the world’s leading research nation.

But it is no longer reasonable to say that the United States is unquestionably in the lead.

Something is moving.

What Matters Is the Connections

Perhaps the most interesting idea in Wang’s editorial is precisely this notion of orchestration.

The most complex technologies do not emerge from a single field. A modern semiconductor requires physics, chemistry, materials science, electrical engineering, computer science, and extremely advanced manufacturing. A modern passenger aircraft requires aerodynamics, materials engineering, electronics, software, engine development, and large systems of specialized suppliers.

No single researcher masters all of this. No single discipline can do it alone. Knowledge must be connected.

This is where China’s industrial strength may acquire a new scientific significance. When laboratories, engineers, factories, suppliers, capital, and government are part of the same technological ecosystem, the distance between discovery and application can become short.

Research can quickly be translated into production, while problems arising in production can in turn generate new research questions.

A movement emerges between theory and practice.

Wang believes this may become China’s next great strength. The country has already learned to manufacture complex products on an enormous scale. If it also succeeds in integrating increasingly powerful scientific environments into this manufacturing capacity, something new may happen.

China will no longer be competing only in production.

It will be competing in knowledge.

The Geography of Research Is Changing

For much of my life, young researchers have wanted to go west – to the United States, Britain, Germany, or France. That did not mean that good research took place only there, but the scientific center of gravity was clear.

It is less clear now.

As Chinese universities and research institutions receive more funding, better equipment, and increasingly strong academic environments, the opportunities available to researchers also change. The young physicist who once might almost automatically have looked to Stanford or MIT may in the future find the most interesting laboratory in Shanghai, Beijing, or Hefei.

Scientific power is therefore not only about how many papers a country publishes. It is also about where talent gathers, where the most advanced instruments are found, where young researchers are given the opportunity to test their ideas – and who creates the environments in which discoveries that are still unknown can take place.

That last point matters.

Because not all research can be orchestrated.

Research That Does Not Yet Know Where It Is Going

This is where I miss something in Wang’s editorial.

He writes convincingly about the capacity to integrate disciplines, technology, and production. But the more research is understood as a means of achieving specific strategic goals, the more important it becomes to ask what happens to research that does not yet know what it will be used for.

I am thinking of slow research. Curiosity-driven research. Research that begins with a question that may seem insignificant, and that cannot promise a new industry, a new product, or economic returns within five years.

The history of science is full of such detours.

CRISPR is a good example.

What has now become one of biology’s most powerful tools for gene editing did not begin as a project to develop genetic technology. Researchers were trying to understand strange repetitive DNA sequences in bacteria and how bacteria defended themselves against viruses. When Emmanuelle Charpentier studied the bacterium Streptococcus pyogenes, she discovered a previously unknown RNA molecule that proved to be part of the bacteria’s ancient immune system. Together with Jennifer Doudna, this knowledge was later developed into CRISPR/Cas9 – the so-called genetic scissors. The Nobel Committee itself described the path to the discovery as unexpected.

No one could have written a five-year plan in advance describing the entire route.

That is precisely what the openness of research means.

We do not conduct research only because we know what we are looking for. We also conduct research because we do not know what we are going to find.

And here lies a possible paradox in Wang’s orchestration.

An orchestra needs a conductor. Someone decides what is to be played, when the instruments are to enter, and how the whole is meant to sound. That can be an enormous strength when the aim is to develop a semiconductor, build an aircraft, or produce a better battery.

But research is not always an orchestral work with a finished score.

Sometimes it begins with a sound no one had planned to hear.

A research system that rewards only what can be justified by predetermined goals therefore risks becoming highly efficient at solving the problems it already knows – and less capable of discovering problems and possibilities no one had imagined.

That applies to China.

But it applies just as much to the United States and Europe.

The pressure toward immediate usefulness, measurable results, publication, innovation, and external funding is also familiar within our own universities.

The question, then, is not only who spends the most money on research.

It is also who manages to preserve room for what cannot yet be justified.

When Science Becomes Geopolitics

This becomes more difficult because research is increasingly also geopolitics.

Semiconductors, artificial intelligence, quantum technology, and biotechnology are at once research, industry, economics, and security policy. Knowledge that was once regarded primarily as scientific can now be regarded as strategic.

A curious contradiction then appears.

The major problems facing humanity require cooperation across national borders. Climate change, pandemics, energy, ocean research, and fundamental physics cannot easily be solved within the borders of a single country.

At the same time, great powers have increasingly strong reasons to protect technology, data, researchers, and knowledge.

The more dependent we become on one another’s knowledge, the stronger the temptation may become to keep parts of that knowledge to ourselves.

That may become one of the great challenges facing research in the decades ahead.

And What About Free Research?

Wang ends with a warning to the United States. The country has already surrendered much of its industrial manufacturing capacity to China. It should not, he argues, do the same with its scientific leadership. He believes the US government should reverse cuts in research funding and once again make the country attractive to talented researchers – including researchers from China.

It is difficult to disagree about the importance of research funding.

But money is not enough.

The decisive question may be what kind of research culture that money is meant to support.

If China, the United States, and Europe increasingly see research primarily as a weapon in economic and geopolitical competition, we may end up with ever more research while at the same time creating less room for free scientific curiosity.

That would be a paradox.

We might become better than ever at producing the knowledge we have ordered, while becoming worse at discovering the knowledge no one knew we needed.

Europe Between the United States and China

This development also raises a question for us in Europe.

For a long time, we have almost instinctively oriented ourselves toward the United States. That may no longer be enough.

If China becomes one of the world’s leading producers of both technology and scientific knowledge, European researchers will have to engage far more actively with Chinese research – critically, of course, but also with a willingness to recognize where excellent research is actually taking place.

The Nature Index illustrates how dramatic the change has become. The Chinese Academy of Sciences ranks first in the overall institutional ranking for 2026. Zhejiang University is second and Harvard third. Among purely academic institutions, Zhejiang is ahead of Harvard, and six Chinese universities are among the top seven.

The figures do not tell the whole story.

But they tell a story we should take seriously.

Who Wins?

Even so, I think it would be wrong to end by asking who wins – China or the United States.

Science is not an Olympic competition.

A discovery in China does not make a discovery in the United States less true. A medical breakthrough in the United States does not lose its value because Chinese researchers publish more papers.

The distinctive quality of knowledge is that it can be shared without becoming smaller.

The question, therefore, is not only where the geographical center of gravity in research is located. It is also what kind of research we want when that center of gravity shifts.

Dan Wang is right that the major technological breakthroughs of the future will require orchestration. We need environments capable of connecting disciplines, people, laboratories, and technologies in ways that no individual researcher could ever achieve alone.

But science also needs its opposite.

Room for the detour.

Room for the question without an answer.

Room for the discovery no one had ordered.

Perhaps the scientific strength of the future will lie precisely in the ability to hold these two movements together: to orchestrate what we know we need, without drowning out what we do not yet know we are looking for.