Those who don’t collaborate with their Chinese peers risk becoming second-rate. Given the sheer volume of Chinese researchers, they will come to dominate various fields; only through collaboration will western scientists know what is going on behind the scenes. “If you’ve missed out on the background thinking behind published papers, you don’t know what was tried and dropped,” Adams says.

It’s not all bad news for western researchers, because it will take more than money to achieve scientific supremacy. “Funding can be a strong attractor but this is just one of many components of doing good science,” says Artur Ekert, a quantum physicist who is a professor at Oxford and director of the Centre for Quantum Technologies in Singapore. “You also need a certain type of attitude, atmosphere, synergy, culture and so on.” Here, China is still weak, partly as a consequence of its culture. Ekert points out that the western tradition embraces adversarial debate, while the eastern approach is characterised by Confucianism’s search for harmony. “Despite many Chinese scientists being educated in the west, there is still a subtle division in the way we do science,” he says.

If China is serious about conquering the world of science, its culture will have to change, Wang says, because the less hierarchical western tradition produces better results. “At the moment, when a well-respected senior scientist gives a seminar in China, you don’t often see junior scientists stand up and criticise the ideas,” he says. But this is how scientists make progress. “In science, by its very nature, young people come up with new ideas; one generation passes another. This is something that the Chinese need to achieve.”