"Immense resources, immense effort
A factor in China’s rising research productivity is its universities adopting a working culture similar to Chinese industry, says Miguel Lim, an education and international development researcher at the University of Manchester, UK. “They work very long hours and there’s a pressure to produce and a pressure to succeed,” says Lim. He adds that many researchers elsewhere work extremely hard for long hours, but that approach isn’t as widespread as it is in China.

The resources behind Chinese science are also immense. The NSF reports that China and the United States accounted for roughly half of global research and development investment in 2019, with the United States spending US$656 billion and China’s outlay being worth $526 billion. According to the National Bureau of Statistics of China, its spending on research and development reached 2.4% of its GDP in 2021, an all-time high. By comparison, China invested just 1.2% of its GDP on research and development in 2004.
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China is already one of the world’s leading research nations in AI. Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2023 found that China accounted for nearly 40% of all publications in AI in 2021, far exceeding the United Kingdom and Europe (15%) and the United States (10%). Papers from China accounted for 29% of all AI citations in 2021, which again puts it ahead of the United Kingdom and Europe (21.5%) and the United States (15%). China ranked second to the United States in a 2022 assessment of AI and robotics articles in the Nature Index, but its annual Share rose more than 1,100% between 2015 and 2021, significantly outpacing the United States, United Kingdom, France and Germany."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02159-7