I was just guessing at numbers and figures

Pulling the puzzles apart

Questions of science, science and progress

Do not speak as loud as my heart

– Coldplay

Nine of the world’s current top,-ten-ranked research universities are in China, according to the recently released 2026 Nature Index.

For the first time since the index was introduced, Harvard is no longer the number one ranked university. Zhejiang University (ZJU) has taken its place.

China’s share of research papers published in the 178 top journals of the Nature Index is now over twice that of the US.

When Nature launched its index in 2015, China’s share of papers published in top journals was 37% of the US share. China took the lead in 2023 and, by 2025, lapped the US.

In 2025, China’s share increased 22.4% year-on-year versus 4.2% for the US.

Because total papers in the index grew 10.8%, growth rates below that indicate a relative decline in the rankings. All countries in the top 20 besides China grew by single digit percentages (or fell). Mainstream media outlets like the Economist and the New York Times have written feature articles on the rise of Chinese universities using the Nature Index and the similar Leiden Rankings (citations rather than publications in top journals).

The mainstream media seem to have moved on from legacy rankings like Times Higher Education (founded in 1971 as a supplement of The Times of London but spun off in 2008 as an independent publication), US News and QS. These rankings are fruity, arbitrarily weighing subjective factors like academic reputation, employer reputation and “learning environment” along with peculiar metrics like international student percentage and number of Nobel/Fields Medal winners.

Legacy rankings have become long in the tooth, spitting out the usual suspects for decades (Ivy plus, Oxbridge and a few elite US state schools) while China turned the world upside down. On purchasing power parity, China’s economy has surpassed that of the US (likely far more than reported, see here, here and here).

China has moved up the value chain, dominating industry after industry from EVs to electronics to clean energy. It is giving the US a run for its money in AI and drug discovery and is on the cutting edge of future technologies including quantum computing and nuclear fusion.

As if preserved in amber, the top 10 universities in the Times Higher Education rankings are unchanged from 2004 to 2026. That Oxford and Cambridge are ranked in the top 5 by Times Higher Education while the UK economy has stagnated for decades (20 year 0.6% real per capita GDP CAGR vs. 7.4% for China) should make everyone question whether methodologies are reflecting actual educational quality and research outcomes.

To be clear, while the Nature Index (and Leiden Rankings) are far more objective, they are also focused much more narrowly. They do not claim to tell you where little Jimmy should apply to college. They do not “measure” reputation. They do not care one whit about undergraduates and their “learning environment” or class sizes. They do not care what percent of research is done by international students or Nobel laureates.

They also do not measure efficiency. ZJU eked out a win over Harvard for the top spot with over three times the number of PhD students. The Nature Index is not about prestige. If you want a prestigious PhD, go to Harvard. If a nation wants to create a powerhouse research institution, then replicate ZJU.

China’s surge up the Nature Index rankings is just a math problem reflecting the explosive growth of the nation’s tertiary education.

Since 2000, the number of annual STEM graduates in China has increased almost tenfold.

Not just sunshine and rainbows

All, however, is not sunshine and rainbows in China’s scientific community. In May of this year, academia in China was rocked by Classmate Geng, a PhD dropout and influencer on BiliBili (China’s YouTube), who tore through China’s rising academic stars – Changjiang scholars and National Science Foundation (NSFC) distinguished young scholars – with accusations of academic fraud.

Using methods sophisticated (AI statistical software) and simple (eyeballing repeated data), Student Geng was able to take down star researchers at top universities including Sun-Yat Sun, Nankai and Tongji (Nature Index 11th, 20th and 21st). Four professors were demoted (three lost deanships) and multiple postdocs were fired. Blood has been spilled.   

While the number of graduates should be plateauing, they will continue to outnumber retiring STEM workers for decades to come. It remains to be seen at what level China’s Nature Index rankings plateau but given known demographics, we will know in the 2040s.

At the height of Classmate Geng’s rampage, Xinhua News interviewed him, granting, in effect, a state imprimatur on his efforts.

Eminent neurobiologist Rao Yi, a former dean of Peking University’s School of Life Sciences, lent his voice to Classmate Geng, accusing Chinese researchers of not just producing the most fraudulent research but having the highest proportion of fraud as well. Calling China’s research environment rotten to the core, Rao Yi lamented a culture of researchers trained to keep their heads down, scratch one another’s backs and share spoils (awards, funding, and promotions) among crony networks.

Classmate Geng himself is more pragmatic, suggesting methodological protocols to prevent fraud – namely, requiring different people to replicate experiments. Because of Classmate Geng, academic journals in China are requiring co-authors to certify that they take full accountability for fraud and have verified all raw data.

Universities implemented mandatory training on data integrity and reproducibility. Regulatory bodies stepped up random data auditing for key research projects, focusing on Changjiang scholars and NSFC distinguished young scholars.

For decades, China’s universities implemented an all-balls, pedal-to-the-metal, publish or perish, hunger games incentive system for academic researchers. This worked perhaps too well. China produced 831,600 Science Citation Index (SCI, ~9,500 key journals) papers in 2025, a 27-fold increase from 2000. In 2000, China accounted for 2.96% (fractional collaboration share) of the world’s SCI papers. By 2025, that rose to ~26%.

China itself publishes ~5,300 Chinese language scientific and technical journals, indexed by China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), only 382 of which are included in SCI. CNKI papers have increased ~500% between 2000 and 2025, publishing papers of limited interest to international publications (e.g. local crop studies, high speed rail metallurgy, rare earths).

Since 2000, China has been overhauling academic incentives, moving beyond quantity KPIs like SCI paper count and citations. China has increased incentives for publishing in top domestic journals such as National Science Review and Cell Research. PhD programs are moving away from rigid two SCI paper quotas to dissertation quality, originality and solving real world engineering problems. Bibliometric KPIs have shifted to high impact metrics like top 1% citations, Nature Index contribution and commercial patents.

Classmate Geng is shooting fish in a barrel. An incentive structure that increased paper output 27-fold since 2000, carried by a 10-fold increase in STEM graduates, has evidently poured beer with a thick head of foam. According to the Economist, Classmate Geng estimates one in ten papers by distinguished scholars is fraudulent.

In a speech, Rao Yi declared that China deserves world records for both scientific progress and academic misconduct. The problem, according to Rao, is that miscreants are not held accountable in the “see no evil, hear no evil” and “I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine” environment formed in the extreme publish-or-perish crucible.

Now that Classmate Geng’s exposure of China’s most distinguished scholars has left universities meting out bloody professional punishment and disgruntled graduate students feeling newly empowered on PubPeer, a sword of Damocles hangs over researchers tempted to cut corners. Chickens have been killed. We will see if the monkeys are scared.

All things considered, however, China’s intense publish-or-perish pressures as it expanded its research infrastructure by an order of magnitude was absolutely the correct policy. To move at China speed and lap the US in the Nature Index in one generation is an astonishing accomplishment, even if 10% of research is fraudulent. You might not like how it’s made but the proof is in the pudding as China dominates industry after industry.

Stable genius’s revenge tour of US academia

At the same time that China has flipped the scientific world on its head and is optimizing incentives for future advances while spilling blood to contain fraud, the US is gutting its research universities by slashing scientific funding.

The Trump administration had proposed budget cuts for the National Institute of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) by 39.3% and 56.9%, respectively. Although Congress rejected those deep budget cuts, the administration has used workarounds – administrative mechanisms, grant freezes and executive actions – to disrupt funding.This has resulted in an expected budgetary shortfall at MIT of $300 million forcing the school to reduce graduate student intake by 500 (~20%). Harvard has also reported “significantly reduced” PhD admissions.

After failing to secure large budget cuts requested for 2026, the Trump administration is trying again in 2027, asking for budget cuts of 55% to NSF, 23% to NASA, 15% to the Department of Energy Office of Science and a 12% to the NIH. To add insult to injury, the Trump administration is proposing to give political appointees at the Office of Management and Budget decision power over Federal science funding. All of this has little to do with curbing government waste and everything to do with President Trump’s disdain for elite universities.

The near-term impact of budget and bureaucratic self-sabotage will be Harvard falling out of the top five and MIT dropping below 20 in the Nature Index rankings. The long term impact could be US universities surrendering their position as destination schools for the world’s brightest minds and cementing scientific leadership in China.