The United States continued to lead China in critical technologies, namely artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, semiconductors, space and quantum, according to a report by Harvard University. The authors of the Critical and Emerging Technologies Index, released by the university’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, said the U.S. maintained its competitive edge because of large-scale American public and private investment, a top-notch and diverse research workforce, and a decades-old decentralized innovation ecosystem. To quantify the global tech race, the index assigned considerable weight to private and public funding resources – a U.S. 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.
In January, Nature Index showed that in terms of high-quality scientific research output, Sichuan University had overtaken Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Oxford University and the University of Tokyo in less than two years. 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. This year the index also showed that China led the world in physics research publications along with Europe, with the U.S. a distant rival. According to the Australian think tank tracker, China led in 57 of 64 technologies from 2019 to 2023, which included the fields of defense, space, energy, environment, AI, biotech and quantum. That tracker evaluated the risk of nations monopolizing research in key technologies based on the share of high-impact research output and the number of leading institutions.
“Although both Europe and China are comparable to the U.S. in raw GDP terms, Europe’s regulatory environment and the Chinese state’s extensive intervention in its markets prevent it either from achieving economic conditions similar to the U.S., with its uniquely deep capital markets, and favorable conditions for starting new businesses,” said Ethan Kessler, a Researcher at the Belfer Center and co-author of the latest report. “There are also factors that we consider in our index, such as the number of successful space launches for the space category, where the U.S. is ahead by a considerable margin. By comparison, in space-related publications, the global field is more even,” he added. However, while China largely trailed the U.S. in all key technology fields, it remained competitive and was steadily narrowing the gap, the report found.
“China lags in semiconductors and advanced AI due to reliance on foreign equipment, weaker early-stage private research, and shallower capital markets, but it is far closer to the United States in biotechnology and quantum, where its strengths lie in pharmaceutical production, quantum sensing and quantum communications,” the report said. “Backed by economic resources, human capital and centralized planning, China is leveraging scale to reduce dependence on imports, attract innovation within its borders and boost industrial competitiveness,” the report added. “Still, China remains constrained by large structural challenges: slowing growth, mounting debt, and industrial overcapacity, among others,” it noted.
The Belfer index evaluated each country’s performance by measuring factors such as private investments and public funding in actual amounts, the numbers and expertise of researchers, defensive capabilities relative to the technology, legal and policy structures, as well as leadership in international organizations and norm-setting bodies. Most of the data used was from 2023. “China has made significant progress and enjoys unique advantages that will challenge the American AI lead in the next decade,” the report said in reference to AI. According to the authors of the report, the U.S. dominated in terms of economic resources, computing power and algorithms, while China led in data and human capital.
But the team said the U.S. lead in AI “may be more vulnerable than previously assumed”, citing China’s recent releases of DeepSeek’s R1 model, which had performance comparable to OpenAI-o1 across mathematics, code and reasoning tasks, as well as Alibaba’s Qwen3 family of highly ranked open-source models. “The great progress China has made in AI over the last two years, particularly with regard to model performance and cost-optimized training, underscores the importance of not only pioneering key technologies but also leveraging initial progress to advance growth in a variety of industries,” the report said. “China has the most immediate opportunity to overtake the United States in biotechnology,” the report noted, because China had “dominance in pharmaceutical production through extensive, large-scale public investments and state-backed manufacturing”. Aside from biotech, Kessler said China was also mostly a threat to U.S. positions in the fields of semiconductors and quantum – areas in the index with the smallest gaps in raw scores between the two countries, the South China Morning Post reports.
