China in Global Science

China has become a science powerhouse at astonishing speed. It is now the largest producer of top-ranking publications, a site of frontier research, and an initiator of new alliances beyond the OECD world. China's scientific endeavors are no longer about domestic technological capacity building but about global leadership. This Element studies these developments by tracing China's integration into global science as a world institution. Rather than portraying China's science as an outlier or a monolithic enterprise wholly directed by the Party-state, it emphasizes how China's science system has adopted organizational features and norms of global scientific knowledge production and is beginning to shape them in turn. It traces China's rising significance in global science and scholarship and how this coexists with national characteristics in governance and missions, concluding with a discussion of transformations in global science amid geopolitical shifts. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.