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China 'out-STEMs' the US
M Ziauddin 11 Aug 2021
A large share of the best universities in the world is said to be in the United States and they are known for excellence. The seventh annual ranking of the Best Global Universities conducted by US News & World Report and published in October 2020 found that 19 of the top 25 schools were American.
However, the QS World University Ranking published by UK company, Quacquarelli Symonds in July this year found that 12 of the top 25 universities were in the US, five in the UK, three in China, two each in Singapore and Switzerland and one in Japan.
Then, at the beginning of August, the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) at Georgetown University in Washington, issued a report entitled "China is Fast Outpacing US STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) PhD Growth," which concluded that: "Based on current enrollment patterns, we project that by 2025 Chinese universities will produce more than 77,000 STEM PhD graduates per year compared to approximately 40,000 in the United States."
In 2000, the US had produced more than twice as many STEM PhDs as China. But China overtook the US in the number of STEM PhDs in 2007 and was 47% ahead by 2019. The change has been rapid and it remains so. The quality of Chinese university-level STEM education has also kept improving.
"Most of the recent and rapid growth in Chinese PhD enrollments comes from universities within the higher-quality tiers," the CSET study found, and "because more than three-quarters of Chinese doctoral graduates specialize in STEM fields, this evidence indicates China's STEM talent pipeline is becoming more robust."
And, not surprisingly, according to Scott Foster (US falling further behind China in STEM PhDs, published in Asia Times dated August 9, 2021) new studies show Chinese universities will produce nearly twice as many STEM PhD graduates than US by 2025
"Given the scale of China's investments in higher education and the high-stakes technology competition between the United States and China, the gap in STEM PhD production could undermine US long-term economic and national security."
Remco Zwetsloot, one of the authors of the CSET report, was quoted in Axios as warning: "If this continues, there seems to be no way the US can continue competing with China on the talent front without immigration reform. It is just a numbers game."
Because a large percentage of American students are not prepared for graduate studies in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the US depends on foreign students to fill its universities and pay the bills.
But it has been alienating foreign students - particularly Chinese students, who accounted for about one-third of foreign students in the US before Donald Trump's anti-China rhetoric and tighter immigration controls.
Efforts under both Trump and President Biden to exclude potential Chinese 'spies' from advanced STEM research also have had an impact.
And according to one estimate, Chinese students contributed US$15 billion to the US economy in the 2018-19 school year when enrollments of foreign students had peaked.
Another report says foreign student enrollments kept American universities afloat, rising by 55% from 2011 to 2019 while domestic enrollment stagnated.
President Biden's election has led to a notable improvement in how the US is regarded overseas and a more open immigration policy. But for the Biden administration, to simply distance itself from Trump-era anti-immigrant rules and ideologies may not be enough to fully rebuild Chinese lost sense of confidence.
China attracted 46% as many students as the US despite its short history as an open country with modern universities. Most foreign students in China are from other Asian countries, led by South Korea, but there are substantial numbers from the US, Russia and France as well.
Clearly, the scale and diversity of university excellence in the West, the rise of East Asian university education and the educational weakness of other regions are said to be phenomena as significant as the relative decline of the US.
China is evolving from cheap hand assembly to fully automated manufacturing and has a huge internet sector. It has built the world's largest high-speed train network, put a rover on Mars and launched its own space station.
All this requires first-rate STEM education, which in China is supported by a government of engineers rather than lawyers. Most likely, when it comes to nation-building, the education data is expected to continue to evolve in its favor.
Asia Times last month was the first to report (China is first out of the gate to Industry 4.0, June 26, 2021) that China had the semiconductor capacity to work around American sanctions for critical applications such as 5G network build-out, and that China was moving rapidly to exploit 5G in a wide range of industries.
China is proposing to build nearly a million 5G base stations this year, vastly outpacing the rest of the world combined. Chinese industry sources, moreover, report that tens of thousands of dedicated 5G networks for factories, ports, warehouses, mines and urban transportation systems will be installed in the course of the next year.
In a July 2021 report on China's semiconductor industry, the US Semiconductor Industry Association wrote:
Just last month, China sent astronauts into space to board a new space station. Earlier this year, China landed a rover on Mars. Chinese state media reported that inside both China's space station and the Mars rover were 100% indigenously designed-and-produced semiconductors, signaling China's increasingly sophisticated microchip capabilities.
Buoyed by a booming market and these government investments, China is poised to be increasingly competitive in some semiconductor market segments.
In an August 4 commentary for Project Syndicate, Harvard Professor Graham Allison and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt warned:
Most Americans assume that their country's lead in advanced technologies is unassailable. And many in the US national security community insist that China can never be more than a "near-peer competitor" in AI. In fact, China is already a full-spectrum peer competitor in terms of both commercial and national-security AI applications. China is not just trying to master AI; it is mastering AI.
The Trump technology sanctions haven't slowed down China. On the contrary, China is gaining on the US and in some fields has overtaken it. Both for economic and strategic reasons, the Biden administration is likely soon to give Trump's failed China policy a decent burial and move on.
The US now imports about $550 billion a year from China, or almost a quarter of America's manufacturing output of $2.4 trillion on a GDP basis. Tariffs of 20% apply to about half of Chinese imports, so by simple arithmetic, the elimination of tariffs should reduce the cost of durable goods in the US by a bit over 2%.
Renmin University Professor Jin Canrong, a prominent Chinese academic closely followed in Washington, is quoted to have argued last week that inflation could bankrupt the US federal government by boosting the cost of interest on the federal debt. He added that the US needs China's supply chains to keep inflation under control ("Will China bail out Biden?," Aug. 3, 2021).
Last month, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told the New York Times that tariffs "hurt American consumers." Since then-president Donald Trump imposed a 20% tariff on roughly half the goods America buys from China, the Treasury has collected about $100 billion in fees. Most of that was paid by US consumers.
Tariffs explain part of the explosion in durable goods inflation during the past year. Inflation is the most pressing economic issue for American voters, according to a Vox/Data for Progress poll released on August 3.
Indeed, according to David P. Goldman (US business pushes Biden for a China trade deal, published in Asia Times dated August 7, 2021) Trump era tariffs on Chinese imports are fuelling record US inflation and threaten Biden's chances at 2022 mid-term elections.
It was, therefore, no bolt from the blue to see the whole of the American business community-more than thirty major business organizations-speaking with one voice as it did in an August 5 appeal to the Biden administration to eliminate tariffs on imports from China. Never before was such a spectacle witnessed in US political history.
The US and China have held three rounds of high-level trade talks since early last month, but so far have failed to reach a compromise.
A deal is most likely and sooner than later because inflation could poison the Democratic Party's chances at 2022 mid-term elections and return control of the US Congress to the Republicans. Cutting tariffs is the quickest way to reduce inflation. Beyond the arithmetic of electoral politics, a consensus is emerging that the technology sanctions that Trump imposed on China have failed and may even have backfired.
M Ziauddin 11 Aug 2021
A large share of the best universities in the world is said to be in the United States and they are known for excellence. The seventh annual ranking of the Best Global Universities conducted by US News & World Report and published in October 2020 found that 19 of the top 25 schools were American.
However, the QS World University Ranking published by UK company, Quacquarelli Symonds in July this year found that 12 of the top 25 universities were in the US, five in the UK, three in China, two each in Singapore and Switzerland and one in Japan.
Then, at the beginning of August, the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) at Georgetown University in Washington, issued a report entitled "China is Fast Outpacing US STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) PhD Growth," which concluded that: "Based on current enrollment patterns, we project that by 2025 Chinese universities will produce more than 77,000 STEM PhD graduates per year compared to approximately 40,000 in the United States."
In 2000, the US had produced more than twice as many STEM PhDs as China. But China overtook the US in the number of STEM PhDs in 2007 and was 47% ahead by 2019. The change has been rapid and it remains so. The quality of Chinese university-level STEM education has also kept improving.
"Most of the recent and rapid growth in Chinese PhD enrollments comes from universities within the higher-quality tiers," the CSET study found, and "because more than three-quarters of Chinese doctoral graduates specialize in STEM fields, this evidence indicates China's STEM talent pipeline is becoming more robust."
And, not surprisingly, according to Scott Foster (US falling further behind China in STEM PhDs, published in Asia Times dated August 9, 2021) new studies show Chinese universities will produce nearly twice as many STEM PhD graduates than US by 2025
"Given the scale of China's investments in higher education and the high-stakes technology competition between the United States and China, the gap in STEM PhD production could undermine US long-term economic and national security."
Remco Zwetsloot, one of the authors of the CSET report, was quoted in Axios as warning: "If this continues, there seems to be no way the US can continue competing with China on the talent front without immigration reform. It is just a numbers game."
Because a large percentage of American students are not prepared for graduate studies in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the US depends on foreign students to fill its universities and pay the bills.
But it has been alienating foreign students - particularly Chinese students, who accounted for about one-third of foreign students in the US before Donald Trump's anti-China rhetoric and tighter immigration controls.
Efforts under both Trump and President Biden to exclude potential Chinese 'spies' from advanced STEM research also have had an impact.
And according to one estimate, Chinese students contributed US$15 billion to the US economy in the 2018-19 school year when enrollments of foreign students had peaked.
Another report says foreign student enrollments kept American universities afloat, rising by 55% from 2011 to 2019 while domestic enrollment stagnated.
President Biden's election has led to a notable improvement in how the US is regarded overseas and a more open immigration policy. But for the Biden administration, to simply distance itself from Trump-era anti-immigrant rules and ideologies may not be enough to fully rebuild Chinese lost sense of confidence.
China attracted 46% as many students as the US despite its short history as an open country with modern universities. Most foreign students in China are from other Asian countries, led by South Korea, but there are substantial numbers from the US, Russia and France as well.
Clearly, the scale and diversity of university excellence in the West, the rise of East Asian university education and the educational weakness of other regions are said to be phenomena as significant as the relative decline of the US.
China is evolving from cheap hand assembly to fully automated manufacturing and has a huge internet sector. It has built the world's largest high-speed train network, put a rover on Mars and launched its own space station.
All this requires first-rate STEM education, which in China is supported by a government of engineers rather than lawyers. Most likely, when it comes to nation-building, the education data is expected to continue to evolve in its favor.
Asia Times last month was the first to report (China is first out of the gate to Industry 4.0, June 26, 2021) that China had the semiconductor capacity to work around American sanctions for critical applications such as 5G network build-out, and that China was moving rapidly to exploit 5G in a wide range of industries.
China is proposing to build nearly a million 5G base stations this year, vastly outpacing the rest of the world combined. Chinese industry sources, moreover, report that tens of thousands of dedicated 5G networks for factories, ports, warehouses, mines and urban transportation systems will be installed in the course of the next year.
In a July 2021 report on China's semiconductor industry, the US Semiconductor Industry Association wrote:
Just last month, China sent astronauts into space to board a new space station. Earlier this year, China landed a rover on Mars. Chinese state media reported that inside both China's space station and the Mars rover were 100% indigenously designed-and-produced semiconductors, signaling China's increasingly sophisticated microchip capabilities.
Buoyed by a booming market and these government investments, China is poised to be increasingly competitive in some semiconductor market segments.
In an August 4 commentary for Project Syndicate, Harvard Professor Graham Allison and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt warned:
Most Americans assume that their country's lead in advanced technologies is unassailable. And many in the US national security community insist that China can never be more than a "near-peer competitor" in AI. In fact, China is already a full-spectrum peer competitor in terms of both commercial and national-security AI applications. China is not just trying to master AI; it is mastering AI.
The Trump technology sanctions haven't slowed down China. On the contrary, China is gaining on the US and in some fields has overtaken it. Both for economic and strategic reasons, the Biden administration is likely soon to give Trump's failed China policy a decent burial and move on.
The US now imports about $550 billion a year from China, or almost a quarter of America's manufacturing output of $2.4 trillion on a GDP basis. Tariffs of 20% apply to about half of Chinese imports, so by simple arithmetic, the elimination of tariffs should reduce the cost of durable goods in the US by a bit over 2%.
Renmin University Professor Jin Canrong, a prominent Chinese academic closely followed in Washington, is quoted to have argued last week that inflation could bankrupt the US federal government by boosting the cost of interest on the federal debt. He added that the US needs China's supply chains to keep inflation under control ("Will China bail out Biden?," Aug. 3, 2021).
Last month, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told the New York Times that tariffs "hurt American consumers." Since then-president Donald Trump imposed a 20% tariff on roughly half the goods America buys from China, the Treasury has collected about $100 billion in fees. Most of that was paid by US consumers.
Tariffs explain part of the explosion in durable goods inflation during the past year. Inflation is the most pressing economic issue for American voters, according to a Vox/Data for Progress poll released on August 3.
Indeed, according to David P. Goldman (US business pushes Biden for a China trade deal, published in Asia Times dated August 7, 2021) Trump era tariffs on Chinese imports are fuelling record US inflation and threaten Biden's chances at 2022 mid-term elections.
It was, therefore, no bolt from the blue to see the whole of the American business community-more than thirty major business organizations-speaking with one voice as it did in an August 5 appeal to the Biden administration to eliminate tariffs on imports from China. Never before was such a spectacle witnessed in US political history.
The US and China have held three rounds of high-level trade talks since early last month, but so far have failed to reach a compromise.
A deal is most likely and sooner than later because inflation could poison the Democratic Party's chances at 2022 mid-term elections and return control of the US Congress to the Republicans. Cutting tariffs is the quickest way to reduce inflation. Beyond the arithmetic of electoral politics, a consensus is emerging that the technology sanctions that Trump imposed on China have failed and may even have backfired.
China 'out-STEMs' the US
A large share of the best universities in the world is said to be in the United States and they are known for...
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