Comment by echelon

Thank you for sharing this!

This is a really interesting story. It's not the US pulling back so much as it is China's rapid and incredible growth. According to this graph, the only period of US scientific expenditure stagnation was during the 2008 housing crisis. Our expenditures over the last decade have been increasing at a pretty good growth rate too.

The data points for the forthcoming years will be interesting (sad) to see after all of these cuts.