CHINA WATCHChina’s Lead in Advanced Sensors Is Overwhelming
China’s research in several advanced sensor technologies vital to military navigation and targeting is overwhelmingly ahead of the three AUKUS partners, the United States, United Kingdom and Australia. Even if the three team up with likeminded Indo-Pacific countries Japan and South Korea, they do not match the Chinese output in high-impact research.
China’s research in several advanced sensor technologies vital to military navigation and targeting is overwhelmingly ahead of the three AUKUS partners, the United States, United Kingdom and Australia.
Even if the three team up with likeminded Indo-Pacific countries Japan and South Korea, they do not match the Chinese output in high-impact research.
This is a key finding of ASPI’s latest update to its ground-breaking Critical Technology Tracker which compares levels of high-impact technological research worldwide. The update, released today, focuses on two key technology clusters in which breakthroughs will have major implications for future industrial, societal and military capabilities—advanced sensors and biotechnologies.
The tracker has now measured the amount of high-impact research by country across 64 technologies. China maintains its overall dominance, leading in 53 technologies against 11 for the US. This article focuses on advanced sensors. A second Strategist piece will tackle biotechnology.
High impact research is a key performance measure of scientific and technological capability. For example, the recent boom in Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications such as ChatGPT have grabbed global attention seemingly out of nowhere but are in fact based on decades of quiet research and advances across AI and computing.
Although North America has the largest share of the $200 billion remote sensor market with 41%, the tracker indicates China’s strong future trajectory through its huge share of papers in the top 10% of highly cited publications, especially in inertial navigation systems (44%), photonic sensors (43.7%), multispectral and hyperspectral imaging sensors (48.9%) and sonar sensors (49.4%).
The advanced sensor technologies included in the tracker are used for sensing, timing and navigation. They are comprised of devices with extremely sensitive detection capabilities for magnetic and gravitational fields, light and radio waves, and measuring time with atomic precision. The seven technologies are atomic clocks, inertial navigation systems, gravitational force sensors, magnetic field sensors, multispectral and hyperspectral imaging sensors, satellite positioning and navigation, and radar.
Three sensor technologies covered in previous releases are—sonar and acoustic sensors, photonic sensors and quantum sensors.
Our table shows our analysis of advanced sensor technologies and identifies the lead country with the highest percentage of papers in the top 10% of highly cited papers. The Critical Technology Tracker shows that China leads in seven of the 10 advanced sensor technologies—reflecting the massive effort and investment Beijing has made in these areas in recent years.
