Exploited by Europeans and neighbouring Japan for centuries, China has found its political, economic and military feet.

In 1945, Japan was defeated and four years later after defeating the Nationalists, the People’s Republic of China was established with Mao Zedong and the Communist Party in charge, ending centuries of European colonial domination of China’s major coastal cities and the grip of the warlords and the Nationalist government, the vestiges of which fled to what is now Taiwan.

That was 75 years ago, when China was largely a peasant country. Yet, in late 1950, when United Nations forces approached the Yalu River separating China and North Korea, China responded in overwhelming numbers to reverse the gains achieved by the UN forces and force an armistice between what has become a prosperous South Korea and a nuclear-armed rogue regime in North Korea.

In the Korean War from 1950 to 1953 (often referred to as the “Forgotten War”), the Chinese army was well-led, brave, tough and respected by all who fought them in that conflict, a clear signal that China, under new leadership, was a potential new threat to Western control of the western Pacific Ocean and regional markets in the decades to come.

These days, the Chinese armed services are equal to the West and may have important advantages in the development of hypersonic missiles and long-range stealth aircraft. China now has the largest navy in terms of the number of ships in the world, stealth technologies second to or equal to the U.S. and poses the first real threat to the dominance of the U.S. Navy’s big aircraft carrier groups in the western Pacific since 1945.

But the real issue for me is the intellectual capital that China has developed to offset and surpass the West, evidence for which was the announcement by the journal Nature: last year, for the first time, China surpassed the U.S. in the number of high-quality papers published in the best science and engineering journals in the world.

This trend has been obvious over the last few years: Chinese universities rank high in the world’s top 50, even the top 10 in the sciences, with the trends heading up in nearly every category in the sciences, accompanied by a relative decline in Western science institutions.

This should be a warning to the West that its intellectual leadership in the basic and applied sciences is waning quickly relative to China. And it’s not just China — science in India, South Korea, Vietnam and elsewhere has matured and become increasingly self-sustaining.

Now, with all the cutbacks affecting top-notch universities in the U.S. these days, some U.S. scientists are looking to move to Canada and European countries as an alternative. But not just those two havens.

China is actively recruiting top-line scientists and even recent PhDs with very attractive salaries and guaranteed funding support for the long haul — the kind of support that is very attractive to scientists looking for long-term career support in the basic and applied sciences and engineering.

The current dominance of the U.S. in the sciences is directly attributable to the head start the U.S. had in the run-up to and throughout the Second World War, when the home front was safe, unlike much of Europe, Russia and China, all of which were devastated by the war.

That and the three-quarters of a century of uninterrupted stability and a strong economy led to the U.S. dominance and attracted many students and established scientists to move to the U.S. That’s why U.S. science prospered so well for so long.

However, that strength is only as strong as the foundation on which it was built and maintained.

Without that support from the national government, U.S. leadership in the physical sciences will falter and what was taken for granted in leadership in so many areas of science, may collapse with serious consequences for the US and its allies.

It’s a case of breaking Humpty Dumpty, what’s happening now, with no plan or even possibility of putting him together again.

That’s not alarmist talk — it’s recognition that it takes a long time, forward planning and good luck to establish countries of excellence in science.

These days, China is imitating what worked in the West for success in business and science by instituting major changes to its political and managerial system to create the right combination of atmosphere, encouragement and support to develop science within China.

That includes welcoming talent from abroad, just as Europe, the U.K. and the United States did for decades to build their science communities. Much of the human talent that fueled Western success came from abroad and they stayed because they received the kind of support and, in some cases, freedom not available elsewhere.

Now, the shoe may be moving to the other foot and budding and established talent from much of the world may be lost to China and other countries.

It’s time to wake up or lose what’s been the engine for success the U.S. and other Western countries.

Some of this material on China will be included in this year’s annual review of the Nobel series beginning Wednesday, Nov. 5, when the physics prize will be discussed at the Niagara-on-the-Lake library. Book early.

Dr. William Brown is a professor of neurology at McMaster University and co-founder of the InfoHealth series at the Niagara-on-the-Lake Public Library.