[Eye on China] China Has Already Overtaken Europe in Science. Why Is Nobody Saying It?

China isn't catching up to European science. It's already lapped Europe in most of the race, and few in Europe are saying so out loud.

I've visited China seven times in the last three years. I've walked through labs there that didn't exist five years ago, fully staffed, well-equipped, running experiments that would take a European team months to get funding approval for alone. That's not propaganda. I've seen it firsthand. Now look at the numbers side by side.

Infrastructure. China's spending on scientific fixed assets, labs, equipment, instruments, more than tripled between 2015 and 2024, growing faster than the country's own traditional infrastructure investment (roads, rail) over the same period. China has designated five national science center clusters since 2016 and is now building megaprojects: a neutrino observatory in Guangdong, a kilometers-long X-ray accelerator outside Shanghai, a synchrotron that has already fed over 40 pharmaceutical research projects. Europe, over the same decade, scrapped its own billion-euro flagship facility competition mid-round, after finalists had already been picked.

Funding. China's 2026 science budget rose 10% in a single year, with basic research funding up 16.3%. Its new Five-Year Plan targets at least 7% annual R&D growth through 2030. Europe's flagship Horizon Europe programme has a €34 billion gap between the high-quality proposals it approves and the money it actually has. Seven out of ten strong applications get rejected, not for lack of merit, but for lack of cash.

Money per scientist. The EU spends about €198,000 per researcher per year. China, with a larger and faster-growing research workforce, is now matching or exceeding that per-head figure while adding researchers to the system at a pace Europe simply isn't.

Where the money leads. An independent tracker following 74 critical research fields worldwide found China now leads in 66 of them. In semiconductors specifically, China's share of novel global patent filings sits at 65%. And only 3.6% of papers with EU authors are ever cited in a patent, compared to 5.8% for China. Europe is publishing. Europe is not turning that science into anything the economy can use. On the 66/74 critical technology fields, read this full report via Ifri: https://www.ifri.org/en/external-book-chapters/external-publications/fragmented-europe-dealing-china-technology-and

Publishing versus converting. China now produces 28% of the world's scientific articles. The EU has held steady at 22% since 2015, which sounds fine until you notice that standing still while your competitor grows is the same as falling behind. A decade ago, Western Europe's paper output was 300,000 papers larger than China's. Today it's 200,000 smaller. And once a paper is published, Europe still struggles to turn it into anything: only 3.6% of EU-authored papers are ever cited in a patent, versus 5.8% for China.

None of this is happening because Europe stopped being capable. It's happening because European science is fragmented, underfunded relative to its own ambitions, and quietly losing the people who hold the whole system together. A lab isn't a grant number and a building. It's the technician who spent twenty years learning exactly how one instrument behaves. The PI who trained three generations of PhD students in a technique that never made it into a manual. When that person retires, and nobody has been funded, hired, or trained to take their place, the lab doesn't shrink. It stops. Quietly. One retirement at a time, across hundreds of institutes, with no emergency call and no press release.

We are in a transition window right now, not a stable state. China is not slowing down, and it's not just spending money; it's building people and facilities at the same time, fast. If Europe hasn't fixed this by 2030, it stops being a gap we can close. It becomes a race we've already lost.

You cannot buy back forty years of trained people, or a decade of megascience infrastructure, with a wire transfer once they're gone.

If you're a scientist: say this out loud about your own lab, your own team, your own succession problem, before it's too late to matter. If you're a decision-maker: fund the people and the facilities, not just the grant announcements. One line in the next framework programme, dedicated succession funding for labs at risk of losing irreplaceable expertise, would cost far less than a single flagship Mission, and save something no Mission ever could.

2030 is not far away. We keep counting euros. We need to start counting people, patents, facilities, and the years we have left to keep them.

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