By Kritika Agarwal
A new report on the state of science and engineering in the United States offers fresh evidence that China is closing the gap in the race for global scientific leadership. While the United States still maintains strength in some areas, China is quickly catching up.
China Surges in R&D Spending
The National Science Board’s just-released 2026 science and engineering (S&E) indicators report acknowledged the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s finding from earlier this year that China surpassed the United States as the largest performer of research and development in 2024.
The NSB noted that, according to the OECD, “China had $1.028 trillion in gross domestic expenditures on R&D [research and development] in 2024 when adjusted for international comparability, followed by the United States with $1.009 trillion.”
As AAU Associate Vice President for Government Relations and Public Policy Matt Hourihan wrote in March, China’s rise isn’t a surprise development, given the country’s aggressive investments in R&D in recent years. “Since 2004, Chinese R&D has grown by more than 14% annually, more than double that of the United States over the same period,” he noted.
As a result, China now accounts for 30% of global R&D performance, closely followed by the United States at 29%. China’s share has risen steadily since 2000, when it was a mere 5%. Meanwhile, the U.S. share of global R&D performance has been in decline since 2000, when it was at 39%.
U.S. Still Leads China in R&D Intensity
As the NSB noted, “Despite international competition, the United States retains significant strengths.” One of these strengths is in R&D intensity, which is a measure of R&D expenditures relative to the gross domestic product of a country; it indicates how much of an economy’s resources are devoted to R&D.
According to the NSB, the United States “is among the world’s most R&D-intensive economies, with R&D expenditures equaling 3.4% of its gross domestic product (GDP) in 2024.” China’s R&D intensity is at 2.7%, but it is rising. Israel and South Korea lead the world in R&D intensity, at 6.8% and 5.1% of GDP, respectively.
The U.S. R&D enterprise is heavily driven by the private sector, which funds 75% and performs 77% of the nation’s total R&D. (Nearly all of the business funding for research (99%) was spent on R&D performed within the business sector in 2024.) Private-sector investments were especially robust in the areas of software, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology.
U.S. firms also attracted 60% of total worldwide venture capital investment, far surpassing China’s 12% share, in 2024. In addition, U.S. businesses received the vast majority of patents granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to U.S. applicants. Inventors in China, however, were granted the most international patents “in AI, quantum information science and technology, biotechnology, semiconductors, and nuclear technologies.”
Higher education institutions were the second biggest performers of R&D in the United States in 2024, with 11% of the total share. Meanwhile, the federal government was the second biggest funder of R&D – in 2024, it funded 19% of the nation’s total R&D ($194 billion), including 52% of the R&D performed at higher education institutions. The overall share of U.S. domestic research funded by the federal government remained largely unchanged in 2024 compared to 2023.
China Leads in Research Output, But U.S. Leads in Research Influence – for Now
According to the NSB, “research publications, in the form of peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings, are important media for sharing scientific discoveries and contribute to a corpus of scientific knowledge that provides a foundation for future research and innovation.”
The NSB found that “Worldwide S&E [science and engineering] publication output totaled 3.5 million articles in 2024, with three countries together accounting for half of the global total: China (31%), the United States (12%), and India (7%).”
The United States led the world in S&E publications until 2017, when China surpassed it. Since then, China’s production of S&E publications has more than doubled that of the United States’.
The United States, however, continues to lead in higher-quality S&E publications as measured by how often those publications are cited relative to others. “The level of citations received by scholarly articles is a method of gauging their scientific impact,” the NSB noted. The United States still leads the world in research influence as indicated by the fact that U.S. authors produce a disproportionate share of articles that are designated “highly cited articles” (HCA). However, even by this metric, China is fast catching up.
China Graduates More S&E Doctorates
In 2022, the year with the latest data available, China awarded approximately 53,000 S&E doctorates – far more than the United States did in 2023 (45,000 S&E doctoral degrees).
This matters because S&E doctoral degree holders are typically at the core of a nation’s research-and-innovation workforce – they drive discoveries in university, industry, and national labs; help train the next generation of scientists and engineers; and contribute their talents to high-tech industries critical for economic competitiveness and national security.
In the United States, international students earned 38% of S&E doctoral degrees; a significant majority of these students remained in the United States (68%) approximately 10 years after graduation – indicating that the country’s S&E enterprise has thus far been largely successful in retaining foreign STEM talent. Recent changes to immigration policies, however, threaten this success.
The NSB report also delivered some warning signals for the U.S. S&E talent pipeline – while the number of S&E degrees awarded by U.S. higher education institutions increased at all levels between 2014 and 2024, data show “overall significant declines in mathematics and science performance among U.S. elementary and secondary students since the COVID-19 pandemic.” These setbacks could have long-term implications for the domestic talent pipeline.
U.S. Needs to Step Up
China’s rise is the result of deliberate, long-term national investment into its scientific research enterprise. Absent a comparable commitment from the United States, existing advantages in research influence, innovation ecosystems, and talent retention may erode.
Unfortunately, as AAU President Barbara R. Snyder wrote recently, despite mounting evidence that the United States is neck-and-neck with China to maintain its global leadership in science and technology, “policymakers here in Washington are currently taking multiple actions” that threaten to slow us down. Reductions and disruptions in research funding and policies designed to curtail our ability to recruit and retain the world’s top scientific talent, she warned, risk causing the United States to fall further behind.
As Congress considers the FY27 budget, it should maintain robust investments in America’s scientific enterprise and ensure that federal agencies actually spend the funds that are appropriated to them. Maintaining U.S. leadership in science and engineering will require sustained, strategic federal action in several areas, including K-12 education and high-skilled immigration, at a scale that matches the challenge.
Kritika Agarwal is assistant vice president for communications at AAU.