With stirring music, the Chinese government’s brief video “Amazing China” glorifies a huge new passenger jet. “A nation, to grow stronger, must implement a range of science and technology projects, which embody its strategic intentions,” the clip declares. The statement echoes Chinese president Xi Jinping’s recent science-based call for—as Asia’s Straits Times put it—“more efforts to turn China into a country of innovators.” Journalists worldwide are examining China’s burgeoning ambitions in science and technology.
Media reports on that ambitiousness regularly use the word superpower. The political publication The Hill reports that during China’s recent 19th Party Congress, Xi called for building the country “into a ‘science and technology superpower,’ particularly as an ‘aerospace superpower’ and ‘cyber superpower.’” In July, Nature and Scientific American portrayed China’s efforts to become a “space science superpower.” The 13 October New York Times front page prominently highlighted “China’s dream of becoming a science superpower.”
Judging by the most recent Nature Index, the science-superpower dream is coming true. The index calls itself “a database of author affiliation information collated from research articles published in an independently selected group of 68 high-quality science journals.” Its current ranking of 500 research institutions lists the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) first, just ahead of Harvard University, the Max Planck Society, the French National Centre for Scientific Research, Stanford University, MIT, and Oxford University.
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