The self-reliance crossover

US export policy toward China rests on a premise: that Chinese innovation still leans on American science, so restricting access to it slows China down. A June 2026 preprint measures that premise directly, and finds it has quietly stopped being true. The authors matched all 6.7 million Chinese invention patents to 38 million scientific papers by the technical phrases they share, then traced where the underlying science came from. The domestically-produced share rose from 1% in 2000 to 26% in 2025, passing the US-produced share in 2021.

As China's reliance on U.S.-produced science fades, policies restricting access fall out of alignment with the U.S.' actual strategic position. — The Growing Self-Reliance of Chinese Innovation

The sharper number is one layer down. Rather than which science patents lean on, the authors also ask who originates the genuinely new ideas — the scientific phrases that appear for the first time and then propagate into patents. China's share of those new ideas climbed from 7% to 46% over the period; the US share fell from 21% to 12%. So this is not a story of China getting more efficient at consuming foreign research. It has become the single largest source of the new science its own inventions are built on.

The measurement is a proxy, and the paper is honest that it is one: 'the science behind a patent' is inferred from shared phrasing, not from formal citations, and the work is a preprint that has not been peer-reviewed — posted in late June and revised twice within three days. But the authors run the checks that would break a weaker claim, including high-impact-journal filters and cross-filed US patents to rule out translation artefacts, and the crossover holds. If it survives scrutiny, it reframes the export-control debate: the restrictions assume they can slow China by withholding US science, but on this measure that share has already fallen to 12%.