The diffusion deficit in scientific and technological power: re-assessing China’s rise

Virtually all scholars recognize that scientific and technological capabilities are becoming increasingly important factors in a nation’s overall power. Unsurprisingly, debates over a possible U.S.–China power transition highlight China’s rise as a science and technology superpower. These discussions overwhelmingly center on national innovation capabilities, reflective of the bias in assessments of scientific and technological capabilities toward the generation of novel advances. This paper argues that these assessments should, instead, place greater weight on a state’s capacity to diffuse, or widely adopt, innovations. Specifically, when there is a significant gap between a rising power’s innovation capacity and its diffusion capacity, relying solely on the former results in misleading appraisals of its potential to sustain economic growth in the long run. I demonstrate this with two historical cases: the U.S. in the Second Industrial Revolution and the Soviet Union in the early postwar period. Lastly, I show that, in contrast to assessments based on innovation capacity, a diffusion-centric approach reveals that China is far from being a science and technology superpower.