China’s R&D Spending Matches U.S. on PPP Measure, But Gaps Remain in Basic Science

China has reached a new milestone in global science: OECD data show that, on a purchasing-power-parity basis, it matched or slightly surpassed the United States in total research and development spending in 2024. The shift does not mean China now leads by every measure, or under every calculation. But across several major indicators, the country’s rise as a scientific power is now visible in numbers as well as rhetoric.

That spending milestone comes with an important qualifier. The comparison depends on purchasing power parity, or PPP, which adjusts for what money can buy in each economy rather than converting currencies at market exchange rates. Widely cited summaries of the OECD’s Main Science and Technology Indicators release from March 31, 2026, put 2024 gross domestic expenditure on R&D at about $1.03 trillion for China and $1.01 trillion for the United States in PPP-adjusted international dollars. At market exchange rates, China still trails the United States.

The spending data are not the only sign of China’s growing scientific weight. Nature reported Wednesday that China is now the top-ranked country by article share in the Nature Index, a tally based on a selected group of influential journals rather than all scientific publishing worldwide. China had already surpassed the United States on that measure in 2023. In innovation filings, the World Intellectual Property Organization said applicants from China filed about 70,160 international patent applications under the Patent Cooperation Treaty in 2024, the highest total of any country.

Still, total R&D spending is not the same thing as strength in basic science, where China continues to lag the United States by some measures. Nature, citing an OECD-based calculation by Chris Martin of the Explorative Science Foundation, reported that China devoted just under 7% of its overall R&D budget to fundamental or basic research in 2024, compared with 14.4% in the United States. Nature also said China’s latest basic-research share was about 7.08%, still below an 8% target set in an earlier five-year plan. That matters because basic research is the less immediately commercial work that often underpins major scientific breakthroughs over time.

The composition of China’s R&D effort also helps explain both its speed and its limits. According to OECD-based analyses cited by Nature, Chinese research spending is increasingly driven by business, with companies accounting for roughly three-quarters to four-fifths of total R&D. That can accelerate applied research and commercialization, but it is different from a system centered more heavily on universities and long-horizon basic science. Nature also pointed to a significant integrity concern: between 2014 and 2024, nearly 60% of retracted papers included authors with affiliations to China. That is a cautionary signal about quality control and incentives, not a judgment on all Chinese research.

The broader trend is not new. China’s leadership has spent years treating scientific capacity as a national priority, tying research strength to economic growth, industrial upgrading and geopolitical influence. In a 2018 policy document, the State Council, China’s Cabinet, set a goal to “significantly increase…impact in fundamental research by 2035” and, by midcentury, to build a “major global scientific centre and innovation highland.”

Those targets help explain why the latest figures matter beyond a single headline number. On a PPP-adjusted basis, China has now pulled level with, and in some calculations just past, the United States in total R&D spending. It leads a prominent high-end journal index and the world’s largest count of international patent filings. At the same time, the caveats are substantial: exchange-rate comparisons still favor the United States, China’s share of spending on basic research remains relatively low, and concerns about research integrity have not disappeared.

What the data show now is not a sudden upset, but the measurable outcome of a long-running state-backed push to expand China’s scientific and technological capacity.