The number of Chinese scientists taking on leadership roles in international science projects is growing rapidly. They now lead more than half of all research projects with the United Kingdom, and are expected to lead an equal number of projects with Europe and with the United States in the next couple of years, according to a study1 published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last week.

Hongjun Xiang, a physicist at Fudan University in Shanghai, China, says the projections are consistent with what he has observed in the country, particularly in fields such as physics and engineering. But China needs to strengthen its leadership capabilities in disruptive basic research, “as Nobel-level original breakthroughs remain rare”, he adds.

To understand how scientific leadership is changing, researchers analysed authorship data from nearly six million scientific publications. The team analysed ‘author contribution’ statements on journal manuscripts, in which each author’s role is described. When such statements weren’t available, the team developed a model that could predict leadership roles based on author experience, citation histories and the ideas researchers brought from their previous work, says James Evans, a co-author and computational sociologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois.

Researchers who conceived, designed and guided the project or offered mentorship were classified as leaders; first-year students, people providing tech support and those performing experiments under direction were considered followers.

From there, Evans and his colleagues devised two parameters to assess the changes in scientific leadership in bilateral partnerships. Lead share describes the number of people in leadership roles from a given country. Lead premium is the ratio of leaders to followers on the paper.

Rising leaders

The team found that China’s lead share in US–China collaborations rose from 30% in 2010 to 45% in 2023. China’s lead premium, however, is progressing more slowly. Chinese scientists still occupy supporting roles in many of these projects, says Evans. They are more likely to lead projects when they work with groups in the United Kingdom and Europe, he adds.

According to the research, in 2019, China’s lead share reached parity with the United Kingdom’s; it is likely to be on par with Europe lead share by 2025–27 and the US lead share by 2027–28. In some crucial technology areas, such as artificial intelligence, semiconductors and energy, Chinese leadership is further behind and is expected to catch up to the United States by 2030.

Xiang says that, in the development of core technologies, such as semiconductors, the country faces significant ‘chokehold’ challenges, including the US government’s ban ban on NVIDIA AI chips sales to China since 2022. China’s dependency on US tech can not be easily overcome, as it is rooted in decades of deep scientific research, says Xiang. “Addressing these structural imbalances is the key to our journey from being a big science country to a truly strong one, and continued international collaboration remains vital for this endeavour,” Xiang adds.

But Evans says the findings upend the assumption that the United States can shut China out of global scientific opportunities by not collaborating with its researchers. Some US lawmakers want restrictions on research collaborations with Chinese institutions that work with the country’s military. Simulations show that “if the US were to stop collaborating with China on projects related to critical technologies — such as space, artificial intelligence or quantum computing — it would prove to be very costly for the US”, he says.

Evans says that US–China collaborations, particularly in fields such as artificial intelligence, are more likely to be successful than work done separately.

Cultural differences