Jenny Wong-Leung
China is no longer merely leading the research in major technology fields. It’s also moving towards a monopolistic position in most of them, the latest update of ASPI’s Critical Technology Tracker shows.
As wars in Ukraine and especially Iran remind us of the decisive effect of technology in combat, many of the areas in which China is strengthening its hand are directly or indirectly military. Others promise economic dominance for China – and technological dependence on it for the rest of the world.
The tech tracker continues to show the United States losing leading places in research to China in one technology after another. Comparison with the previous, 2025 update shows that European countries, too, are losing ground, though India is making remarkable advances.
The window for Western countries to reverse this trajectory is narrowing. This data shows exactly where the ground is being lost and how fast.
ASPI’s Critical Tech Tracker measures not a country’s current level in any particular technology but the intensity of its research efforts in the field, as shown by a rolling five-year count of high-impact papers the country produces. This data points to its future technological level. Papers with high impact are the 10 percent most highly cited.
In 2021 to 2025, China published the greatest number of such papers in 69 of 74 technologies covered by the tracker – in other words, in almost all the technologies. This compared with 66 fields in which it was ahead in 2020 to 2024. The three technologies in which Chinese research gained leadership had formerly been led narrowly by the US: natural language processing, genetic engineering and nuclear medicine and radiotherapy.
Monopoly risk
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