‘Made in China’ is changing the world

Security & Defence PLuS Executive Director Dr Ian Langford writes in The Australian that the centre of gravity in global research has shifted and the implications for Australia and its partners are profound.

He highlights that China now produces almost twice the scientific research output of the United States and is accelerating its lead across frontier fields including AI, quantum, advanced manufacturing, and critical technologies.

“The conclusion is unavoidable: the West’s research tradition is no longer pre-eminent. It has been overtaken. The baton is being passed.”

Dr Langford notes that China is no longer competing through IP theft but through sheer scale: publishing, patenting, commercialising, and industrialising at a pace the West has not matched. Meanwhile, Western systems are stagnating, underinvesting, and losing scientific talent.

“Industries once underwritten by Western research are now driven by Chinese laboratories, Chinese scientists and Chinese industrial scale.”

Yet the article argues the West still holds one structural advantage: the dynamism of capitalism, its entrepreneurship, private capital, and freedom of inquiry. Dr Langford writes that Australia faces a strategic choice between continuing to underinvest or treating R&D as a national capability essential to sovereignty and competitiveness.

Read the full article in The Australian: ‘Made in China’ is changing the world