[Eye on China] The Lab Spending Gap: China Outspends Europe on Labs by 70 Percent

According to the OECD's March 2026 figures, China's R&D expenditure reached approximately €890 billion in 2024, surpassing the United States at €873 billion, while the EU-27 stood at only about €527 billion. China overtook Europe more than a decade ago. What is new is that it has now overtaken the United States. Meanwhile, EU R&D expenditure has fallen from around 70% of the US level in 2014 to roughly 60% today.

But the trillion-euro number is not what concerns me most. It is what decades of sustained spending leave behind. Laboratories, instruments, experimental platforms, researchers, technicians, PhDs, datasets, suppliers, industrial partnerships, and accumulated expertise. China has sustained extraordinarily rapid R&D growth for decades, allowing universities and institutes to accumulate scientific capacity rather than repeatedly build it around short-term projects.

Another comparison is revealing. Indicatively, China now has more than €264,000 of R&D expenditure per researcher, compared with more than €232,000 in the EU. China is therefore combining an enormous scientific workforce with increasingly deep resources behind each researcher. We can already see the technological consequences. China generates more than half of the world's granted AI patents, with Stanford's latest comparable figure around 70%, while also leading in AI publications and citations.

This is why the recent AEF info and Le Grand Continent debate at ENS-PSL caught my attention. Jean-Francois Huchet, president of Inalco, argues that China is no longer simply a manufacturing power. It has become a place where science itself is created, with an exceptional ability to move from university research to industrial application. A laboratory generates experiments, experiments produce prototypes, prototypes enter industry, and industrial problems return to the laboratory. Lab → experiment → prototype → industry → lab.

China remembers its own technological catch-up and understands the danger of separating science from manufacturing. A €2 million experimental facility surrounded by PhDs, researchers, technicians, suppliers, manufacturers, and companies is therefore not simply €2 million of equipment. Over twenty years, it becomes an innovation ecosystem. Scientific capacity compounds.

China also benefits from an enormous STEM workforce and the return of internationally trained Chinese scientists, while increasingly offering researchers laboratories, startup budgets, teams, and infrastructure. And behind all this is another major advantage: continuity. China connects research, infrastructure, education, industrial policy, and talent through long-term national planning. Europe operates through changing governments, political priorities, framework programs, calls, and funding cycles. A laboratory cannot be switched off for five years and magically reconstructed when priorities change again. A lost laboratory means lost people, skills, data, networks, and years.

China is also beginning to reduce its historical dependence on Western institutions for scientific recognition, giving greater importance to domestic journals and national research priorities. The next stage may therefore be not only to compete within a Western-centered scientific system, but also to increasingly build its own scientific institutions and standards.

A semiconductor researcher needs fabrication facilities. A materials scientist needs characterization equipment. A building scientist needs climate chambers. An AI researcher needs computing infrastructure. Ideas matter, but ideas need somewhere to become science.

So perhaps Europe needs another indicator alongside publications, citations, ERC grants, patents, and rankings:

How much permanent scientific capacity are we actually building?

China: €890 billion. United States: €873 billion. EU: €527 billion. China/EU: 1.7:1. China: €264,000+ per researcher versus €232,000+ in the EU. These are not simply spending numbers. Laboratories accumulate. Equipment accumulates. People, skills, data, and industrial relationships accumulate.

Eventually, a spending gap becomes a laboratory gap.

And a laboratory gap becomes a scientific power gap.

Source: OECD Main Science and Technology Indicators, March 2026; AEF info x Le Grand Continent, ENS-PSL, July 7, 2026.

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