News on China's scientific and technological development.

TO CATCH A glimpse of China’s industrial heft, visit Changxing Island in the country’s north-east. There, jutting into the Bohai Sea, is one piece of the machine: a specialised petrochemical plant that opened in 2012 and has grown relentlessly ever since. It represents, in condensed form, the powerful mixture that has fuelled China’s

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

: policy directives, state support, local incentives and restless entrepreneurs.

For the rest of the world it is also a cautionary tale. Hope springs eternal that China might rein in its excess capacity, perhaps as a result of its “anti-involution” campaign, the government’s latest attempt to curb cut-throat competition among domestic producers. But Changxing Island shows it is more realistic to expect another path—namely, that other countries will find it ever harder to displace China in global supply chains.

Click to expand...

Wrought said:

A microcosm of the rise of the chemical industry is Hengli on Dalian's Changxing island.



This is not to be confused with Shanghai's Changxing island, famously home to the Jiangnan and Hudong-Zhonghua shipyards. However, in a twist of fate, Hengli

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

(not the Dalian shipyard, mind you), under its Hengli Heavy Industries subsidiary. It's the former STX site, since acquired and upgraded.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Click to expand...

In this period, for the very first time, China appears in the top 10 producers, with nearly 4% (the same as India), and Australia drops out of the top 10. Arguably, the next decade showed the greatest change. Over the years 2001–2010 (

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

e), the US dropped to only 36%, and China’s share increased to 23% of publications. Additionally, Spain displaced Russia out of the top 10 in publishing, and the contributions of the top 10 countries slipped to 77.10%. China’s ascendency continued in the period 2011–2020, reaching 44% (

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

f) and, for the first time, displaced the US out of the highest position (dropping to 21%). In the period 2011–2020, for the first time, the top 10 contributing countries represented less than three-quarters of the publications; see

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

. This trend was slightly reversed in the years 2021–2023, in part as a result of China’s growing dominance in remote sensing publishing. Specifically, China now accounts for 62% of the publications from the top 10 contributing national contributors and almost half (47%) of all papers produced in the years 2021–2023. This shows a complete reversal of the US’s preeminence in the first 30 years of this study; see

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

g. In fact, over 60 years, the US dropped from producing 88% of all publications in the period 1961–1970 to only 9.29% (12% of those from the top 10 countries) in the years 2021–2023.

Click to expand...

tphuang said:

I have now put together an episode of my podcast on China's recent moves and why the tech breakthroughs of the past couple of years are so critical to geopolitical power.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Click to expand...

This article is about that decade. It is about how China learned to make things with its hands, how that learning compounded across sectors, and why a policy that looks like industrial planning is also an extended seminar on how to manufacture. I will tell three company stories along the way. I will show how policy and workshop practice meet. I will explain why you cannot jump straight to high-end EVs, drones, or humanoid robots and expect to avoid the hard years of low-value manufacturing. And I will show how tacit knowledge, the know-how that does not fit in a manual, was the real transfer.

When people in Washington and Brussels say they want to reindustrialize at home they mean to resurrect factories and to make chips, EVs, drones and robots on sovereign soil. That is a noble aim. It’s naive to think a country can skip a decade of industrial learning. China didn’t become the factory of the world by decree; it did so through years of apprenticeship and repetition. That process is what the West and emerging economies must grasp if they hope to rebuild manufacturing at speed.

Click to expand...