It depends who is doing the measuring

October 27, 2025

I thank Alex for his thoughtful analysis which summarises pretty well the fact that, as in so many other areas of life, the Western domination of the way progress is measured and who does it, leaves some pretty important questions about the accuracy of these measures unanswered.

China graduates nearly four times the number of STEM students per year than the US and is now far and away the largest filer of patents. Currently, China files around half the world total of patents and increasingly more than the US since 2015.

That has produced a significant leadership for China in so many areas of technology. China currently has in operation a Thorium Reactor which the West has been trying to set up but failed to do for decades. In addition, it has, along with only Russia, small modular reactors in commercial operation. Western countries don’t.

China has also developed, and is testing now, a zero emissions plasma jet engine which uses no fossil fuels. No other country is even close to achieving this. China also has operational mag-lev super high-speed trains since 2004. It is also a leader in the development of personal quantum computers and low energy-use AI.