A notable development of the last decade was the pluralisation of research capacity in the sciences. Between 1995 and 2005, the annual number of scientific papers produced in China rose from 9,061 to 41,596. China was poised to overtake UK and Germany at the top of the EU table though its output remained less than one fifth that of the EU as a whole.

In the same decade, China's annual output of papers rose by 16.5% per annum. The annual rate of growth in South Korea was 15.7%, in Singapore 12.2% and Taiwan 8.6%. In 2003, Singapore invested 2.24% of GDP on R&D, a higher figure than Canada.

In contrast, between 1995 and 2005 the number of papers produced by nations in the EU rose by 1.8% per annum, with rapid growth only in outliers such as Portugal and Turkey. Papers produced in the US increased by just 0.6% while in the UK the number did not rise at all.

Though China's researchers are unable to conduct global research conversations in their own language and China's transformation in education and research "may still be only in its relatively early stages" as one observer notes, it is remaking the knowledge economy landscape.

Between 2000-2005, R&D investment in China rose by 18.5% per year. In comparison, between 1995 and 2005, Finland led R&D investment in the European Union with an increase of 7.8% per year. Investment in Germany rose by 2.5% and France 1.3%.

Between 1996 and 2005 China's investment in R&D as a proportion of GDP rose from 0.57 to 1.35%. In 2006, China became the world's number two R&D spender and between 2004 and 2005, the number of international patents it filed grew by 47%.

Less than one quarter of basic research in China takes place in universities, compared with over half in many OECD nations and almost two thirds in the US. The state enterprises receive more R&D investment than the universities; nevertheless China is the third largest investor in R&D in higher education, after the US and Japan, at more than US$10 billion in 2005.

China's demography suggests vast long-term research potential. By 2010, 90% of all PhDs in the physical sciences and engineering will be held by Asians living in Asia, most of them produced by China. But, despite the fact that three Asian nations other than China have also invested in accelerated growth in research outputs, it is misleading to talk about an 'Asian region' or 'Asian leadership' in the global knowledge economy, as if the Asian nations as a whole were parallel to Europe.

The geographical category Asia does not translate into a unified system with coherent impact: there are no prospects of a pan-Asian education area, or an 'Asian' strategy to lift education and research. Deep animosities between China, Japan and South Korea prevent East Asian unity and the only possible combination is Taiwan and the mainland, which seems only a matter of time. Singapore is a small country of less than five million people that, like Switzerland, moves nimbly between larger partners to sustain its autonomy.

Nor is India in the same category as China as an emerging knowledge economy. For example between 1995 and 2005, India's rate of growth of scientific papers was 4.5% per annum, and total papers at 14,608 in 2005 was one third the number produced in China (NSB, 2008) and it has yet to indicate a coherent national policy that would lift participation and research at scale. The story of the last decade in education and research is not 'the rise of China and India' or 'the rise of Asia'; it is the rise of China.

In 2005, China's investment in R&D in higher education was still only one quarter of the level in the United States. But if present rates of growth continue, inside a generation China will exceed the investment in US and European higher education.

Still, questions about quality remain. In 2008, European nations aside from the UK housed 88 of the top Jiao Tong discipline groups. The UK had 50, the US had 308 [but] there were just 10 in China, nine of them in engineering.

One difficulty facing China is that on the whole it is more difficult for most foreign personnel to engage in a Chinese-speaking setting than to engage in an English-language setting or the bilingual and multilingual settings of West European systems. So the future of Chinese knowledge power is not simply a function of GDP shares and investment - it is also tied to the evolving global role of China in culture and language.

* Simon Marginson is a professor of higher education at the University of Melbourne. This article is an edited version of an address he gave to the European Commission Bologna 2020 conference in Ghent, Belgium, in May.


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