China is the world's leader in nearly 90% of critical technologies that "significantly enhance, or pose risks to, a country's national interests," according to a technology tracker run by a respected independent think tank.
A new report in Nature says China has leapfrogged the U.S. in a stunningly short period.
In the early 2000s, the U.S. was No. 1 in most critical technologies, with China holding the lead in just 5% of areas tracked.
Those stark findings come from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's updated Critical Technology Tracker, which expanded this year to 74 current and emerging technologies and ranks countries by their performance in "high-impact" research.
ASPI's latest five-year window (2020-24) shows China leading in 66 of the 74 technologies, including areas tied directly to national power such as nuclear energy, synthetic biology, and small satellites.
The U.S. leads in the remaining eight technologies, including quantum computing and geoengineering, according to the tracker.
The tracker's methodology is a reminder that this is not a GDP-style scoreboard of overall industrial might.
ASPI's The Strategist said it measures research performance by focusing on the top 10% most-cited research papers in each category and treating that as a leading indicator of future science-and-technology capability.
ASPI's report also flags concentrated risk in several newly added areas where China holds a clear lead — cloud and edge computing, computer vision, generative AI, and grid integration technologies — and assigns some of them a high "technology monopoly risk" rating, signaling that expertise is clustering heavily inside Chinese institutions.
Earlier this year, former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and other former U.S. national security officials wrote Congress warning that China was outpacing the U.S. in critical technology fields and urged increased funding for federal scientific research.
"China is making significant strategic investments in basic and applied research and positioning the country to outpace us in critical areas that could determine the outcome of future conflicts," the letter said. "This is a race that we cannot afford to lose."
Charlie McCarthy ✉
Charlie McCarthy, a writer/editor at Newsmax, has nearly 40 years of experience covering news, sports, and politics.
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