China's emerging prominence in high-grade education

Writing about China's rapid advancement in training its youth in high-grade science and technology takes me back to 1976 when I was appointed to lead the World Bank's rapidly developing programme. The Bank's involvement covered both policy reform and financing of projects the Chinese considered vital for the development of their economy. The dam on the mighty Yangtze River at a place called 'three gorges' would double the production of electric power in the country. I was appointed the chairman of the three-member committee that was to examine and approve the feasibility report of this immensely large hydel project.

The World Bank then placed significant emphasis on ensuring that people displaced by large projects were properly resettled. The three gorges project was to displace 1.1 million people, but the Chinese had not provided for them to be settled. On the World Bank's advice, I refused to approve the feasibility report until proper resettlement measures were ensured.

The Chinese said that they lacked people who could design such a programme and asked the World Bank for help in providing needed expertise. The Bank sent in its experts, and the programme they designed created space for them in the country's western provinces, particularly the Autonomous Region of Xinjiang bordering Pakistan. The region needed sea access, which Pakistan offered via the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

Since that time, roughly half a century ago, China has invested heavily in developing facilities to train people in advanced science and technology. While I have discussed CPEC progress elsewhere, today I will write about the place China now occupies in training not only its own people but those from friendly nations. Pakistan is one of the beneficiaries; hundreds of its students now attend institutions that offer high-level expertise across various fields of science and technology.

According to Bethany Allen and Wong Leung of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, China, today, is surpassing the United States in science and technology research. According to data from the institute, US universities lag behind their Chinese counterparts in cutting-edge research across dozens of emergent technologies. Researchers analysed millions of papers listed in the Web of Science to rank global universities in 64 key technological fields. Their findings were striking.

China secured the top spot globally in 57 of the investigated fields. In most disciplines, Chinese institutions not only ranked highly, but dominated the top ten slots. By these measures, the world's best school on aggregate performance across all technologies is Tsinghua University in Beijing, which ranks among the global top ten in 29 of the 64 domains. In three of them — artificial intelligence algorithms and hardware accelerators, adversarial AI, and autonomous systems operations — Tsinghua tops. America's best performer, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (better known as MIT) makes to the top ten in just ten areas of research and ranks first in just two of them.

To quote again from Allen and Leung, "we found that nine of the top 10 best overall performers are Chinese universities. That's not even factoring in non-university institutions like the state-run Chinese Academy of Sciences, which if included, would be the world's top performer, placing first in 28 of the 64 disciplines. Data based on published scientific papers can't tell the whole story, of course.

Chinese universities still don't provide the well-rounded education in a range of disciplines that keeps US universities like Harvard, Yale and Columbia high on most global ranking. But high-tech research performance often leads to industrial dominance. Chinese institutions hold the highest spots in our rankings in technologies that underpin industries either already dominated by China — including drones, solar panels and electric vehicles — or where the country is making rapid progress, including nuclear energy technology and robotics."

If President Donald Trump aims to compete with China in science and technology, he would have to use state power to aid institutions that develop human capital. Instead, he has taken steps that undermine his goal of surpassing China in science and technology. His style of governance won't help that goal, as quotes above, using the data collected and analysed by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, suggest China is making spectacular progress.

As part of his campaign to reduce the size of the American government alongside mounting deficits, Trump has developed programmes that would hurt the country's premier science and technology institutes. Harvard University is one of the several institutions that have seen their federal grants severely cutback, reduced as a part of the Trump government's reform programmes.

To face the Chinese challenge, the Trump administration is also making it difficult for Chinese students to enrol in major American universities such as Harvard, Yale and Columbia. It has announced heavy fees for granting foreign students to enrol themselves in institutions of higher learning. But keeping Chinese students at home won't reduce the reach of China into higher technical fields.

On October 16, Harvard announced that it ended its fiscal year with a $113 million deficit. The shortfall would have been worse if not for the outpouring of private donor support. They gave the university more than $600 million in the 2023-2022 academic year — a record for the nearly 400-year-old university — as its leaders refused to comply with sweeping federal demands and institutional changes. The deficit is small in the context the of the university's operating base.

What are the implications of this competition for Pakistan? I myself went to Harvard University to study Economics and Public Finance, with the expenses covered by Ford Foundation. My Harvard education laid the foundations for my subsequent career at the World Bank. The current generation, however, should focus on getting to China and working in the disciplines that are vital for Pakistan to make economic, financial and technical progress.