Lets not forget that China has over 3x the popn of USA so to surpass scientific output is to be expected at some stage. They havent got there yet because there

Lets not forget that China has over 3x the popn of USA so to surpass scientific output is to be expected at some stage. They havent got there yet because there is a history, culture and political environment to overcome and that will take a few more decades. In the fields that i pay attention to (Im not a scientist, just a curious part-time pythonista) such as materials science, practical uses of AI and vision, it seems (just an opinion, dont ask me for stats) most of the work are coming from China scientists. In some other fields like programming languages, computer networking they seem significantly fewer. Of course this may be biased by my sources. On a social level when one has a government where the top level politicians are mostly scientists and engineers this is a result to be expected. When govt is dominated by lawyers one can expect things go in other direction. China realised a long time ago that they had to educate and work to improve their position - productivity and improving standard of living comes from real productive stuff not from legislation. My 2c.