The Chinese Academy of Sciences and Its Place in World Science

The Chinese Academy of Sciences is at once a national research organisation, an honorific learned society and a university system, and on most quantitative measures it is the largest scientific institution in the world. It employs about 74,000 people in 108 research institutes, enrols more than 100,000 students in its universities, leads the development and operation of 47 of the country’s national large research infrastructures and has, by its own account, topped the Nature Index ranking of research institutions for fourteen consecutive years. This essay traces how the academy came to occupy that position, from its foundation in 1949 through the weapons programmes of the 1960s, the damage of the Cultural Revolution and the reforms of the reform era, and then considers what its scale means for science beyond China: its research output, its flagship facilities, its training of scientists from other countries, the security concerns it has raised in the West, and the criticisms made of it at home and abroad. An earlier Huaxia essay, The Academy That Counted, examined the academy’s inheritance from the Republican Academia Sinica and the arithmetic of its Nature Index ranking; the present essay builds on that account rather than repeating it.

Foundation and the Soviet model

The Chinese Academy of Sciences was established on 1 November 1949, a month after the founding of the People’s Republic, with the poet and historian Guo Moruo as its president. It was assembled from the mainland institutes of the Republican Academia Sinica, founded in Nanjing in 1928, and of the Beiping Academy, founded in 1929. Several institutes that now carry the academy’s name are older than the academy itself. The Purple Mountain Observatory above Nanjing was completed in 1934 under the Republican academy, and the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics was founded in March 1949, some months before the new academy existed.

In its first decade the academy took the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union as its model. By the beginning of 1955 the Soviet soil scientist V. A. Kovda was serving as chief adviser to the academy’s president, and in January of that year he delivered a report on the planning and organisation of national scientific research. As the historian Zuoyue Wang has shown, the report set in motion the events that led to the Twelve-Year Plan for the development of science and technology, completed in 1956, in whose drafting more than 600 scientists, including all the members of the academy’s divisions, took part under Kovda’s successor as adviser, Boris Lazarenko, and the State Council’s science planning commission. Soviet advisers were withdrawn at the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, but the institutional pattern they had helped to establish remained. The Soviet pattern gave the academy two features that it retains. The first was a division between a learned society of senior scientists and a network of full-time research institutes. The academy’s Academic Divisions were founded on 1 June 1955, and their members, known at first as division members and later as academicians, became the country’s senior scientific advisers. The second was the principle that research should be planned centrally and directed towards national needs, with the academy acting less as a society of independent scholars than as an instrument of state development.

The academy also took on teaching, because its institutes needed researchers faster than the universities could supply them. In 1958 it founded the University of Science and Technology of China in Beijing, staffed in large part by the academy’s own scientists, and the university moved to Hefei in 1970.

The academy and the strategic weapons programmes

The academy’s reputation within China was made above all by its part in the programme known as Two Bombs, One Satellite, which produced China’s first atomic bomb, tested on 16 October 1964, its first hydrogen bomb, tested on 17 June 1967, and its first satellite, Dongfanghong-1, launched on 24 April 1970. The academy had prepared for nuclear work from its first year. Its Institute of Modern Physics was established in 1950, laying, in the academy’s own description, “the theoretical and technological groundwork for the application of atomic energy”. Under Qian Sanqiang the institute became the Institute of Atomic Energy in 1958 and was placed under the joint leadership of the academy and the Second Ministry of Machine Building, which ran the nuclear industry; many of its staff were transferred to the ministry’s weapons laboratories.

The academy’s role in rocketry and space began with the return of Qian Xuesen, who had worked at the California Institute of Technology and returned to China in October 1955. In January 1956 he became the first director of the academy’s new Institute of Mechanics. The satellite programme itself was an academy project. Begun in January 1965 and named Project 651 after that date, it was led by the meteorologist and geophysicist Zhao Jiuzhang, who directed the overall design of Dongfanghong-1 at the academy’s satellite design institute before the programme passed to the defence establishment. When the Communist Party Central Committee, the State Council and the Central Military Commission awarded medals in 1999 to the 23 scientists judged to have contributed most to the programmes, a memorial history published by the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences counted 17 of them as having worked at the academy. The same years produced one of the academy’s best-known achievements in basic science: the total synthesis of crystalline bovine insulin, completed in 1965 by teams from the academy’s Shanghai institutes and Peking University, which yielded a synthetic protein with the biological activity of the natural hormone.

The Cultural Revolution and the National Science Conference

The Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966, did grave damage to the academy. According to a history by Wang Yangzong of the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, published in the academy’s Bulletin in 2018, many of the academy’s institutes were transferred to the defence system or handed to provincial governments in the early years of the movement, and some were abolished; after the State Science and Technology Commission was merged into the academy in 1970, the academy for a time directly administered only ten institutes. Of 170 senior researchers in the academy’s Beijing institutes in 1968, 131 were designated for overthrow or investigation. The homes of 1,909 households across the academy were searched, and 229 people were persecuted to death. Zhao Jiuzhang, who had led the satellite design, was among those who died. A Nature editorial marking the academy’s seventieth anniversary in 2019 noted that, “according to CAS’s own records, 229 scientists were either killed or took their own lives in this time.” An attempt to restore order in 1975, led by Hu Yaobang at the direction of Deng Xiaoping, is described in The Academy That Counted; it was reversed within a year.

Recovery began after the fall of the Gang of Four in 1976. Among the first signs of change was the rehabilitation of the mathematician Chen Jingrun, who had spent his career on Goldbach’s conjecture and who, in the words of the Nature editorial, had been “led away for re-education on a farm, beaten and tortured” during the Cultural Revolution; a work of reportage on his life by the writer Xu Chi, published in January 1978 after interviews at the academy, made him a national hero in the weeks before the conference. The National Science Conference, held in Beijing from 18 to 31 March 1978, marked the formal end of the period. It was attended by 5,586 delegates, of whom 3,478 were scientific and technical personnel, and it honoured 862 collective units, 1,192 individual scientists and 7,675 research results. In his opening speech Deng Xiaoping declared that science and technology are productive forces and that intellectuals were part of the working class, removing the political stigma under which scientists had worked since the 1950s. At the closing session a broadcaster read a written address by the ailing Guo Moruo, titled “The Spring of Science”, which proclaimed, in translation, that “the most brilliant spring of science in our nation’s history has arrived”. Guo died in June that year.

The conference was followed by institutional changes that shaped the academy for the next generation. On 1 March 1978 the academy opened the graduate school of the University of Science and Technology of China in Beijing, the first graduate school in the country, with an initial intake of 1,015 students; it is the predecessor of the present University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. Of the more than 1,000 graduate students the academy admitted in 1978, more than 130 were sent abroad after language training shortly after enrolling, an early step in the movement of Chinese students to Western universities. In 1981 the chemist Lu Jiaxi became president, the first time the academy had been led by a working scientist rather than by Guo Moruo or a party official. In the same year 89 members of the Academic Divisions proposed a national fund for basic research open to applicants from any institution. The State Council provided 30 million yuan, the divisions organised peer review for more than 4,400 projects between 1982 and 1986, and in February 1986 the scheme became the National Natural Science Foundation of China, which remains the country’s principal funder of basic research. In March 1986 four members of the divisions, Wang Daheng, Wang Ganchang, Chen Fangyun and Yang Jiachi, submitted the proposal on tracking foreign strategic high technology from which the National High Technology Research and Development Programme, known as the 863 Programme, was developed.

Reform, commercialisation and talent recruitment

From the mid-1980s the academy was encouraged to earn money and to move its research into industry. The best-known result was the company founded in November 1984 by eleven researchers from the Institute of Computing Technology, initially called Legend and later Lenovo; its founding is described in the earlier Huaxia essay. Nature’s 2019 editorial observed that the academy remained Lenovo’s largest shareholder and owned or held shares in more than thirty conglomerates and companies “employing tens of thousands of people in food and agriculture, life sciences, chemicals, banking and insurance”, and that “the academy’s investments have made it one of the world’s richest.”

The Institute of Computing Technology has continued to generate companies of strategic importance. Its work on domestically designed processors produced the Loongson 1 chip in 2002 and later the company Loongson Technology. In 2016 two brothers who had worked at the institute, Chen Yunji and Chen Tianshi, founded Cambricon to commercialise their research on neural-network accelerators, and the company listed on the Shanghai STAR Market in July 2020; Huaxia has told that story in Cambricon and the Chinese NPU Story. Technology transfer has also taken less conspicuous forms. The Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics developed a process for converting methanol, which can be made from coal, into ethylene and propylene, the basic feedstocks of the plastics industry. The first commercial plant using it, operated by Shenhua in Baotou, began production in August 2010 with a design capacity of 600,000 tonnes of olefins a year from 1.8 million tonnes of methanol, and by the institute’s account 25 licence contracts had since been signed for plants with a planned and operating capacity of 15.25 million tonnes a year.

The academy was also among the first Chinese institutions to recruit scientists from abroad systematically. Its Hundred Talents Programme, launched in 1994, offered substantial start-up funding to young researchers willing to establish laboratories at its institutes. By 2013 the programme had recruited and supported 2,145 people, about nine-tenths of them from abroad.

The present phase of reform began with a visit by Xi Jinping to the academy on 17 July 2013, at which he asked it to achieve what became known as the “four firsts”: to be the first to achieve leapfrog development in science and technology, the first to build a national centre of innovative talent, the first to build a national high-level science and technology think tank, and the first to build world-class research institutions. The academy responded in 2014 with the Pioneer Initiative, which reorganised its institutes into four categories: innovation academies oriented to technologies with economic or strategic applications, centres of excellence for frontier basic research, big-science centres built around major facilities, and institutes with specialised regional or sectoral missions. The intention was to concentrate resources on fewer and larger research units and to align the institutes more closely with national priorities.

Structure and scale today

The academy describes itself as combining three functions: a national network of research and development institutes, a merit-based learned society and a system of higher education. Each of the three parts is large. The research network comprises 108 research institutes among 136 institutions directly under the academy, together with nine regional branches, ten overseas institutions, 104 key laboratories, 96 observation and research stations of its own and more than 200 affiliated with individual institutes, 16 botanical gardens and 20 herbaria. The academy leads the development and operation of 47 national large research infrastructures, which it says account for more than half of the national total. It has about 74,000 regular staff, of whom some 63,000 are scientists.

The learned society, organised in six Academic Divisions covering mathematics and physics, chemistry, life sciences and medicine, earth sciences, information technology sciences and technological sciences, elects new members every two years. At the election of November 2025, 73 members and 27 foreign members were chosen, and in July 2026 the academy had 888 members and 169 foreign members, the latter from more than 30 countries. Membership is the highest scientific honour in China, and members serve as advisers to the government on scientific questions, a function that gives the academy an influence over national policy that few research organisations elsewhere possess.

The educational system consists of the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei and the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, with ShanghaiTech University also affiliated to the academy. Together the three universities enrol more than 100,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The University of Chinese Academy of Sciences has about 70,000 students, including nearly 2,000 international students from about 100 countries. Most of its doctoral students carry out their research in the academy’s institutes, which makes the academy, in effect, one of the largest doctoral training systems in the world. Huaxia’s essay on how many STEM graduates China produces places these figures in the national context.

The academy’s finances are published each year. Its departmental budget for 2026 totals 205.07 billion yuan, including funds carried over from previous years, with planned expenditure for the year of 159.40 billion yuan. About 61.1 billion yuan, or 29.8 per cent of total revenue, comes from direct appropriations in the general public budget; a larger share, about 71.3 billion yuan or 34.8 per cent, comes from what the budget calls business income, earned through the institutes’ professional activities, and a further 28.4 per cent is carried over from previous years. Science and technology account for about nine-tenths of planned spending. The comparable budget for 2025 had totalled 194.02 billion yuan. Even after allowing for the different cost of research in China, planned annual spending of about 159 billion yuan, the equivalent of well over ten billion euros at any recent exchange rate, places the academy in a different category from most of its counterparts abroad.

Research output and the measures of influence

The academy’s output is most often measured by the Nature Index, which counts primary research articles in a selected list of journals, now 178 titles in the natural, health, applied and social sciences, and divides each article fractionally among the institutions of its authors. In the 2026 Research Leaders tables, based on articles published in 2025, the academy had a Share of 3,655.10 from a Count of 12,822 articles, an increase of 14.8 per cent on the previous year. Zhejiang University was second with 1,276.85 and Harvard University third with 1,259.01. The academy’s Share was therefore about 2.9 times Harvard’s. It was also larger than the combined Shares of the Max Planck Society (764.09, thirteenth), the French National Centre for Scientific Research (701.98, sixteenth) and the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres (682.00, eighteenth), the three largest public research organisations in Europe. The academy’s two universities appear separately: the University of Science and Technology of China was sixth with 1,128.58 and the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences eighth with 1,055.67.

The breadth of the academy’s lead is shown by the index’s subject tables. In the twelve months to May 2026 the academy ranked first in the world in the applied sciences, the biological sciences, chemistry, the earth and environmental sciences and the physical sciences, second in the health sciences and seventh in the social sciences. Its largest research topics by Share are physical chemistry, chemical engineering and macromolecular and materials chemistry, followed by organic chemistry and ecology. On the index’s current journal list its Share rose from about 1,937 in 2021 to about 3,647 in 2025. Part of that increase reflects the enlargement of the journal list in 2024 and 2025, which brought in many applied and engineering journals, but the academy’s lead over Western institutions widened on any basis.

Citation measures tell a similar story. Clarivate’s Essential Science Indicators, covering papers published from January 2014 to March 2025, credited the academy, including its two universities and its affiliated institutes, with 633,261 papers and 15,468,339 citations, ranking it second in the world by citations and first in mainland China. In Clarivate’s list of Highly Cited Researchers for 2025, the academy was the leading institution in the world, with 258 awards, against 170 for Harvard, 141 for Stanford and 66 for the Max Planck Society. Clarivate noted that the United States remained the leading country, with 2,670 awards, against 1,406 for mainland China.

These figures need to be read with care, and the Nature Index itself warns that its metrics “alone should not be used to assess institutions or individuals.” The academy is ranked as a single institution although it is in effect a national system of laboratories, so that its totals are better compared with those of the Max Planck Society or the Helmholtz Association than with those of a single university. Volume-based indicators also reward size: the index counts articles and their fractional attribution, not their significance. The academy’s high citation totals suggest that much of its work is widely used, but aggregate figures do not settle questions about originality, which are taken up below. What the figures establish beyond dispute is that a large and growing share of the work published in the world’s most selective natural-science journals now originates in the academy’s institutes.

Flagship facilities and achievements

The academy’s large facilities have given Chinese science capabilities that previously existed only in the United States, Europe and Japan, and in some cases capabilities that exist nowhere else. The most widely known is the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope, or FAST, built and operated by the academy’s National Astronomical Observatories in a natural karst depression in Guizhou and completed in 2016. By September 2026, at the end of its first decade, FAST had identified more than 1,300 pulsars, more than all other telescopes in the world combined over the same period, and research based on its observations had been published in 13 papers in Science and Nature. “Ten years of dedicated work has secured China’s leading position in global radio astronomy,” said its chief engineer, Jiang Peng. Huaxia has described the telescope in Ten Years of China’s FAST Telescope, and Nekud has written on the discovery of pulsars.

In fusion research, the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak at the academy’s Institute of Plasma Physics in Hefei sustained a high-confinement plasma for 1,066 seconds on 20 January 2025, more than doubling its own previous record of 403 seconds, set in 2023. The wider Chinese fusion effort is the subject of China’s Race to Bottle the Sun; Nekud’s The Race for Fusion Power sets it in international context.

In quantum information, the academy and the University of Science and Technology of China, led by Pan Jianwei, have produced a sequence of results that attracted wide international attention. The Quantum Experiments at Space Scale satellite, known as Micius, was launched on 16 August 2016. In 2017 it distributed entangled photons to ground stations 1,203 kilometres apart, and in 2018 it was used to establish quantum keys between ground stations in China and Austria, separated by some 7,600 kilometres, supporting an encrypted video conference between Beijing and Vienna. In 2020 the photonic quantum computer Jiuzhang performed a boson-sampling task that its authors estimated would be infeasible for classical supercomputers, and in March 2025 the group reported Zuchongzhi 3.0, a superconducting processor with 105 qubits. Huaxia has followed this work in China’s Two-Track Race for Quantum Computers, and Nekud in The Race to Build the Qubit.

The academy’s contribution to China’s space programme is less visible than its telescopes but no less substantial. Its Technology and Engineering Center for Space Utilization is responsible for the space application system of the crewed spaceflight programme, which covers the scientific experiments carried in China’s crewed spacecraft and on the Tiangong space station. For the lunar programme, the academy’s National Astronomical Observatories operate the ground research and application system, which receives and processes mission data through a 50-metre antenna at Miyun near Beijing and a 40-metre antenna at Kunming. The academy’s geochemists have led the analysis of returned samples. A team at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics dated basalt returned by Chang’e-5 to 2,030 million years ago, showing that volcanism on the Moon continued much later than previously established, and in 2024 the same institute reported that basalt returned by Chang’e-6 from the far side had erupted 2,807 million years ago. Huaxia’s Chang’e-6 and the Far Side of the Moon discusses these results.

Two further achievements illustrate the range of the academy’s work. In 2021 researchers at the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology reported in Science the first synthesis of starch from carbon dioxide outside a living organism, using a route of eleven core reactions that combined chemical catalysis with engineered enzymes. The academy reported that the route produced starch with an efficiency 8.5 times that of starch synthesis in maize. The lead author, Cai Tao, cautioned that the comparison with farming was theoretical: “According to the current technical parameters, the annual production of starch in a one-cubic-meter bioreactor theoretically equates with the starch annual yield from growing 1/3 hectare of maize without considering the energy input.” The other is in biosafety. The academy’s Wuhan Institute of Virology completed China’s first biosafety level four laboratory in January 2015, received accreditation in January 2017 and began formal operation in January 2018. The institute has since been at the centre of the international debate over the origins of COVID-19. In June 2025 a scientific advisory group convened by the World Health Organization concluded that “the weight of available evidence…suggests zoonotic spillover”, while noting that China had not provided requested information on work and biosafety conditions at laboratories in Wuhan, and the WHO Director-General said that “all hypotheses must remain on the table, including zoonotic spillover and lab leak.” Several Western intelligence agencies have reached differing conclusions; in January 2025 the United States Central Intelligence Agency assessed, with low confidence, that a research-related origin was more likely than a natural one. The question remains unresolved.

Talent pipelines and returnee scientists

The academy has depended from its foundation on scientists trained abroad. Qian Xuesen and Qian Sanqiang were among many who returned in the 1950s, and the academy’s early recruitment of overseas Chinese scientists was a deliberate policy. The pattern was renewed after 1978, when the academy and the universities began sending large numbers of graduate students to Europe and North America, and again from 1994 with the Hundred Talents Programme. Pan Jianwei’s career illustrates the later pattern. He completed his doctorate at the University of Vienna in 1999 in the group of Anton Zeilinger, returned to the University of Science and Technology of China as a professor in 2001, ran a second laboratory at Heidelberg University from 2003 to 2008, and then returned to Hefei full time, bringing with him techniques and collaborators from European quantum optics.

National recruitment schemes, of which the best known internationally was the Thousand Talents Plan, launched in 2008, expanded the movement, and the academy’s institutes and universities were among its principal destinations. Political conditions in the United States have also affected the flow. The United States Department of Justice launched the China Initiative in November 2018 to counter economic espionage; it came to focus largely on academic scientists who had not disclosed Chinese affiliations or funding, and it was formally ended in February 2022. A study by Yu Xie of Princeton University and colleagues, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2023, analysed data on the institutional affiliations of more than 200 million scientific papers and reported: “we find a steady increase in the return migration of scientists of Chinese descent from the United States to China.” In a survey of 1,304 scientists of Chinese descent employed at American universities, 61 per cent said they had thought about leaving the United States. The broader national figures for returnees are summarised in Huaxia’s China Already Owns the Scale of Science.

International collaboration and influence on global science

The academy has cooperation agreements with partners in more than 90 countries. Its President’s International Fellowship Initiative, launched in 2009, funds foreign scientists, from senior professors to students, to work at its institutes. Its collaboration with the Max Planck Society is long-standing; the CAS-MPG Partner Institute for Computational Biology in Shanghai is one product of it. In the Nature Index, the academy’s leading international collaborators in the twelve months to May 2026 were the Helmholtz Association, the Max Planck Society, the French National Centre for Scientific Research, the Leibniz Association and the National University of Singapore. Yet international collaboration accounts for a modest part of the academy’s output: the index attributes 10.1 per cent of its collaborative Share to international partners and 89.9 per cent to domestic ones. The academy’s largest partners are overwhelmingly Chinese, led by its own universities, Peking University and Tsinghua University. At the national level, collaboration between China and the United States in the Nature Index journals fell after 2019, from a collaboration score of 4,395 in that year to 3,942 in 2023, before recovering to 4,327 in 2024.

The academy’s most distinctive international activity is its training of scientists from developing countries. Its partnership with The World Academy of Sciences, based in Trieste, dates from 2004 and was renamed the CAS-TWAS President’s Fellowship Programme in 2013. From 2015 it provided 200 doctoral fellowships a year, and by 2022 more than 1,220 doctoral students from 75 countries had been hosted at the academy’s universities and institutes. In 2018 the academy and 36 other institutions founded the Alliance of National and International Science Organizations for the Belt and Road Regions, known as ANSO, which now has 96 members in 59 countries. Its scholarship programme, launched in 2019 and funded mainly by the academy, supports 100 to 200 master’s students and 300 doctoral students a year at the academy’s universities and institutes, and a sub-programme run with TWAS and UNESCO since 2022 selects up to 40 doctoral students a year from developing countries, ten of them in climate-related research, with special consideration for women and for applicants from the least developed countries.

The academy also maintains ten overseas science and education centres, most in countries associated with the Belt and Road Initiative. The Sino-Africa Joint Research Center, founded in May 2013 at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology in Kenya and hosted by the academy’s Wuhan Botanical Garden, works on biodiversity, remote sensing, disease control, water resources and agriculture; by the academy’s account it had initiated more than 45 joint research programmes and trained more than 160 African technicians. Others include the South America Center for Astronomy, centres for drug discovery and for ecology and environment in Central Asia, the Kathmandu Center for Research and Education, a joint centre in Sri Lanka and a biodiversity institute for Southeast Asia. The 2019 Nature editorial described how the academy’s then president, Bai Chunli, positioned it as the scientific arm of the Belt and Road Initiative, with institutes “involved in rice genomics in Pakistan, water purification in Sri Lanka and astronomy in Uzbekistan”. Huaxia’s overview of China’s Belt and Road Initiative describes the wider programme.

A less obvious channel of influence runs through the academy’s National Science Library, whose rankings of journals into tiers by citation impact have, according to commentators on scholarly publishing, been used for years by Chinese universities and institutes to evaluate staff and students. Because Chinese authors now produce a large share of the world’s papers, these rankings affect where submissions go. In the last days of 2020 the library issued the first Early Warning List of International Journals, naming 65 journals considered to be at risk of quality problems. An analysis by Christos Petrou in the Scholarly Kitchen found that the listed journals had carried about six per cent of all Chinese papers in 2020, and that submissions from China to some listed titles fell sharply in the following months; the megajournal IEEE Access recorded an annual decline of 24 per cent in its output in the first quarter of 2021. The list has since been updated, and its 2024 edition, which named 24 journals from about a dozen publishers, flagged citation manipulation for the first time.

Western concerns and responses

The academy’s scale and its close relationship with the state have made it a focus of security concern in the United States and among its allies. The concern rests on the academy’s historical role in the weapons programmes, on China’s policy of military-civil fusion, under which civilian research is expected to support defence where possible, and on the dual-use character of many of the fields in which the academy is strongest, among them quantum technology, high-performance computing, lasers, materials and space.

The principal instrument of the American response has been the Entity List maintained by the Bureau of Industry and Security of the Department of Commerce, which requires licences for the export of items subject to American export regulations to listed organisations. In May 2024 the bureau added the academy’s Institute of Physics, its Key Laboratory for Quantum Information, its Center for Excellence in Quantum Information and Quantum Physics and its Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, together with the University of Science and Technology of China, stating that the entities had been added “for acquiring and attempting to acquire U.S.-origin items in support of advancing China’s quantum technology capabilities”. In September 2025 the bureau added the academy’s National Time Service Center, for acquiring American items in support of China’s “military and defense-related space-domain activities” and its quantum technology capabilities, and the academy’s Aerospace Information Research Institute, for “its connections to companies that support China’s High Altitude Balloon program.” Companies that grew out of the academy have also been listed, among them Loongson Technology in March 2023.

Other measures have narrowed scientific exchange more generally. When the United States and China renewed their bilateral Science and Technology Agreement in December 2024, the revised agreement was limited to government-to-government cooperation in basic research and excluded critical and emerging technologies. Universities in the United States, Britain and other countries have introduced reviews of collaborations with Chinese institutions in sensitive fields, and some funding agencies require researchers to disclose foreign affiliations in detail. Chinese officials and scientists have argued that such measures politicise research and impede work on shared problems, and the academy continues to present international cooperation as one of its core activities. Supporters of the restrictions argue that the academy’s integration with state strategy makes it impossible to separate its civilian work from military applications. The disagreement is not likely to be resolved soon, and its practical effect has been to reduce collaboration with American institutions in the most sensitive fields while leaving cooperation in areas such as ecology, earth science and basic physics largely intact.

Comparisons with other national research organisations

The academy is often compared with three types of institution abroad, and each comparison illuminates a different aspect of it. The closest structural analogue is the Max Planck Society, a federation of research institutes under a single name. As of January 2026 the society had 85 institutes and research facilities and, at the end of 2025, about 26,700 staff; it received slightly more than 2.2 billion euros in public funds in 2025. The academy has roughly the same number of research institutes but nearly three times the staff, a far larger budget and, unlike the Max Planck Society, its own universities and its own national learned society. The Max Planck Society is a private association funded by the federal and state governments and concentrates on basic research; the academy is a state institution directly under the State Council with an explicit mission to serve national strategic needs.

The French National Centre for Scientific Research is closer to the academy in size and in its national scope. It reports a budget of four billion euros and 34,700 employees, including 29,400 scientists, in about 1,100 laboratories in France and abroad, most of them operated jointly with universities. In the 2026 Nature Index tables CNRS had a Count of 5,212 articles but a Share of only 701.98, because its articles are divided among many partner institutions; the academy’s Share was more than a quarter of its Count, the CNRS figure little more than an eighth.

The comparison most often made by historians is with the Russian Academy of Sciences, which shares the academy’s Soviet origins. The two diverged sharply after 1991. In 2013 a Russian law merged the academy with the academies of medical and agricultural sciences and transferred its institutes and property to a new Federal Agency for Scientific Organisations, whose functions passed in 2018 to the Ministry of Science and Higher Education. The Russian Academy thus lost control of its laboratories, while the Chinese academy retained and enlarged its own. In the 2026 Nature Index tables the Russian Academy of Sciences ranked 128th, with a Share of 188.91.

The fourth comparison is with the seventeen national laboratories of the United States Department of Energy, which together perform many of the functions that the academy performs in China: they operate large facilities, conduct research in physics, materials, energy and computing, and in three cases maintain the nuclear weapons stockpile. They are separate institutions, most run by universities or private contractors, and in the Nature Index they appear individually; the largest, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, had a Share of 181.56 in 2025. The academy, by contrast, concentrates in one organisation functions that in the United States are spread across the national laboratories, the universities and the National Academy of Sciences. That concentration accounts for much of its standing in institutional rankings.

Limits, criticisms and reform

The academy’s critics, both inside and outside China, have concentrated on three issues. The first is the evaluation culture that its scale and its rankings have encouraged. For many years Chinese institutions, including the academy, rewarded researchers for the number of papers they published in journals indexed by the Science Citation Index, often with cash bonuses. The policy produced rapid growth in output but also encouraged incremental work, salami-slicing of results and, at the extreme, fraud. The government has recognised the problem. In 2018 the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering jointly launched a campaign against the practice of evaluating researchers solely by papers, titles, degrees and awards, and in February 2020 the Ministry of Science and Technology issued measures to end the “paper-only” orientation of evaluation, including assessment by a small number of representative works rather than by publication counts.

The second issue is research integrity. A Nature analysis published in December 2023 found that retractions of research articles worldwide had passed 10,000 that year, more than 8,000 of them from journals owned by Hindawi, after investigations into compromised peer review; among large research-producing countries, China had one of the highest retraction rates over the previous two decades. A further analysis in February 2024 found more than 17,000 retractions with Chinese co-authors since 2021, and the Ministry of Education required universities to list all their retractions from the previous three years and to investigate cases of misconduct.

The third issue is originality. The academy has produced important results, but the relationship between its vast output and fundamental discoveries of the first rank remains a subject of debate, and many of its best-known achievements, such as FAST, EAST and the quantum experiments, are feats of engineering and organisation as much as of new ideas. Critics argue that the academy’s top-down planning, its emphasis on large projects and its sensitivity to political priorities favour the rapid pursuit of established goals over the open-ended inquiry from which unexpected discoveries tend to come. Defenders reply that the academy’s output is still rising rapidly, that China’s research system is young by international standards and that originality has historically followed scale. The Pioneer Initiative’s centres of excellence, the reform of evaluation and the growing number of young investigators trained in the academy’s own institutes are all intended to address this concern, but their results will take time to judge.

There are also questions of governance. The academy is a state institution directly under the State Council, and its leadership is expected to support the policies of the Communist Party. Nature’s 2019 editorial observed that the academy’s leadership “has been careful to stay in lock-step with the government” while building up independent sources of income, and described its financial autonomy as “an unusual arrangement for a science academy”. Since 2013 the academy’s mission has, if anything, become more closely tied to national strategy, and official documents now describe it as a core part of the country’s strategic science and technology forces.

The academy in the world

The Chinese Academy of Sciences is the product of a particular national history: a scientific community inherited from the Republic, an organisational model borrowed from the Soviet Union, a reputation earned in the weapons programmes, a near-collapse in the Cultural Revolution and a long period of reconstruction and expansion since 1978. Its present scale, measured by its staff, its budget, its graduate students and its share of the world’s high-quality publications, has no equivalent among the research organisations of other countries. Its influence on global science operates through several channels at once: the volume and quality of its publications, the large facilities that make it a necessary partner in fields such as radio astronomy and fusion, its training of scientists from Africa, Asia and Latin America, its effect on publishing through its journal rankings, and its role in the security calculations of Western governments.

The academy’s future influence will depend on matters that the quantitative measures do not capture well: whether its reforms succeed in encouraging original work, whether it can keep and attract the best scientists as international mobility becomes more constrained, and whether its institutes can remain open to collaboration while serving a state that increasingly treats science as a field of strategic competition. What is already clear is that any account of where science is done in the twenty-first century must give a central place to the institutes in Beijing, Shanghai, Hefei, Dalian and dozens of other cities that publish under the academy’s name.

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