Xi shaking hands with Joe Biden, Xi shaking hands with Keir Starmer, Xi meeting Scholz – the headlines over the past few days have been dominated by the high-level bilateral meetings on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Rio. However, the Chinese representatives in Brazil, and before that in Peru at the APEC summit, were probably more interested in the heads of government from the Global South, above all the two host countries. The Chinese delegation traveled from Beijing with dozens of draft agreements. Xi also announced the “Open Science International Cooperation Initiative”. Manuel Liu takes a look at Xi’s successful tour of Latin America for you.
Things are not necessarily going badly for China’s scientists either – as they are playing a greater role in the list of the most influential researchers, the Clarivate citation ranking, from year to year. Among the research institutions with the most influential scientists, China even ranks first with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Our Research.Table colleague Anne Brüning took a look at the ranking.
The office brings with it an enormous amount of power: Donald Trump wants to make Howard Lutnick the US Secretary of Commerce. Lutnick is CEO of the investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald and a long-time friend and ideological ally of Trump. He supports the president-elect’s vision of using tariffs to bring industrial jobs back to the USA, writes Julian Heissler in his portrait.
Have a wonderful day!
With regard to China, high-level meetings dominated the coverage of the APEC summit in Lima, Peru, and the G20 meeting in Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro: Chinese leader Xi Jinping held bilateral talks with US President Joe Biden, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, France’s Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, among others. However, China achieved important results for Beijing elsewhere: On his trip to South America, Xi underscored his role as a self-proclaimed advocate of the Global South and as a stable trading partner in various ways.
In a speech to representatives of the G20 countries on Monday, Xi announced an “Open Science International Cooperation Initiative”, which was first proposed around a year ago at the Belt and Road (BRI) Conference. Led by China, Brazil, South Africa and the African Union, the initiative aims to give countries in the Global South access to scientific and technological innovations.
This can help the Global South in two ways, says Cobus van Staden, co-founder of the China-Global South Project media house. Firstly, the companies and governments of the Global North that dominate research are using international trade and patent law to restrict the sharing of technologies. “The fight for access to COVID-19 vaccines was a glaring example of this dynamic in action,” van Staden tells Table.Briefings. The initiative from Beijing is intended to simplify this access for the Global South.
Secondly, the initiative could help by connecting the countries with China’s capital and research expertise. This could bring their interests to the top of the research priority list. China itself could use the initiative to spread its own technology standards throughout the Global South, van Staden suspects.
Xi also used the South American trip to expand his pet project, the BRI. As reported, he inaugurated one of the most important infrastructure projects on the continent: the port of Chancay in Peru. Beijing and Lima also signed around 30 bilateral agreements, including an updated free trade agreement. For van Staden, Xi thus underlined “how indispensable China has become as an economic and trading partner at a time when trade relations with the USA are being called into question”.
In Monday’s speech, Xi also announced that China would import eight trillion US dollars worth of goods from developing countries by 2030 – a trade policy asset in talks with the respective state representatives. Xi and his entourage, including his close confidants Cai Qi and Wang Yi, held bilateral talks with heads of state and government from countries including Brazil, Chile, Peru and Mexico on the sidelines of the APEC and G20 meetings. These are all potential markets for Chinese products that are affected by US and EU tariffs.
China expanded bilateral relations with Brazil. President Lula signed 37 intergovernmental agreements with Xi on Wednesday. For example, “synergies” are to be created with regard to the BRI. Brazil is not a member of the BRI. According to the South China Morning Post, the Chinese government will also open up its market for Brazilian sorghum, sesame and fresh grapes. Other agreements relate to infrastructure, mining, communications, sustainable development, tourism, sport, health and culture.
Last year, the volume of trade between the two BRICS countries reached a record $157.5 billion, according to the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. From January to October 2024, Brazilian exports amounted to $83.4 billion and imports from China to $52.9 billion.
Xi’s trip was prepared well in advance to make the staging of his South American success story perfect. Just in time for Xi’s arrival, guest articles were published under his name in the Peruvian daily newspaper El Peruano and in the Brazilian daily Folha de S.Paulo. In them, he outlined “win-win cooperation” between the countries and positioned China as Brazil’s most important trading partner – instead of the USA.
In addition, Chinese students with Chinese flags were allowed to march on the streets of Lima and Rio, on the routes that Xi took. The unmistakable message to the state representatives of Western countries: We have been here for a long time, you have not.
Van Staden points out the relevance of the timing of the trip, “where the North-South divide dominates conversations in forums like COP29”. The research initiative strikes the same chord, because South America and Africa have not forgotten that they were partially abandoned by the West during the Covid pandemic. At the same time, however, China is standing in the way of the COP29 negotiations in Baku when it comes to climate financing in developing countries.
In South America, Xi is signaling South-South solidarity. Ultimately, this will be remembered by local government representatives because it trumps the uncertainty about the future global economy that a Trump election victory will bring. While Western countries are busy preparing for Donald Trump 2.0, Xi is seizing the moment.
In the list of the most influential researchers, the Clarivate citation ranking, China is playing a greater role from year to year. This is the result of an analysis published this week by the data company Clarivate Analytics. According to the report, 20 percent of the 6,600 scientists currently listed there come from China, compared to eight percent in 2018. Although the USA is still clearly in the lead with 36%, its share is shrinking; in 2018, it was still 43%.
The evaluation for the year 2024 identified a total of 6,636 scientists who have had a significant impact on their fields in the past ten years by publishing several highly cited articles. 2,507 of them work in the USA, and 1,405 in China. In third and fourth place: Great Britain with 563 scientists, Germany with 332.
Germany was thus able to maintain the fourth place it achieved in 2022 and 2023, compared to fifth place in 2021. However, a look at the top ten countries also shows the growing scientific strength in the Asia-Pacific region as a whole: Singapore is new to the top 10 countries, displacing Italy, which was in tenth place last year. Hong Kong, last year’s newcomer, has moved up to eighth place, relegating France to penultimate place.
Among the research institutions with the most influential scientists, China even ranks first with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), followed by Harvard and Stanford universities. However, the direct comparison is not accurate: “The CAS is a large network of state institutes, while Harvard is a single institution,” comments Clarivate chief analyst David Pendlebury in a blog post. The CAS is more comparable to the US National Institutes of Health (ranked fifth) or the Max Planck Society (ranked ninth).
The best European research institutions are the University of Oxford in seventh place, University College London in eighth place, followed by the MPG. Last year, the MPG only made it to tenth place, in 2021 it was fifth.
There are no other German universities among the top 50 research institutions, while there are four other universities from the UK (Cambridge, Imperial, Edinburgh and King’s). Nevertheless, alongside the MPG, which accounts for 56 of the 332 researchers currently listed, several German universities stand out:
The Clarivate Ranking of Highly Cited Researchers is based on publications that are cited most frequently in the Web of Science citation index. For this year’s list, the period 2013 to 2023 was evaluated in 20 subjects.
Citation rankings are criticized for their susceptibility to trickery, among other things. The evaluation and selection criteria have become even stricter in this respect, according to Clarivate. As a result, more than 2,000 candidates were excluded during this year’s analysis – twice as many as last year. Attention was paid, for example, to excessive self-citation and citation cartels. abg
New York, Madison Square Garden, a few days before the election. The greats of the MAGA universe have gathered on the stage of the world’s most famous arena to give Donald Trump’s campaign the final push. The Republican’s sons are speaking, vice presidential candidate JD Vance, billionaire Elon Musk. But shortly before Trump himself gives his speech, a man with a beard streaked with gray and a very high forehead steps up to the podium: Howard Lutnick, CEO of investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald.
Lutnick is not a star. Very few of the 20,000 or so spectators are likely to recognize his name. But he is important in Trump’s orbit – as evidenced not only by his prominent speaking slot. As one of the co-chairs of the Republican campaign’s transition team, he has been preparing the new administration’s most important personnel decisions for months.
Now he has secured an important position for himself: On Tuesday, the former and future president nominated the 63-year-old as the next Secretary of Commerce and announced that Lutnick would simultaneously assume “direct responsibility” for the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.
The Wall Street man is therefore likely to become one of the central figures for one of the most important concerns of the next Trump administration: the imposition of tariffs with the aim of enforcing the president’s will.
It is not the role that Lutnick was aiming for. In recent weeks, he has hardly faltered in his bid for the post of Treasury Secretary, securing the support of influential Trump whisperers such as Elon Musk. But even if the banker missed out on the more prestigious job in the Treasury Department, located right next to the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, his new role is likely to come with an enormous amount of power.
The Department of Commerce (DoC) oversees a whole range of government agencies and institutions that are crucial to US economic policy. In his role as the United States Trade Representative (USTR), Lutnick will also steer the trade policy of the world’s largest economy. The Trump team has not announced whether he will formally take on the role. The jobs of Secretary of Commerce and Trade Representative are usually separate.
In Howard Lutnick, Trump is appointing a long-time friend to his cabinet – and an ideological ally. The investment banker supports the president-elect’s vision of using tariffs to bring industrial jobs back to the USA. He also sees the import surcharges in a positive light. “Don’t tax our people. Make money instead,” Lutnick recently said in a podcast. “Impose tariffs on China and make $400 billion.”
These statements coincide with Trump’s plan to impose a special 60 percent levy on all imports from the People’s Republic. It would be a massive escalation of the trade war between Washington and Beijing, which Trump started during his first term in office and the effects of which are still being felt today. Numerous tariffs imposed by the Republican at the time remained in force during the Biden years.
China is likely to remain the focus of Trump’s trade policy. However, Europe could also face difficult years with Lutnick in office. After all, the president-elect announced during the election campaign that he would impose a 10 or 20 percent tariff on all imports. This would cost the European Union dearly. According to analysts, exports from the eurozone to the USA could slump by around a third if Trump were to impose a tariff of ten percent. Most recently, the volume of exports to the United States amounted to around €460 billion per year. And Germany in particular could be severely affected by such a slump.
This is because the United States is the most important export market for German companies. In 2023, they sent goods worth around €168 billion across the Atlantic. A slump here could send the German economy into recession, Bundesbank President Joachim Nagel recently warned in Die Zeit. But this could be just the beginning.
Even during his first term in office, Trump had one German sector in particular in his sights: the automotive industry. Under the then Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, the USTR prepared a report that would have enabled the Trump administration to impose punitive tariffs of 25 percent on imports of German cars and car parts. In the end, Trump was dissuaded from these plans and the report ended up in the archives. But under Lutnick, it could end up back on the agenda.
Inspired by the Hollywood films “Minions” and “Everything Everywhere All At Once”, more and more young Chinese people are buying stones with googly eyes, hats and other individual decorations. These “pets” serve as quiet companions that do not need to be walked or fed. According to Sixth Tone, sales on Taobao rose by 246 percent in August alone compared to the previous month. The average price for a stone is 30 RMB, or around €2.60 euros. Some sellers state when and where they found the stones and give them IDs. Some have even written care instructions.
Xi shaking hands with Joe Biden, Xi shaking hands with Keir Starmer, Xi meeting Scholz – the headlines over the past few days have been dominated by the high-level bilateral meetings on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Rio. However, the Chinese representatives in Brazil, and before that in Peru at the APEC summit, were probably more interested in the heads of government from the Global South, above all the two host countries. The Chinese delegation traveled from Beijing with dozens of draft agreements. Xi also announced the “Open Science International Cooperation Initiative”. Manuel Liu takes a look at Xi’s successful tour of Latin America for you.
Things are not necessarily going badly for China’s scientists either – as they are playing a greater role in the list of the most influential researchers, the Clarivate citation ranking, from year to year. Among the research institutions with the most influential scientists, China even ranks first with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Our Research.Table colleague Anne Brüning took a look at the ranking.
The office brings with it an enormous amount of power: Donald Trump wants to make Howard Lutnick the US Secretary of Commerce. Lutnick is CEO of the investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald and a long-time friend and ideological ally of Trump. He supports the president-elect’s vision of using tariffs to bring industrial jobs back to the USA, writes Julian Heissler in his portrait.
Have a wonderful day!
With regard to China, high-level meetings dominated the coverage of the APEC summit in Lima, Peru, and the G20 meeting in Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro: Chinese leader Xi Jinping held bilateral talks with US President Joe Biden, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, France’s Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, among others. However, China achieved important results for Beijing elsewhere: On his trip to South America, Xi underscored his role as a self-proclaimed advocate of the Global South and as a stable trading partner in various ways.
In a speech to representatives of the G20 countries on Monday, Xi announced an “Open Science International Cooperation Initiative”, which was first proposed around a year ago at the Belt and Road (BRI) Conference. Led by China, Brazil, South Africa and the African Union, the initiative aims to give countries in the Global South access to scientific and technological innovations.
This can help the Global South in two ways, says Cobus van Staden, co-founder of the China-Global South Project media house. Firstly, the companies and governments of the Global North that dominate research are using international trade and patent law to restrict the sharing of technologies. “The fight for access to COVID-19 vaccines was a glaring example of this dynamic in action,” van Staden tells Table.Briefings. The initiative from Beijing is intended to simplify this access for the Global South.
Secondly, the initiative could help by connecting the countries with China’s capital and research expertise. This could bring their interests to the top of the research priority list. China itself could use the initiative to spread its own technology standards throughout the Global South, van Staden suspects.
Xi also used the South American trip to expand his pet project, the BRI. As reported, he inaugurated one of the most important infrastructure projects on the continent: the port of Chancay in Peru. Beijing and Lima also signed around 30 bilateral agreements, including an updated free trade agreement. For van Staden, Xi thus underlined “how indispensable China has become as an economic and trading partner at a time when trade relations with the USA are being called into question”.
In Monday’s speech, Xi also announced that China would import eight trillion US dollars worth of goods from developing countries by 2030 – a trade policy asset in talks with the respective state representatives. Xi and his entourage, including his close confidants Cai Qi and Wang Yi, held bilateral talks with heads of state and government from countries including Brazil, Chile, Peru and Mexico on the sidelines of the APEC and G20 meetings. These are all potential markets for Chinese products that are affected by US and EU tariffs.
China expanded bilateral relations with Brazil. President Lula signed 37 intergovernmental agreements with Xi on Wednesday. For example, “synergies” are to be created with regard to the BRI. Brazil is not a member of the BRI. According to the South China Morning Post, the Chinese government will also open up its market for Brazilian sorghum, sesame and fresh grapes. Other agreements relate to infrastructure, mining, communications, sustainable development, tourism, sport, health and culture.
Last year, the volume of trade between the two BRICS countries reached a record $157.5 billion, according to the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. From January to October 2024, Brazilian exports amounted to $83.4 billion and imports from China to $52.9 billion.
Xi’s trip was prepared well in advance to make the staging of his South American success story perfect. Just in time for Xi’s arrival, guest articles were published under his name in the Peruvian daily newspaper El Peruano and in the Brazilian daily Folha de S.Paulo. In them, he outlined “win-win cooperation” between the countries and positioned China as Brazil’s most important trading partner – instead of the USA.
In addition, Chinese students with Chinese flags were allowed to march on the streets of Lima and Rio, on the routes that Xi took. The unmistakable message to the state representatives of Western countries: We have been here for a long time, you have not.
Van Staden points out the relevance of the timing of the trip, “where the North-South divide dominates conversations in forums like COP29”. The research initiative strikes the same chord, because South America and Africa have not forgotten that they were partially abandoned by the West during the Covid pandemic. At the same time, however, China is standing in the way of the COP29 negotiations in Baku when it comes to climate financing in developing countries.
In South America, Xi is signaling South-South solidarity. Ultimately, this will be remembered by local government representatives because it trumps the uncertainty about the future global economy that a Trump election victory will bring. While Western countries are busy preparing for Donald Trump 2.0, Xi is seizing the moment.
In the list of the most influential researchers, the Clarivate citation ranking, China is playing a greater role from year to year. This is the result of an analysis published this week by the data company Clarivate Analytics. According to the report, 20 percent of the 6,600 scientists currently listed there come from China, compared to eight percent in 2018. Although the USA is still clearly in the lead with 36%, its share is shrinking; in 2018, it was still 43%.
The evaluation for the year 2024 identified a total of 6,636 scientists who have had a significant impact on their fields in the past ten years by publishing several highly cited articles. 2,507 of them work in the USA, and 1,405 in China. In third and fourth place: Great Britain with 563 scientists, Germany with 332.
Germany was thus able to maintain the fourth place it achieved in 2022 and 2023, compared to fifth place in 2021. However, a look at the top ten countries also shows the growing scientific strength in the Asia-Pacific region as a whole: Singapore is new to the top 10 countries, displacing Italy, which was in tenth place last year. Hong Kong, last year’s newcomer, has moved up to eighth place, relegating France to penultimate place.
Among the research institutions with the most influential scientists, China even ranks first with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), followed by Harvard and Stanford universities. However, the direct comparison is not accurate: “The CAS is a large network of state institutes, while Harvard is a single institution,” comments Clarivate chief analyst David Pendlebury in a blog post. The CAS is more comparable to the US National Institutes of Health (ranked fifth) or the Max Planck Society (ranked ninth).
The best European research institutions are the University of Oxford in seventh place, University College London in eighth place, followed by the MPG. Last year, the MPG only made it to tenth place, in 2021 it was fifth.
There are no other German universities among the top 50 research institutions, while there are four other universities from the UK (Cambridge, Imperial, Edinburgh and King’s). Nevertheless, alongside the MPG, which accounts for 56 of the 332 researchers currently listed, several German universities stand out:
The Clarivate Ranking of Highly Cited Researchers is based on publications that are cited most frequently in the Web of Science citation index. For this year’s list, the period 2013 to 2023 was evaluated in 20 subjects.
Citation rankings are criticized for their susceptibility to trickery, among other things. The evaluation and selection criteria have become even stricter in this respect, according to Clarivate. As a result, more than 2,000 candidates were excluded during this year’s analysis – twice as many as last year. Attention was paid, for example, to excessive self-citation and citation cartels. abg
New York, Madison Square Garden, a few days before the election. The greats of the MAGA universe have gathered on the stage of the world’s most famous arena to give Donald Trump’s campaign the final push. The Republican’s sons are speaking, vice presidential candidate JD Vance, billionaire Elon Musk. But shortly before Trump himself gives his speech, a man with a beard streaked with gray and a very high forehead steps up to the podium: Howard Lutnick, CEO of investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald.
Lutnick is not a star. Very few of the 20,000 or so spectators are likely to recognize his name. But he is important in Trump’s orbit – as evidenced not only by his prominent speaking slot. As one of the co-chairs of the Republican campaign’s transition team, he has been preparing the new administration’s most important personnel decisions for months.
Now he has secured an important position for himself: On Tuesday, the former and future president nominated the 63-year-old as the next Secretary of Commerce and announced that Lutnick would simultaneously assume “direct responsibility” for the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.
The Wall Street man is therefore likely to become one of the central figures for one of the most important concerns of the next Trump administration: the imposition of tariffs with the aim of enforcing the president’s will.
It is not the role that Lutnick was aiming for. In recent weeks, he has hardly faltered in his bid for the post of Treasury Secretary, securing the support of influential Trump whisperers such as Elon Musk. But even if the banker missed out on the more prestigious job in the Treasury Department, located right next to the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, his new role is likely to come with an enormous amount of power.
The Department of Commerce (DoC) oversees a whole range of government agencies and institutions that are crucial to US economic policy. In his role as the United States Trade Representative (USTR), Lutnick will also steer the trade policy of the world’s largest economy. The Trump team has not announced whether he will formally take on the role. The jobs of Secretary of Commerce and Trade Representative are usually separate.
In Howard Lutnick, Trump is appointing a long-time friend to his cabinet – and an ideological ally. The investment banker supports the president-elect’s vision of using tariffs to bring industrial jobs back to the USA. He also sees the import surcharges in a positive light. “Don’t tax our people. Make money instead,” Lutnick recently said in a podcast. “Impose tariffs on China and make $400 billion.”
These statements coincide with Trump’s plan to impose a special 60 percent levy on all imports from the People’s Republic. It would be a massive escalation of the trade war between Washington and Beijing, which Trump started during his first term in office and the effects of which are still being felt today. Numerous tariffs imposed by the Republican at the time remained in force during the Biden years.
China is likely to remain the focus of Trump’s trade policy. However, Europe could also face difficult years with Lutnick in office. After all, the president-elect announced during the election campaign that he would impose a 10 or 20 percent tariff on all imports. This would cost the European Union dearly. According to analysts, exports from the eurozone to the USA could slump by around a third if Trump were to impose a tariff of ten percent. Most recently, the volume of exports to the United States amounted to around €460 billion per year. And Germany in particular could be severely affected by such a slump.
This is because the United States is the most important export market for German companies. In 2023, they sent goods worth around €168 billion across the Atlantic. A slump here could send the German economy into recession, Bundesbank President Joachim Nagel recently warned in Die Zeit. But this could be just the beginning.
Even during his first term in office, Trump had one German sector in particular in his sights: the automotive industry. Under the then Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, the USTR prepared a report that would have enabled the Trump administration to impose punitive tariffs of 25 percent on imports of German cars and car parts. In the end, Trump was dissuaded from these plans and the report ended up in the archives. But under Lutnick, it could end up back on the agenda.
Inspired by the Hollywood films “Minions” and “Everything Everywhere All At Once”, more and more young Chinese people are buying stones with googly eyes, hats and other individual decorations. These “pets” serve as quiet companions that do not need to be walked or fed. According to Sixth Tone, sales on Taobao rose by 246 percent in August alone compared to the previous month. The average price for a stone is 30 RMB, or around €2.60 euros. Some sellers state when and where they found the stones and give them IDs. Some have even written care instructions.
