Month: December 2025

China’s Rise as a Global Science and Technology Superpower

Posted on By Nnanda Kizito Sseruwagi

By Nnanda Kizito Sseruwagi

President Xi Jinping has articulated the strategy of China in the 21st Century as including adherence to science and technology as the number-one productive force, talent as the number-one resource, and innovation as the number-one driving force. China’s national-strategy is to be-the world leader in AI by 2030.

Today, the United States and other Western nations are no longer distant leaders in Artificial Intelligence (AI) research. Chinese Universities like Tsinghua and Peking publish more research on AI than any other academic institution in the world. In volume of publish AI research, China has the most highly cited and impressive papers. Chinese academic and research institutions publish almost five times more AI papers than the U.S. and more than the U.S., U.K., India, and Germany combined.

China’s investment in fundamental technologies like bioscience and cleantech is peerless. By 2008, China had overtaken the U.S. in number of PhDs produced, while at the same time producing double the number of STEM PhDs than America. Since 2020, China’s R&D spending is 90% of the U.S.’s, and it remains in a distant lead on the number of patents applications registered.

China has more of the world’s top 500 supercomputers than any other country in the world. China is home to the BGI group – one of the world’s leading life science and genomics organizations. BGI has extraordinary DNA sequencing capabilities and capacity, employs thousands of scientists, and holds vast reserves of DNA data and computing capacity. The rest of the world altogether has fewer robots than China. In terms of technology, the U.S. is several years behind China’s supersonic missiles development. China remains the world leader in 6G communications and photovoltaics – the technology that converts of light into electricity using semiconducting materials. China’s expertise in quantum computing is also notable. Since 2018, China has filed twice as many patents in quantum technology as the United States.

In 2016, China launched the Quantum Science Experiment Satellite. The Quantum Experiments at Space Scale (QUESS) project was designed to facilitate quantum optics experiments over long distances to allow the development of quantum encryption and quantum teleportation technology. Under this project, China sent the world’s first quantum satellite, Micius, into space. Micius is expected to provide a more secure communications infrastructure.

In 20117, China built a two-thousand-kilometre quantum link between Shanghai and Beijing for transmitting secure financial and military information. The country is also building the National Laboratory for Quantum Information Sciences in Hefei, which will be the world’s biggest such facility. Hefei scientists even claimed to have built a quantum computer that is ten times faster than Google’s Sycamore superconducting quantum processor.

The persistent stereotype against China, circulated by the West, was that China is just good at mimicking, lacks creative capabilities and is too restricted for transformative ingenuity. All this turns out to have been wrong. China has instead emerged as a contemporary titan of science and engineering.

In the field of synthetic biology, China is also leading innovative medical applications. In 2025, the Children’s Hospital of Fudan University in Shanghai successfully treated a 4-year-old Pakistani girl with severe thalassemia. Using Chinese-developed gene-editing drug, her dependency on blood transfusions ended and she has returned to living a normal life. The treatment used a base-editing drug called CS-101, designed to target severe beta-thalassemia. Professor Zhai Xiaowen, in collaboration with CorrectSequence Therapeutics, a Shanghai-based biotech company, had launched the clinical research project in 2023.

Chinese scientists have showcased the possibility of integrating AI with synthetic biology to speed up innovation. They have reduced the process of designing novel proteins to weeks rather than months, and there is potential applicability for these lad-ready proteins in drug development, diagnostics, and other biotech tools. China’s advances cell and gene therapies are also top notch, ranking the country second globally. By 2020, it had conducted approximately 1,000 clinical trials, targeting diseases like cancer, HIV, and hereditary disorders.

The field of nanotechnology is also being conquered by Chinese researchers. Recently in June 2025, researcher at the College of Integrated Circuits and Micro-Nano Electronics at Fudan University in Shanghai harnessed the mineral tellurium to create nanowire implants used in a biocompatible device that restored vision in genetically blind mice as well as a monkey, while giving them the ability to see “invisible” light. By this innovation, China has been able to not only create an artificial retina that restores sight but one capable of giving super vision – the extraordinary ability to see infrared light.

The author is a senior research fellow at the Development Watch Center.

 

 

2025 Saw More Consolidation of China-Africa Ties

Posted on By Joshua Kingdom

2025 was significant as far as China-Africa relations go. For one thing, a major reception was hosted in June in Huan Province to mark twenty five years since the establishment of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation. Now that we are in December, it is deserving that we take a moment to reflect on the different milestones that characterized the Beijing-Africa partnership throughout the year.

In executing the task ahead of me, I have divided the piece in three broad areas and we will start with Trade. I elected to begin with the economics because while development partners often talk about having good intentions in their dealings on the continent, following the money always provides clarity about who means what they say.

Whichever metric one looks at, it is clear that there has been tremendous growth in economic activity between China and Africa over the last twelve months. By May thus, trading between the two parties had already reached  $134.16 billion an increase of 12% in comparison to 2024. In part, this owed to the fact that Africa provided an alternative market to Beijing following Trump’s trade war. But performance also increased in terms of the quantity of exports from the African Union states. As Africanews reported in August, the said nations had shipped out over $18 billion worth of goods by then to different regions of the Communist Party (CCP) administered territory. That figure as well, exceeds last year’s state of things.

What is more is that many of these endeavors built on what came before them while others ensured the smoothening of future collaborations. This helps frame the CCP-Africa workings as long-term thereby showing just how either of the players values the other. In regards to building on past commitments, Capital News reported in June that the Chinese government had continued to deliver on President Xi Jinping’s promise at the 2024 Beijing summit by elevating agriculture, healthcare, green growth, security etc. and that more than 45,000 jobs had been created up to that point. As for the future, the Changsha Declaration which removed tariffs on African exports to China for fifty-three countries is perhaps the single-most overarching mark arrived at this year.

Again, in order to consolidate the progress realized thus far in Africa, Beijing continued with what has been one of its signature campaigns for the last decade or so i.e. infrastructure development. By mid-2025 therefore, the Green Finance and Development Centre revealed that the Belt and Road Initiative had already seen projects worth $39 billion embarked on. As with trade, the Communist Party of China and her African allies sought to get involved in pursuits that cement their cooperation for years to come.

Among other ventures, this spirit was evidenced by the China-Africa Internet Development and Cooperation Forum hosted in Xiamen. The first of its kind, the Xiamen forum laid down foundations for partnerships in cyberspace and telecommunication that will span decades. The other part of this specific development equation was the rehabilitation of existing constructions as evidenced by the $1.4 billion agreement to revamp the Tazara railway.

2025 was also characterized by high level delegations of leaders flying across the Indian Ocean traveling in either direction. This too is a crucial signifier of countries taking each other seriously since high ranking officials are busy people who only attend to matters of utmost priority to their agendas. In other words, this is another case of actions speaking far louder than words.

For China’s case then, foreign minister Wang Yi kept up with the long tradition of his country in which officials occupying his current position travel to Africa for all their first visits each year. In this case, the FM paid courtesy calls to Namibia, Nigeria, Chad, and the Republic of Congo in January. And in November, the second most senior ranking member of the Communist Party, Premier Li Qiang visited both Zambia and South Africa. Similarly, Presidents William Ruto, John Dramani, Hakainde Hichilema, and Emmerson Mnangagwa of Kenya, Ghana, Zambia, and Zimbabwe respectively headed missions to China at different times this year.

There is more that I could say including the dynamism showcased by the private sector (say Yadea’s showcasing of electric bikes purposefully designed for the African terrain) but that would require a lot more than I am able to fit in a single column. I hope though that you now have an idea of the trajectory that things followed this year.

The writer is a Lawyer and Research Fellow at the Development Watch Centre.