US still king of critical tech, but China quickly closing gaps: report

The United States continued to lead China in critical technologies, namely artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, semiconductors, space and quantum, according to a report released on Thursday by Harvard University.

The authors of the Critical and Emerging Technologies Index, released by the university’s Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs, said the US maintained its competitive edge because of large-scale American public and private investment, a top-notch and diverse research workforce, and a decades-old decentralised innovation ecosystem.

To quantify the global tech race, the index assigned considerable weight to private and public funding resources – a US advantage not captured by trackers focusing on research output, such as the Nature Index and the Critical Technology Tracker, created by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Both of these have pointed to China as the leading country in many research fields, according to the team.

In January, Nature Index showed that in terms of high-quality scientific research output, Sichuan University, a regional university in southwest China, had overtaken Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Oxford University and the University of Tokyo in less than two years.

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The index – maintained by the highly regarded journal Nature – ranks institutions based on their contributions to articles published in the world’s most influential science journals.

South China Morning Post