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Science Against Time

From the series Industry and pharmaceuticals

The surge in China’s biopharmaceutical industry over the last decade is part of its broader scientific and technological ascent and therefore deserves our attention. Such growth presents a challenge to other imperialist powers.

The Biosecure Act’s intention, to reduce the ties between American and Chinese biotech firms, has been branded by The Economist as “old-fashioned protectionism”. The British weekly recognises, however, that the clash goes well beyond a trade war. The stakes are higher. In a lengthy cover story [“The rise of Chinese science”], it writes that “China is now a leading scientific power”. Just five years ago, this was still considered only a possibility. The current question is whether this is “welcome or worrying” [June 15th, 2024].

Unity and scission

The viewpoint of that publication, an authoritative voice of one of the power-houses of imperialism, is set out in its editorial: “If there is one thing the Chinese Communist Party and America’s security hawks agree on, it is that innovation is the secret to geopolitical, economic, and military superiority. President Xi Jinping hopes that science and technology will help his country overtake America. Using a mix of export controls and sanctions, politicians in Washington are trying to prevent China from gaining a technological advantage”.

The liberist Economist believes that “America’s strategy is unlikely to work”. Such a strategy overestimates “America’s ability to constrain the whole of Chinese science” by imposing sanctions and hindering the flow of data, thus depriving itself of precious talents and ideas. Furthermore, “it underestimates the cost to America’s own science — including the technology that underpins its security. Rather than copy China’s tactics, America should sharpen its own innovative edge, by enhancing the traits that made it successful”. Running counter to this perspective though, pressure is growing in America and Europe to limit collaboration with China. In fact, “the old science world order, dominated by America, Europe, and Japan, is coming to an end”. This is a confrontation between powers and, within them, between groups and fractions of the ruling class over how to face this competition.

This is a contradiction intrinsic to capitalism. Scientific development, nourished by the global exchange of knowledge, is a social product and universal patrimony. It is appropriated by private individuals for profit, and by states for economic competition and military power. Arrigo Cervetto, in 1980, wrote: “Although competition and interdependence universalise the bourgeoisie, they also conserve its specific national interests. The global politics of the bourgeoisie therefore reflect the universality of competition and interdependence and the particularity of interests” [“The Marxist Theory of International Relations”, Unitary Imperialism, vol. 1].

Between collaboration and closedown

Last December, a five-year extension was agreed on the US-China Agreement on Cooperation in Science and Technology (STA), drawn up by Jimmy Carter and Deng Xiaoping and signed in 1979. The protocol has been adapted to suit the new dimensions of China. “The amended Agreement ensures that any federal science and technology cooperation with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) under the STA benefits the United States and minimises risks to US national security. The amended Agreement covers only basic research; this Agreement does not facilitate the development of critical and emerging technologies. The modernised STA is one way in which the United States is responsibly managing strategic competition with the PRC” [US Department of State, “Amendment and Extension of the US-PRC Science and Technology Agreement”, December 13th, 2024].

An editorial in the journal Nature published a few months before condemned the delay in the “historic agreement”, complaining that “too much is said about the risks of collaboration and too little about the benefits” of the mutual advantage of cooperation in research and student exchange programmes.

Since the end of the 1970s, three million Chinese students have studied in American universities, “one of the largest cross-border flows of students in modern times” [USCET-US-CHINA Education Trust, “Three Decades of Chinese Students in America, 1991-2021”, September 13th, 2023].

The Economist, in the aforementioned article, reports the figures of Beijing’s Ministry of Education: between 2000 and 2019, more than six million Chinese students went to study abroad; most of them returned home with a wealth of new knowledge. In 2010, the government launched the “Youth Thousand Talents” programme to incentivise their return, offering substantial bonuses. “China now employs more researchers than both America and the entire EU”. On the other hand, “Chinese researchers form the backbone of many departments in top American and European universities” and “closing the door to Chinese students and researchers wishing to come to Western labs would also be disastrous for Western science”. This is an opinion shared by Nature, according to which the “worsening climate” in US-China scientific relations is limiting collaborations.

Lobby clash

In 2018, the Trump administration launched the “China Initiative”. Spearheaded by the Department of Justice and run by the FBI, its aim was “to combat economic espionage and intellectual property theft by Chinese government agents” planted among scientists and technologists [Brennan Center for Justice, “The ‘China Initiative’ Failed US Research and National Security. Don’t Bring It Back”, September 23, 2024]. The Biden administration terminated the programme in February 2022, determining that it failed in its goals and “stifled scientific research”. Now, on a Republican initiative (with the support of some Democrats), the proposal to relaunch it is on the table but this would only cause further damage to the United States’ national security interests, according to the Brennan Center.

The “China Initiative” did not find any spies and only spread suspicion and distrust towards communities of Asian origin. Since it was launched, the number of Chinese-born scientists leaving the United States increased by 75%, most of them returning to China. A survey carried out by USCET among Chinese students who returned home from America found a growing number of episodes of discrimination and racism. This makes it “harder for US universities and research institutions to recruit and retain the finest scientific and technological talent from around the world”, writes the Brennan Center.

Nature cites Germany as an example of collaborative management of scientific relations with China. The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) recommends a “realpolitik approach”, leaving the risk-benefit evaluation to individual universities. Nevertheless, pressure is mounting within the EU to limit collaborations with China: the participation of Chinese universities in Horizon Europe is limited to research projects on climate and environmental issues.

Manufacturing and inventing

One measure of China’s commitment to science and technology is provided by the figures regarding Research and Development(R&D) spending. According to OECD statistics, from 2015 to 2022, China’s spending doubled from $344 to $687 billion (calculated in PPP, at constant 2015 prices). In the same period, in the United States, R&D spending increased by 50%, from $507 to $762 billion; in the EU-27 by 19%, from $340 to $408 billion; and in Japan, by 9%, from $168 to $180 billion. The statisticians recommend that the figures should be viewed with caution, because the calculation methods are not always compatible. Nevertheless, as the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) reports, on the basis of evaluations made by the American Congressional Research Service, the Chinese share of global funding for R&D, having been at 5% in 2000, had exceeded 24% by 2020, becoming the second largest in the world. The United States fell from a 40% share in 2000 to 31% by 2020 [CSIS, “China’s Drive for Leadership in Global Research and Development”, June 30th, 2023).

China’s challenge is to consolidate itself as a power not only in manufacturing, but also in innovation: from “made in China” to “created in China”. Shenzhen’s Institute of Advanced Technology is presented as the Chinese answer to Silicon Valley. However, university and government spending in China is focused more on applied research, while basic research accounts for almost half of the total in the United States. In the times of the imperialist contention, the race is on.

Not only academia

China, however, “is gaining ground in terms of individual research institutions”, write the McKinsey consultants. According to Nature Index, seven of the top ten institutions, ranked by the number of publications in the most cited scientific journals, are Chinese. The CAS (Chinese Academy of Sciences) — “the biggest scientific organisation in the world”, which includes more than one hundred institutions in China — is in first place, followed by Harvard University and the German Max Planck Institute. The French CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research) is in seventh place. In 2015, of the top ten institutions, three were American, two British, two German, one French, one Japanese, and one Chinese (the CAS) [Nature Index 2024, “Research Leader: Chinese Institutions Dominate the Top Spots”, June 18th, 2024]. According to figures published by The Economist, the share of publications with a high global impact by Chinese authors in the sectors of materials science, chemistry, engineering, informatics, ecology, and the environment, agricultural science, physics, and mathematics clearly surpasses the European or American share. Other fields, such as biology and biochemistry, or neuroscience, are behind.

Not everything is excellence. In the last few years, the growth in scientific publications has been inflationary, especially with the COVID-19 pandemic, and China has been one of the most prolific contributors. The world has been submerged by a flood of publications, often at the expense of quality, so much so as to raise alarm bells on the part of monitoring organisations and institutions, partly due to the high number of outright fabrications. But this is a separate discussion and only marginally affects the top scientific journals.

The imperialist contention is accelerating the race towards scientific and technological development. In the hands of capital, this becomes a question of how quickly the powers can acquire economic and military force. Scientists Against Time [James P. Baxter III, 1946] is the story of the American Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) during the Second World War. The extraordinary research effort across all fields“ — a turning point in the broad history of civilisation” as its director Vannevar Bush defined it — produced exceptional results. Among them penicillin, but also the atomic bomb.

Lotta Comunista, January 2025

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