Imported Article – 2026-04-15 05:44:17

This story is part of Sixth Tone’s 10-year anniversary series, Ten Years in Transition.

SHANGHAI – Thirty meters underground on the outskirts of Shanghai, engineers are painstakingly fitting together the components of a tunnel more than three kilometers long into place.

Inside, a superconducting accelerator will generate intense X-ray pulses that allow scientists to record how atoms move and rearrange during chemical reactions.

Keeping such beams stable demands extraordinary precision. Engineers must align the accelerator tunnel within millimeters across its entire length, accounting for the Earth’s curvature and minimizing vibrations from nearby maglev trains.

The facility is known as the Shanghai High Repetition Rate XFEL and Extreme Light Facility, or SHINE, China’s first hard X-ray free-electron laser. “Building an ordinary tunnel, you can advance hundreds of segments a day,” said Li Xinsheng, a senior engineer on the project. “Here we manage about eight.”

Like many engineers in China’s construction industry, Li began his career building roads, real estate, factories, and utilities. Today he is among a growing number applying those same skills to large scientific projects.

Known as megascience facilities, they include giant neutrino detectors, fusion reactors sometimes called “artificial suns,” and massive radio telescopes.

China still spends far more on traditional infrastructure, but investment in research facilities and scientific equipment has grown much faster over the past decade, even as infrastructure spending has slowed.

Between 2015 and 2024, spending on scientific fixed assets, including labs, equipment, and machines, more than tripled, while traditional infrastructure investment grew by less than 80%.

In the past, Chinese scientists often focused on theory in frontier fields because the country lacked the resources to build such instruments, said Liu Zhi, vice president of ShanghaiTech University and director of the Center for Transformative Science (CTS), which runs SHINE with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

“As China’s economic capacity has grown, the country has increasingly invested in the tools needed to explore those questions directly,” he said. “Such facilities can also help attract researchers and build scientific hubs.”

Today, more than 90 megascience facilities have been built or are planned across China, forming a growing network of scientific infrastructure that supports the country’s push into frontier research.

The pivot

For years, large infrastructure projects were among the fastest ways to drive economic growth in China. Highways, railways, and real estate development became key tools for local governments seeking to boost output and investment.

That model accelerated after the 2008 global financial crisis, when a 4-trillion-yuan ($580 billion) stimulus program triggered a nationwide wave of construction. But by 2016, authorities had begun addressing overcapacity in traditional infrastructure. That year, investment growth slowed to 17.4%, down from more than 42% in 2009.

Two years later, authorities launched a nationwide cleanup of public-private partnership projects, tightened controls on local government borrowing, and began steering investment toward what officials called “new infrastructure.”

The new focus fell on digital networks, computing power, and scientific research facilities.

China launched its “East Data, West Computing” program in 2022 to expand national data centers, while the number of 5G base stations surpassed 4.8 million by 2025 – nearly seven times the 2020 total. At the same time, growth in traditional infrastructure investment turned negative, falling 2.2% year on year, a rare contraction after decades of expansion.

Roads and bridges remain essential, officials say, but returns on new projects have diminished. Recent spending has therefore focused more on filling gaps, including improving infrastructure in less-developed regions and strengthening disaster resilience.

China’s spending on R&D rose from 89.6 billion yuan in 2000 to 3.6 trillion yuan in 2024. Adjusted for purchasing power parity, that rise was the fastest among major economies.

Innovation became a central development goal in the early 2010s. Annual R&D spending surpassed 1 trillion yuan in 2012, and the government soon began planning a new generation of large scientific facilities scheduled for construction between 2016 and 2030.

Authorities also set long-term targets: becoming an innovation-driven economy by 2020, moving into the front ranks of global innovation by 2030, and building a world-leading science and technology powerhouse by midcentury.

For engineers like Pan Chao, the shift is already visible on the job. After years of building drainage systems and steam pipelines across China, the engineer in his 30s now works on the SHINE facility in Shanghai.

“The national direction is shifting toward higher-tech projects,” he told Sixth Tone. “And we’re one drop in that wave.”

New wave

China’s push into megascience began modestly. The country’s first major research instrument, the Beijing Electron-Positron Collider, was completed in 1988 after years of funding struggles.

For much of its early life, the facility…

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