A March 2026 report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development confirms that China’s investment in research and development has reached parity with the United States in dollar terms—and by purchasing power parity measures has surpassed the United States outright. Both nations have crossed the $1 trillion annual threshold.
The milestone caps a series of inflection points arriving in rapid succession. As Caroline Wagner of Ohio State University, who has tracked Chinese science across every major database for over a decade, lays out in The Conversation: In 2019, China surpassed the U.S. in its share of the top 1% most-cited research papers. By 2022, China took first place in most-cited papers overall. In 2024, China overtook the United States in total scientific publications—the first such displacement of American leadership since the U.S. itself surpassed the United Kingdom in 1948—and pulled ahead in the Nature Index, which tracks the world’s most selective journals, by a 17% margin.
“China is investing, but … the U.S. is not,” she explains. U.S. federal R&D peaked in 2010 at roughly $160 billion and has fallen more than 15% since. As a share of GDP, federal R&D has declined from a 1964 peak of 1.86% to a paltry 0.66% in 2021. The Trump administration is now slow-walking new research proposals while simultaneously restricting international scientific exchange.
The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation estimates that a 20% cut in federal R&D beginning in FY2026 would shrink the U.S. economy by nearly $1 trillion over ten years.
The United States is divesting from what built its industrial economy while China adopts methods that had driven increased American productivity.
