Science Funding Dips In U.S. While Soaring In China by Cynthia Tucker, Editorial in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
Writing this month in The Wall Street Journal, Norman Augustine, a former CEO of Lockheed Martin Corp., and Burton Richter, a Nobel laureate in physics, said:
“As a percentage of GDP, federal investment in physical science research is half of what it was in 1970. (By contrast), in China, R&D expenditures rose 350 percent between 1991 and 2001, and the number of science and engineering Ph.D.s soared 535 percent.”
Update: link broken so removed the link to the original article.