The IQs of the populations of America and China are distributed on a bell curve with median close to 100 and standard deviation 15. Hence, the percentage of Americans who are gifted could be expected to be about the same as the percentage of gifted people in the Chinese population.
However, the Chinese population is about 4 times the population of the United States. Therefore we would expect that there would be about 4 times as many gifted Chinese as Americans. If the Chinese were to select their people of highest IQ and channel them into science, then they would have a more gifted group of scientists than the United States.
One measure of mathematical competence is the annual International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO) in which high school students from almost all the major nations of the world compete in solving mathematics problems. In July 2023, China secured first place in the International Mathematics Olympiad for the fifth consecutive year. Among the 112 teams participating this year, China was the only team to have all members win gold medals. The photo shows the members of team US who stood first in the IMO in 2019, one of the four times that the US stood first in the past quarter century. (A graph showing national winners of the IMO in the past several decades is accessible at: Is it true that there are more people with Genius IQ in China than there are people in the United States? – Intelligence and IQ ) So the Chinese are dominating the IMO contests.
However, the U.S. has many times more Noble Prizes than the Chinese, and some people contend that the entrepreneurial environment in America is more conducive to the creative process and will enable America to retain its supremacy in scientific fields. China is now producing some very sophisticated technologies in medicine, weaponry, communications and transportation.
Performance in the IMO would not appear to be important to the security of America, but it’s the canary in the mine, warning of a gradual decay in mathematics and science education in America.
