ASPI Report: China Now Leads U.S. in 66 Critical Technologies

According to an independent think tank, China currently leads the world in nearly 90% of critical technologies that “significantly enhance or pose risks to a country’s national interests.” A recent report published in Nature states that China has leapfrogged the U.S. in a stunningly short period.

In the early 2000s, the United States dominated most critical technologies, with China holding the lead in just 5% of areas tracked. These stark findings come from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s updated Critical Technology Tracker, which expanded this year to include 74 current and emerging technologies and ranks countries by their performance in “high-impact” research.

The latest five-year window (2020–2024) shows China leading in 66 of the 74 technologies, including areas tied directly to national power such as nuclear energy, synthetic biology, and small satellites. The United States leads in the remaining eight technologies, including quantum computing and geoengineering.

The tracker’s methodology underscores that this is not a GDP-style measure of industrial might. ASPI’s The Strategist explains it measures research performance by focusing on the top 10% most-cited research papers in each category, treating that as a leading indicator of future science-and-technology capability.

ASPI’s report also flags concentrated risk in several newly added areas where China holds a clear lead—cloud and edge computing, computer vision, generative AI, and grid integration technologies—and assigns some of them a high “technology monopoly risk” rating. This signals that expertise is clustering heavily within Chinese institutions.

Earlier this year, former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and other former U.S. national security officials wrote Congress warning that China was outpacing the United States in critical technology fields and urged increased funding for federal scientific research. They noted: “China is making significant strategic investments in basic and applied research and positioning the country to outpace us in critical areas that could determine the outcome of future conflicts. This is a race that we cannot afford to lose.”