There has been a recruitment drive to lure internationally trained PhDs back to China, alongside a growing number of English-language programmes that have drawn in more overseas students, says Andrew Crisp, owner of the CarringtonCrisp education consultancy.

“You have growing diversity that supports rankings,” says the British consultant.

The results are crystal clear as China now performs strongly across the main indicators of research performance. “China increasingly dominates research metrics – wherever you look,” says Ben Sowter, Senior Vice President of QS, who heads up the Sector Intelligence Unit.

He points to a strong showing in citations and growing representation in the Nature Index, which measures contributions to a select set of top scientific journals.

But the emphasis on metrics has also come under scrutiny. Incentives tied to measurable results can skew behaviour. “Rapid gains in quantifiable metrics” can come “faster than actual underlying qualitative improvements”, says Simon at the Quincy Institute, in Washington DC.

“The emphasis on patents has led to the creation of many junk patents that may be helpful for rankings or individual promotions, but have little commercial potential,” he adds.

If a rise in research volume and university rankings have been the visible outcome, sustained investment has been the engine powering its accent.

“There have been two primary factors at play,” says QS’ Sowter: “sustained, deepening state support for education and research” and “money both for education, and more impactfully, on R&D”.

China’s spending on research and development has grown lavishly over the past two decades, bringing China close to surpassing the US in total expenditure – $781 billion for China compared with $823 billion for the US in 2023, according to OECD data.

“This has taken China's leading research universities inexorably [up] with it,” Sowter says.

What stands out is not just the scale of the spending but its consistency: investment has been sustained over several decades.

And funding has been deliberately concentrated. Rather than spreading resources evenly, China has channelled investment into a small group of elite institutions, says the Quincy Institute’s Simon. This has created a hierarchical system, allowing top universities to rise more quickly.

“A relatively small group of institutions receives disproportionate support to compete globally,” he says, citing both the Tsinghua and Zhejiang rankings. The contrast with some western systems is stark.

In the US, the Trump administration has cut billions of dollars from federal research funding, scrapping more than 1,600 National Science Foundation grants and putting pressure on university budgets. Harvard has been singled out in particular.

Meanwhile, China has kept the funding taps flowing and the impact is evident in its scholarly works.

Publications have increased rapidly, with citations rising alongside them. “The numbers are easy to see,” says Zweig at HKUST.

In 2024, a banner year for Chinese research, it produced 37,273 articles in leading scientific journals, compared with 31,930 for the US. On top of that, China now accounts for 35.7 percent of global citations, compared with 22.4 percent for the US.

That has fed directly into rankings. Research output carries significant weight in global league tables, including the QS rankings where citations account for 20 percent of the weighting.

Little wonder that universities have built systems that reward measurable works. “Chinese universities have built strong incentive systems around publications… citation counts, patents and applied research outputs,” Simon says at Quincy Institute.

But the model has limits. Rapid growth in papers or citations has not always been matched by improvements in quality. In some areas, innovation still lags behind the scale of research activity.

“While improving, not all research translates efficiently into globally competitive products and services,” Simon adds.

Beyond the focus on publications, talent has been another central pillar of China’s rise in the international education order.

Chinese universities, backed by national programmes, have pursued aggressive recruitment strategies to attract top researchers from abroad. Programmes such as the Thousand Talents Plan have been used to bring back overseas Chinese academics, says HKUST’s Zweig.

This has been backed by strong incentives. Returnees have been offered significantly higher salaries – in some cases double those of local faculty – plus better conditions, says Zweig. But the money comes with strings attached: greater demands in terms of publications, he adds.

The scale of the system has also helped. China is projected to produce more than 77,000 STEM PhDs a year, compared with about 40,000 in the US – giving China a deeper pool of researchers to sustain its research growth.

Meanwhile, the nation's top universities have continued to receive targeted funding for labs, facilities and faculty recruitment, according to Simon at the Quincy Institute. “China has actively recruited the best and the brightest,” he says, including overseas Chinese scientists and internationally trained researchers.

There are signs the strategy is working. Research by Yu Xie at Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and colleagues points to a steady rise in the number of scientists of Chinese descent returning from the US to China in recent years.

And as research funding pressures mount in the US under the Trump administration, that trend may continue, with more scientists returning to China.

What does that mean for the wider Chinese economy, the world's second biggest behind America?

In China, universities are part of the country’s industrial push. Simon says: “China’s leadership has treated universities not simply as educational institutions, but as a core component for overall national development, technological upgrading and strategic competition.”

Universities are closely tied to industry and state priorities, helping to speed the path from research to application. They “serve as bridges between basic research and industrial application”, Simon says, with closer alignment to strategic sectors and faster routes from lab to market.

Some of this research has fed directly into industry, with advances in battery technology developed in university labs later deployed by electric vehicle groups such as BYD, now the world’s biggest EV seller.

For universities in other countries looking on, there are lessons to learn from China's ascent to the top tier, but not all travel. Clear national goals have mattered, backed by sustained investment over decades. Resources have been channelled into a small group of elite institutions, lifting research performance.

Building global research networks has also been critical. “International networks, whether among academics, students or alumni, are key for many rankings,” says Crisp, the UK based consultant.

But much of it is hard to copy. China’s system is tightly coordinated, with funding, incentives and university priorities all tied to national goals.

Rankings are also evolving. “Some of the leading rankings are increasingly looking at sustainability measures,” says UK consultant Crisp, which could begin to shift the incentives that have driven China’s rise.

But for now, China is riding high and that uplift has been engineered. The rankings show it.