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China: How science made a superpower

Shellen Wu traces the rise of the dominant force in science, in the second of a series of essays on the ways in which the past 150 years have shaped today’s research system, marking Nature’s anniversary.
  1. Shellen Wu

    1. Shellen Wu is an associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA.

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Illustration by Señor Salme

The opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing featured ancient China’s four great inventions: the compass, printing press, paper and gunpowder. The lesson on display, as taught in classrooms across the country that today publishes the most research papers, is that Chinese innovation in science and technology changed the world.

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Nature 574, 25-28 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-02937-2

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