Behind the riot of robots running, dancing and playing at Beijing’s second World Humanoid Games last week is an ambitious Chinese project to turn China into the world’s leading science power. This ambition is rooted in President Xi Jinping’s call to fully mobilise “new quality productive forces” being unleashed by the current revolutions in science and technology. Xi is convinced that China’s next phase of growth cannot rely on cheap labour, large-scale manufacturing, infrastructure and capital accumulation. It must come from innovation.
AI is central to Xi’s strategy. Beijing’s objective is to diffuse AI across the physical economy — robotics, machine tools, automobiles, biotechnology, materials, energy, agriculture and scientific research. China’s manufacturing depth is its advantage. Beijing is betting that fusing digital intelligence with the world’s largest industrial ecosystem will make China the leading technological power.
For decades, China absorbed foreign technology, improved it through manufacturing and dominated production. It now wants to move upstream — from adaptation to original discovery. China spent 2.8 per cent of GDP on R&D in 2025; basic-research expenditure rose by 11 per cent. The manufacturing power now seeks to become a science superpower.
The logic is simple: AI accelerates discovery; discovery produces technology; technology transforms industry; industrial strength generates national power and gives China a geopolitical edge.
Washington is reaching a similar conclusion, coming from the opposite direction. The Trump administration’s Science: A New Golden Age, released in July, has been billed as the first major reset in US science policy since World War II. It begins by recognising American strengths — its great universities, laboratories, technology companies and capital markets. It also acknowledges the American weakness — the erosion of the capacity to turn discoveries into production.
Globalisation separated American innovation from manufacturing. Companies designed at home, produced abroad and depended on long supply chains. That model generated wealth but also vulnerabilities exposed by the pandemic, China’s rise and geopolitical rivalry. Washington now wants to reintegrate the production of knowledge and manufacturing.
Washington and Beijing see AI not merely as a general-purpose technology, but as an accelerator central to the production of new knowledge that in turn will transform industry. By making discovery continuous with design and manufacturing, AI-driven science will transform production itself — and turn scientific speed into economic power and geopolitical capability.
China begins with the largest manufacturing base and moves upstream into science. America begins with the strongest scientific system and moves downstream into manufacturing. China fears dependence on American technology; the US fears dependence on Chinese production. Both seek to close the gap between knowledge and production.
This contest is not about who unveils the cleverest AI model or the most sophisticated humanoid. It is about building the most effective ecosystem connecting universities, laboratories, entrepreneurs, finance, energy, factories, supply chains and markets.
Where does this leave India? Delhi recognises the trend and has launched several new missions — on AI, semiconductor production and quantum technologies. It also has a draft robotics policy. But two weaknesses stand out.
First, ambition and imagination are concentrated in government declarations at a time when the private sector contributes more than ever to producing knowledge in the US and China. Indian capital rarely articulates a project for mastering the new forces of production or a new project for science and basic research. This was not always so. Jamsetji Tata helped create the Indian Institute of Science in 1909; the Kirloskars and other western Indian business families sent their children to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from the 1920s. They recognised that independent India’s future lay in mastering modern science. The Sir Dorabji Tata Trust supported Homi Bhabha in establishing the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, which formed the nucleus of India’s atomic energy and space programmes. Indian capital has sadly retreated from that tradition.
The Economic Survey 2025-26 puts India’s R&D expenditure at 0.64 per cent of GDP. In comparison, China spends about 2.8 per cent and the US 3.5. The World Intellectual Property Organisation estimates India’s total R&D spend at $75 billion in purchasing-power-adjusted dollars, against $786 billion for China and $782 billion for the United States. In nominal dollar terms, India will look even less impressive.
Second, India has not reformed its scientific institutions. China’s reform era launched in the late 1970s by Deng Xiaoping put the revitalisation of science and technology at the heart of his Four Modernisations. India’s reform era, beginning in the 1990s, produced no comparable overhaul.
India and China both benefited from access to American universities that offered valuable training in advanced sciences for their vast talent pools. China combined that opportunity with massive domestic investment in science and higher education and incentives for researchers to return. To say that India’s science sector does not attract talent back is an understatement.
If the Congress era saw the steady bureaucratisation of Indian science, the BJP is adding cultural nationalism to it. Civilisational pride cannot make mythology a substitute for evidence, experiment and scientific temper. India’s most confident claim should not be that all modern science was discovered in its past, but that the greatest Indian contributions lie in the future.
Equally unfortunate is the Indian tendency to talk tall. Delhi’s radical posturing on technological “self-reliance” in the 1970s and 1980s isolated India from global technological advances. Today, again, there is grandiose talk of “technological sovereignty”. India must necessarily walk on two legs: Deepen cooperation with global science, capital, technology and talent while building domestic research, industrial and institutional capacity.
Without reform of the state-led science system and a massive commitment from private capital, Indian industry could well become a subaltern to Chinese and American science-industrial systems that are set to become as breathtaking as the robots we saw in Beijing last week.
The writer is contributing editor on international affairs for The Indian Express. He is a distinguished professor at the Motwani Jadeja Institute of American Studies, Jindal Global University and holds the Korea Foundation Chair on Asian Geopolitics at the Council for Strategic and Defence Research, Delhi
Without reform of the state-led science system and a massive commitment from private capital, Indian industry could well become a subaltern to Chinese and American science-industrial systems. (Illustration: C R Sasikumar) 
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