The New York Times had an article that has set off alarms in higher education circles in the US that, according to some global rankings, China’s universities are rapidly advancing the amount and quality of their scientific research output, leaving US universities behind.

Look back to the early 2000s, and a global university ranking based on scientific output, such as published journal articles, would be very different. Seven American schools would be among the top 10, led by Harvard University at No. 1.

Only one Chinese school, Zhejiang University, would even make the top 25.

Today, Zhejiang is ranked first on that list, the Leiden Rankings, from the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Seven other Chinese schools are in the top 10.
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According to Mark Neijssel, director of services for the Centre for Science and Technology Studies, the Leiden rankings take into account papers and citations contained in the Web of Science, a database set of academic publications which is owned by Clarivate, a data and analytics company. Thousands of academic journals are represented in the databases, many of which are highly specialized, he said.

The research output of Harvard and other US universities has not declined. It has grown but the Chinese universities are growing faster. This is because China has put great emphasis on scientific research, seeing it as the foundation of its technological base for its growth as a world power.

President Xi Jinping, in a speech in 2024, praised his country’s advances in fields such as quantum technology and space science. He cited a breakthrough by researchers at Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology, who developed a method to synthesize starch from carbon dioxide in the lab, which could possibly lead to industries making food from the air, without needing acres of plants dependent on land, irrigation and harvesting.
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China has been pouring billions of dollars into its universities and aggressively working to make them attractive to foreign researchers. In the fall, China began offering a visa specifically for graduates of top universities in science and technology to travel to China to study or do business.

“China has a boatload of money in higher education that it didn’t have 20 years ago,” said Alex Usher, president of Higher Education Strategy Associates, a Toronto education consulting company.

Mr. Xi has made the reasons for the country’s investments explicit, arguing that a nation’s global power depends on its scientific dominance.

“The scientific and technological revolution is intertwined with the game between superpowers,” he said in a speech in 2024.

President Trump’s administration has taken the opposite tack, aiming to cut billions of dollars in research grants for U.S. universities.

Trump officials have argued that the cuts are meant to eliminate waste and reorient research away from themes of diversity and other topics that they see as too political.

It should be noted that there is a significant time lag, of the order of five years or so, between investment in scientific research and its visible payoff in terms of research publications. So what we are seeing cannot be attributed to Trump alone but more to the long-term investments of the Chinese government. But what is clear is that Trump’s current policies, such as attacking the autonomy of universities, threatening them if they do not bow to his will, and making massive cuts in research grants, will make things much worse, though its effects will only be seen down the road in a few years.

One of the key factors is the number and quality of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows who do so much of the actual research. It used to be that they would want to come to the US and so the US universities had the pick of the crop but that is no longer true.

Harvard and other leading U.S. universities face a fresh set of stressors from the Trump administration’s cuts to science grants, as well as from travel bans and an anti-immigration crackdown that has swept up international students and academics.

The number of international students arriving in the U.S. in August 2025 was 19 percent lower than the year before, a trend that could further hurt the prestige and rankings of American schools if the world’s best minds choose to study and work elsewhere.

It takes decades of painstaking effort to build up research programs but they can be destroyed much more quickly. US universities were not always leaders. German universities produced some of the best research but just within one decade in the 1930s, Nazi policies of pogroms and death camps aimed at Jews and their general suppression of intellectual freedom drove many of their best scientists and other intellectuals out of the country. A lot of them ended up in the US and helped create the rich scientific infrastructure here. The current Trump administration may achieve the dubious distinction of producing a greater degradation of US research within an even shorter time than the Nazis did.

I want to be clear that I am not concerned that US universities are no longer seen as the world leaders in scientific research. I am not a fan of global ranking systems which can be gamed. Furthermore, the jingoistic desire that is so common in the US to be seen as the winners in every sphere is something I abhor. Scientific research, because it is published openly, benefits everyone, irrespective of the source, so we should welcome Chinese investments in this area. Of course, the technological benefits are not as freely shared and so US economic competitiveness may well be adversely affected.

What really concerns me is that the anti-science, anti-intellectual climate that is currently prevalent at the highest levels of the US government does not bode well, not just for the US, but for the creation of new knowledge globally.