As Chinese research goes from strength to strength, it is natural that the country’s biggest and most economically developed urban areas, such as Beijing and Shanghai, would become superstar science cities; as China gets richer, more educated and more technologically sophisticated, the megacities drive further progress. What might be more surprising is that some of China’s smaller provincial capitals are becoming globally significant, also ranking among the Nature Index top 20. Nanjing (5th), Wuhan (9th), Hangzhou (13th), Hefei (15th) and Xi’an (20th) are all examples, inhabiting ranking territory similar to major global cities, such as Tokyo (10th), Paris (11th), Seoul (12th), London (14th) and Chicago (17th). Furthermore, the data indicate that these provincial cities — each anchoring regions as large and as wealthy, in relative terms, as a European country — are among those seeing the fastest-rising research output in the Nature Index. These trends reveal that as China’s government places science and innovation at the core of its economic strategy, such cities and regions are playing a key role in cultivating excellence and, as a result, a bid for sustainable, technologically driven growth.

Economic imperative

China’s emphasis on scientific progress over the past decade is not just motivated by the intrinsic value of science; rather, research and innovation are seen as upstream of economic growth, more broadly. Science mega-structures, such as the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) in Guizhou province, or the Kunming Institute of Botany, housing Asia’s largest seed bank, in Yunnan, are constructed with both economic growth and scientific excellence in mind. The hope is that nationally funded institutes and research labs in faraway places can spark new industries, ideas and innovations that are then embedded in those regions. Huge regional investments based on emerging technologies, such as a 3.5-gigawatt solar panel field in Xinjiang, should be seen as part of the same process.

Nature Index 2024 Science cities

This approach of sparking economic growth through regional investment can be especially important at times of instability. As the global financial crisis hit China around 2008, the country invested heavily in infrastructure such as the high-speed rail network that now crisscrosses the country. As China experiences another bout of economic indigestion — by trying to move away from an economy driven by the value of real estate towards one driven by sustainable growth — the country’s leadership has decided that investing in science and technology is central to creating new forms of urban development. Indeed, as China faces an unequal, two-tier economy, with coastal provinces having incomes much higher than interior provinces, it has become politically essential to balance the country’s wealth, lest they experience some Chinese version of the populism that is gripping many Western societies. China’s leaders are well aware of the political problems that can be caused by regional and class inequality, and by assigning key industries of the future, such as green energy or electric cars, to different cities and provinces, science funding becomes a tool of much broader objectives of social equality and stability and the upskilling of a society.

Star student

When China’s president, Xi Jinping, pointed earlier this year to the importance of new technologies to upgrade industry in the country and promote green transformation, he might have been thinking about places such as Hefei. The capital of Anhui province, it scores higher for natural sciences in the Nature Index Science Cities list than London, Los Angeles or Chicago, and is home to the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), the 5th ranked institution globally in the Nature Index in 2023. Hefei is the star student of China’s regional growth strategy; its rich network of scientific institutions and science graduates gave it the fertile soil for a world-beating industry — electric vehicles (EVs) — to grow. Breakthroughs in EV technology — such as a low-cost solid-state battery developed at USTC that might be a game-changer for the EV market — are part of an extended supply chain that stretches from scientific institutes on one end, through a sophisticated realm of factories and workshops, en route to a huge consumer market. Taken collectively, this makes for a new vision of China’s economy, one with scientific research at its genesis. There will be no shortage of cheerleaders for such a model in the national government, either. Zheng Shanjie, a former party secretary in Anhui province, is now head of the National Development and Reform Commission, China’s main economic planning body.

As other provincial leaders try to make their own cities the next success story, they don’t necessarily need to follow Hefei’s model; there are various ways to connect science with economic growth. Often, the local branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) — the Beijing-headquartered mega-institute that is the global leader in the Nature Index — is a good place to start. CAS has dozens of regional centres throughout the country, such as the Institute of Botany in Kunming. These offshoot institutes sometimes respond to scientific practicalities: Kunming is located in a semi-tropical and extremely biodiverse region, for example. Second, leaders might attempt to establish some of the tie-ins with international investors and multinational corporations that have helped Shanghai’s biotech industry grow; the city hosts large research labs for pharmaceutical giants such as GSK and Pfizer, and a district for start-up businesses in Zhangjiang, where young innovators can get land, office space and tax breaks. Finally, they can coordinate so that each province specializes in targeting a different area of China’s domestic consumer market, in the way Shenzhen’s homegrown tech companies such as Huawei and DJI have done, for instance.

Between these powers of the state, international investment and the vast base of consumers that China has to offer, scientific breakthroughs can be rapidly herded from the laboratory to market to have maximum economic impact. So, in the years to come, it will be no surprise to see other Chinese cities that are relatively unheard of in the West leap up the Nature Index Science Cities rankings. The more unlikely the place, the more China’s leadership will see a need to put it on the map; and in today’s China, science is the royal road to economic and political importance.