Premium Edition Teaser: Xi Blinded Me with Science, Every Ottoman for Himself, Poison Ivy
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We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order. This is Multipolarity, charting the rise of the new multipolar world order.

Coming up this week on Premium Multipolarity... China is planning a new version of its Made in China 2025 industrial strategy, just as America is punching holes in its own science funding budget. We'll be reporting from the output gap.

Meanwhile, the new US ambassador to Ankara has declared that he's against carving up Syria in a modern Sykes-Picot, the treaty that drew up the Middle East's modern borders in 1919. Is this an important anti-colonial action, or just a license for Erdogan to gobble up his own Ottoman Empire?

Finally, Harvard continues to come under shelling by the US government. Not content with "despiring international students," Trump said on Monday that he is considering taking $3 billion of previously awarded grant money and giving it to trade schools.

Is this a case of frightening them to with an inch of their lives? Or is DJT genuinely guillotining the credentialed aristocracy that runs the United States? Of course, this is Premium Week, so to find out, you'll have to sign up on our Patreon. Five dollars, pounds or euros cancel any time. But first...

The Trump administration in the United States of America has come in for yet more criticism. People will be surprised to hear because that's something that never happens to the Trump administration. This time though, the criticism is based on the seemingly esoteric area of science funding. There's a big New York Times article with lots of pretty charts recently

highlighting that the amount of science funding to the institutions that are responsible for most of the basic science research in the United States has been cut, or the federal funding at least, has been cut to the lowest levels in more than a decade. And the 2026 budget also has really significant benefits.

cuts to science funding. I think the National Institutes of Health is going to see a 40-something percent cut. The Environmental Protection Agency is going to see its budget slashed. The National Science Foundation is going to see its budget cut by over 50%. NASA will have its science budget cut as well. It's all part of the Republican effort to cut non-defense spending by about a quarter.

But there's some concern about the fact that it's landing on science research because it is important to the long-term prospects of an economy. I think we're all aware that during the Cold War, for example, one of the great advantages the US had was that it was just so far ahead in science. Like, we all know...

that American tech, whether it be in the fields of defense or consumer goods or industrial goods or motor vehicles or whatever you care to imagine, was simply better than the stuff that Russia or East Germany, for example, was pumping out. And that gave, over time, the US economy a huge advantage over the Soviet economy. And I think there's concerns, perhaps rightfully, in fact,

that slashing and kind of hacking into science funding in the way that's happening at the moment could affect the US economy in the longer term. Now, I'm not sure that listeners will be aware, but a few weeks ago, I wrote a sub stack on the multipolarity, the sub stack. It was on tariffs and it was called the deluge.

And it's specifically referred to a misconception about China. There's a conception out there that what China wants to do is it wants to corner this industry or that. It wants to, I don't know, dominate the electric vehicles market or dominate the market for drones or robotics. Or perhaps the people just think that China wants to be economically the most dominant power in

the world and I actually think both those things are true, but I also believe from what I've read of people who are far more knowledgeable about China than I am that Beijing's plans actually are far more ambitious than that and when I say far more ambitious, I mean way more ambitious. I think in fact the plan of Xi Jinping and the Communist Party of China or the senior figures within the Communist Party of China are

or not to be the market leader in 5G technology, but actually to catapult humanity into a new and as yet undiscovered higher level of economic prosperity and technological advancement. I mean, it's nothing short of that in terms of scale of the ambition. And to that end, the Chinese have really been investing heavily

in education and sciences. And now that's really starting to pay off. An organization called the Australia Strategic Policy Institute, which is like a think tank tasked with keeping tabs of what's happening big picture wise in Australia's kind of strategic envelope, so to speak, did a study that focused specifically on which countries

were in the lead in a range of critical technologies. Those are technologies likely to be critical for the 21st century, both economically in the broad sense and militarily. And those areas were advanced information and communications technology,

advanced materials and manufacturing, artificial intelligence, computing and communications, biotechnology, gene technologies and vaccines, defense, space, robotics and transportation, energy and environment, quantum technologies and sensing, timing and navigation. Now each of those categories was then subdivided into specific other categories.

But the Australia Strategic Policy Institute found that in the 61 critical technologies that they'd identified, sorry, the 64 critical technologies that they had identified, China led in 57. And in the seven in which it wasn't in the lead, it was second. So it's really starting to dominate these industries.

Not just commoner garden manufacturing, not just cheap goods for Walmart, but these absolute bleeding edge technologies. China is dominating. And it gets worse than that. Because if you look at the PISA rankings, they're kind of an independent and standardized test for the skills and knowledge of 15-year-old schoolchildren all around the world. And they test in maths, science, and reading.

China actually is second behind Singapore overall and specifically its second behind Singapore in maths and its third behind Singapore in Japan in science and at university level it's also seeing gains I found a quote from the journal science which is one of the most prestigious science journals in the world and it said that Japan's National Institute of Science and Technology

has tallied the top 1% of paper in terms of citations, a rarefied stratum inhabited by Nobel laureates. China has slightly edged out the United States in the number of most cited papers. Meantime, Nature, another very prestigious science journal, found that of the top 10 universities in terms of their science research contributions,

Seven were Chinese. Only three non-Chinese universities were Harvard in the United States, the Max Planck Society in Germany, and the French National Center for Scientific Research. So not only is China dominating now in these cutting-edge technologies, but in its own science research, it is also dominating. And in addition to that,

It's really doing very well in terms of the PISA rankings for the average knowledge of its 14 and 15 year olds. And in addition to that, it has a very extensive genius program where it seeks to identify exceptional young children at a young age and shepherd those individuals towards environments that can best use their ability. So by 10 years of age, for example,

It hopes to have tested, filtered and identified children of outstanding potential intelligence. By 15 years of age, it seeks to ensure that these kind of geniuses are surrounded by others of a similar mental capacity and are able to benefit from an accelerated curriculum and additional resources.

By 20 years of age, the Chinese state will seek to ensure geniuses are working in appropriate fields. So things like the really hard sciences. And by 30 years of age, it hopes to ensure that these people are given the resources that are necessary to start companies or to teach other geniuses or to do research that can really make the most of their human potential.

And so you compare all this where China already seems to be dominating in these cutting edge technologies, its university research and education system, and ability to identify outstanding human capital.

suggest that it's also going to dominate in the future. And at the same time, the US is kind of cutting science funding. Now, I concede that a lot of this science funding might be corrupt. A lot of it might be spent on nonsense jobs for Washington blob, Washington deep state loyalists. A lot of it might not be relevant to the economy. But unless you've got something to replace that, unless you've got a proper plan,

It's like America is facing its Sputnik moment here, and it hasn't even noticed. And in the current administration's efforts to really drain the swamp in Washington, so to speak, in its effort to cut off these people from their sources of funding and power, it might be making the situation worse.

Yeah, I think you've made the case for kind of both sides there, although you've weighted the case for trying to maintain a coherent science strategy for the United States. But I think we have to be realistic about this. This idea of dollar in, knowledge out model of science funding that's been dominant in Washington, I mean, for all my life effectively, is broken. It doesn't work. And I think that the

Proof in the pudding is in the eating. I mean, everything you just said about China dominating in the sciences is in spite of the fact that the US federal government spends obscene amounts of money on science funding and has for years. And you're right, in the heyday of the Cold War, that money seems to have been spent well. Well, clearly it's not being spent well anymore.

And I think we shouldn't really underestimate just how bad of a problem what you just said is. Hello there. Andy Collingwood here, interrupting this broadcast to let you know that this is a premium episode of Multipolarity. That means if you want to listen to the rest of the episode, if you want to hear what's happening with regard to China and American science funding and the dangers to America...

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Now, for Patreons, back to the show. And they're doling a lot of this out to get friends in favour. I mean, that's the reality of science funding in America. Nothing really comes out, nothing good, comes out of the American science bureaucracy. I mean, just take a couple of examples that listeners will probably be somewhat familiar with. One of them is NASA. NASA receives an enormous budget, but...