I've my doubts. Chinese researchers are publishing a lot but their papers are getting retracted at even higher rate. Currently, they account for 50% of all retractions across the publishers. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.19197v1
And there is no clamor Chinese green card either in politicians in China for students coming from other countries or in people outside coming to China. And if China will be having highest ranking technical universities, it means immigration is not a necessity for technical excellence or ranking as many keep alluding to.
Exactly this, it's hilarious seeing the reasoning ITT and elsewhere that we need unlimited foreign immigration to possibly keep stride with China, a country with extremely strict immigration opportunities and as a result, much better cultural cohesion.
I actually agree with them that China is absolutely on track to surpass us, though the funny part is they never stopped to think about why that might be, nor what it will mean for Western countries and immigration going forward.
The writing is really on the wall for the death of "a country is an economic zone migrants should be free to enter and leave at will" line of thinking, but regaining the cohesion we once had and the previous pressure for migrants to actually assimilate rather than just forming closed satellite communities may take longer still.
> And I say this as an European, we’re miles behind really.
I am not so sure about this. Many universities in Europe are still really good (even if they market their research achievements much less aggressively than US-American universities). The problem that exists in many European countries is that companies or startups have difficulties commercializing these research achievements.
Sounds same as China? No money, aging population? Not sure how the Chinese Universities are doing, but the international ones seem struggling (they pay foreign faculty 5–10x more, by law). Not so sure about the next 5 years. Could be messy.
Not investing well in education, health and infrastructure is one of the causes of the decline of Europe, and stagnant productivity.
Its not even so much as money not being spent, as money being spent badly. In the UK money is wasted on having too many universities and too many undergraduates. There are badly thought out commercial research subsidies. Schools are driven my metrics in a large scale proof of Goodheart's (Campbell's ?) law.
Why is this even an "if" at this point? China's EV industry has overtaken the US's. They are at worst only slightly behind in AI -- all of the best large open weight LLMs are from Chinese companies, and there are more major Chinese LLMs chasing SOTA than western SOTA LLMs.
Literally everything the second Trump administration has done in office has made the Chinese much stronger in every possible way, and the USA much weaker.
The USA isn't completely doomed if we can get past the current madness somehow. However, while I don't know what post-Trump America looks like, the USA has permanently ceded political and technical leadership. Trump has sealed the US's fate.
Most of Europe is behind because the money there has dried up. (Except for Norway)
> You have to make a lot more fuck ups for us to catch you.
The main issue is the 40TN debt that the US has which will soon matter. But the expected action that they will do is to continue printing and debasing the US dollar until they cannot.