China’s science base: western technology with Chinese essence?
Technologically eclipsed for 200 years, China’s science base makes America apprehensive. Its future contribution to fundamental knowledge will turn on openness rather than any attempt to contain it.
The purpose of this note is to bring together and catalogue the scale and achievement of modern Chinese science. It is not an attempt to either examine the prospects of the Chinese economy or the geopolitical calculus that the US and other Asian and European countries will have to employ in considering their relations with China. Its purpose is to pull aspects of Chinese science and science policy together in a convenient manner. The interest in the scale of the Chinese achievement in science is stimulated, however, in part by the apprehension it has created in the US foreign policy and military establishment.
Over the last three centuries China has experienced in relative terms a genuine roller coaster in its relative perception as a technical society. Occidental fascination with luxury products that were beyond their capability of producing was followed by an economic eclipse as the west, led by Britain and the Netherlands, powered ahead drawing on the benefits of the scientific and industrial revolutions. After much military and external economic interference and the misadventure of socialist planning, in a little over thirty years China has returned to what be considered her normal relative position in the world economy and the technologies that support it.
China’s great strength has been the sheer scale of resources and human capital that it has brought to establishing its science base and an extraordinary capacity to apply diffused science and technology in the international marketplace. Quantity does not make for quality as the history and experience of the Indian and Soviet science bases attest. Yet there appears to be accumulating evidence that quality is emerging out of the quantity. There is a general understanding that basic science has been given insufficient attention and funding and in many respects that may be inevitable in the context of a strongly active enterprise state that employs a heavy visible hand to achieve mission driven policy objectives. There appears to be an official understanding of the need to give greater emphasis to basic research to get a self-sustaining indigenous source of fundamental discovery. High quality large scale basic research has historically been associated with wealthy countries that enjoy the benefits of long-standing research universities, institutes and science collections and museums. The classic examples are France, Switzerland, the UK and the US. China now has the wealth to facilitate basic research and appears to appreciate the need for a change of gear in that direction. Some economists with specialist interests in new growth theory and science believe that China is well placed to reap the rewards of a Fourth Industrial Revolution based on AI and robotics that will result in a non-linear take off in transformative output.
These achievements have made the US apprehensive. The latest expression of this apprehension is the CHIPS Act in 2022, reshoring production of semiconductors to the US. This builds on the Trump administration’s Entity List in 2019 blocking China’s access to sophisticated semiconductor and nanotechnologies. This will certainly be awkward for China and will probably slow its progress and make it more expensive. Several American scholars think such intellectual blockades will end up stimulating China into indigenous research activity that will more than offset the American measures. It may turn out that the nationalist inward turn that China is taking under President Xi’ leadership, making the academy the servant of the Party, an appearing to abandon the long pursued Chinese approach to science of applying western technology with Chinese essence by pulling China in on herself may do more harm than anything that the US Government could do. Science is an international republic of ideas. There is no American or European or Chinese science. Progress comes from transparent sharing of information and research, along with international specialisation rather than autarky of the mind.
Chinoiserie and the Occidental imagination
China has been a source of fascination for the occidental imagination since the first encounters between European travellers and the Manchu Dynasty. For centuries its goods and products from textiles and ceramics to pieces and tea were the acme of luxury. Chinese art and design was replicated in Europe and America. From aristocratic houses, such as the Chinesisches Haus in the park at Sanssouci in Potsdam and Royal Pavilion in Brighton to the mass market in bourgeois domestic artefacts ebonised furniture, lacquered articles, mother of pearl inlay and Chinese genre scenes reflected an aesthetic sensibility infused by a sense of style called Chinoiserie.
China was responsible for many of the world’s principal technical innovations in the pre-modern millennia before the Industrial Revolution that started in Britain and the Netherlands after 1790. These include ceramics, crossbows, gunpowder, pulp paper, compasses, sternpost ship rudders, printing presses, seed drills and iron ploughs, wheelbarrows, and seismographs. These achievements were carefully catalogued in Joseph Needham’s scholarship published in the Cambridge University press series Science and Civilization in China between from the 1950 to 2000. Although he noticeably does not appear to include ice cream, which in folk memory is an innovation that Marco Polo encountered in Imperial China in the 13th century. Or maybe not.
China’s economic and technological eclipse for 200 years
By the 19th century China was scientifically and technologically eclipsed. The Scientific Revolution of the 17th century and Newtonian mechanics and mathematics passed it by. While the application of steam power and the innovation surrounding the first industrial revolution completely bypassed the Qing Dynasty’s empire. Angus Maddison in The World Economy a millennial perspective published by the OECD in 2000 captures the transformation of the position of the Chinese economy writing:
‘Until the nineteenth century China was a much bigger and more powerful state than any in Europe or Asia. Its technical precocity and meritocratic bureaucracy gave it higher levels of income than Europe from the fifth to the fourteenth century. Thereafter Europe slowly forged ahead in terms of per capita income, but the Chinese population grew faster. Chinese GDP in 1820 was nearly 30 per cent higher than that of Western Europe and its Western Offshoots combined’. Between the 1840s and 1940s, China’s economy collapsed. Per capita GDP in 1950 was less than three quarters of the 1820 level. In 1950, China’s GDP was less than a twelfth of that in Western Europe and the Western Offshoots.’
The relative decline of China in the 19th and early 20th centuries was aggravated by asymmetric applications of the principles of free trade, unbalanced treaties and foreign military intervention. But part of the story was the extraordinary take-off in historical terms of the west as a result of the scientific and industrial revolutions. This produced a determination to modernise China and to catch up with the west which for these purposes included Japan by 1900. The strategy of the Imperial Chinese government was learning from more advanced countries while applying a Chinese essence, Western application approach.
The restoration of China its historically natural place in the world economy
Today China is transformed. China is the world’s largest economy. It has the world’s second largest science base after the USA in terms of purchasing power parity. Its rapid economic, industrial and technological advance has instilled fear into America. Senior retired US admirals and generals write books speculating about the inevitability of war. Harvard University has set up a research project under Professor Graham Allison devoted to the Thucydides’s Trap. – the classic case of a waning power fearing the rise of another – ‘I conclude that the Athenians, because they had grown in power and terrified the Spartans, made war [nearly] inevitable’ (Thucydides 2003, I.23.5-6).
Two successive US administrations led by Presidents Trump and Biden have made America's military trade and technological response to China the centrepiece of their international and domestic policy. There are strong continuities between this anxiety about China and President Obama’s tilt to the Pacific more than a decade ago. When Mrs Clinton was Secretary of State her Chinese counterpart explained that China’s perspective had to be listened to because China was a big country and bigger than America. These wider geopolitical, military and economic anxieties are not the focus of this article, which is interested in Chinese science. Yet the rapid progress of Chinese science and the scale of its technological adaptation since 1985 is central to this American anxiety.
China’s science and technology base is central to American apprehension about Chinese power
Now America must adjust to a country that is bigger, has a larger economy and may have some technological advantages in hypersonic weapons and may be about to or has overtaken America in new technologies such as AI. Haider Khan in a paper Geoeconomics, China, Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Future published in May 2023 argues that ‘China presents important case study material for the rest of the 21st century as the 4th industrial revolution unfolds. Various quantitative measures ranging from rapidly rising expenditure on research and development (R&D) and a larger and higher-quality talent pool to impressive growth in output of scientific publications and patents. Taken together, these metrics all indicate that China is well on its way in the 2020s towards becoming a formidable player in innovation marching towards the fourth industrial revolution technological systems led by Artificial Intelligence and Deep Machine learning.’ In this American anxiety about the accumulating power of China, science has a central role in its perspectives on future relations between the two societies.
The Soviet legacy of socialist scientific economic planning
The modern story of Chinese science started with the 1949 victory of the Communist Party over the Nationalist armies of Chang Kia Check. Mao se Tung was strongly committed to using science and technology to modernise China on the Soviet model of planning and heavy industry. China has ‘built its research system basically from scratch’. In 1956 it started with the policy of “Marching Towards Sciences.” China’s funding model for basic research followed the principles of “national missions/tasks-oriented disciplines development. The 1953 Five Year Plan guided by Soviet economists was committed to industrialisation and an improvement in consumer goods. Soviet scientists and technicians were central to China’s first steps in constructing a technological and modern science base. Between 1949 and 1960, Soviet advisers developed 156 large-scale industrial projects, mainly in electrical power generation, steel, and heavy equipment manufacturing. Large amounts of equipment were imported from the USSR and socialist economies in Eastern Europe. Over 3,000 Soviet and Eastern European technicians worked in China. They were principally involved in training Chinese workers. At the same time 20,000 Chinese received training or college degrees in the Soviet Union and other European socialist economies. People trained in the Soviet Union and socialist countries were at the heart of Chinese scientific and technological development for more than a generation. This planning process and engineering and technical effort brought about a huge change in the structure of the Chinese economy. The ratio of GDP accounted for by heavy industry rose from 7.9 per cent to 35.7 per cent between 1949 to 1962. As a share of all industrial output heavy industry roughly doubled to over 53 per cent. This exercise in socialist planning further removed the Chinese economy from any conventional concept of economic welfare or Paretian optimality creating huge imbalances in the economy.
The Breach between China and the USSR in the 1960s
The Great Leap Forward to turn China from an agrarian into an industrial country against the advice of their Soviet planners was disastrous. This contributed to a frisson between the Chinese and Soviet Communist leaderships. Several things contributed to the deterioration of the relationship including: differences over Khruschev’s de-Stalinisation programme in the USSR; the Chinese perception that Khrushchev was, in Marxist-Leninist terms, a revisionist; the poor personal relations between Mao and Khrushchev; and perception on the part of China that the USSR, under Khrushchev, was not sufficiently firm with the US Eisenhower administration when America was disrespectful to the national sovereignty of socialist countries
The breach came when the Soviet Union did not go to war with the US over the Cuban missile crisis and backed down China broke with it. There were further differences between the USSR and China over India where the Soviet Union took India’s side; and the Soviet decision to sign the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963. Chairman Mao rejected the Brezhnev doctrine of peaceful coexistence between the USSR and the US as nuclear armed powers.
Clear priority given to policy the objective of Project 596: one bomb two missiles
China considered the Test Ban Treaty to be a deliberate attempt by nuclear powers to impede the development of its own nuclear capability. Although it did not prevent it. On 16 October 1964, China with Soviet help as part of its Project 596, detonated its first nuclear bomb, a uranium-235 implosion fission device. China continued to make progress with the developed intercontinental ballistic missiles later in the 1960s and launched its first space satellite in 1970.
Chairman Mao’s Red Guards decimated the institutional capacity of Chinese science
This post-revolutionary science base was severely disrupted by the breach with the USSR. After one row at an International Meeting of Communists and Workers Parties in Romania, for example, Khrushchev withdrew 1,400 Soviet technicians from the PRC, which cancelled some 200 joint scientific projects. The damage done to the Chinese science base as a result of the breach with the Soviet Union was then compounded by the Cultural Revolution. This was initiated by Chairman Mao in 1966 to regain the ideological initiative and to counter the Soviet-style bureaucracies, that were perceived as personal-power-centres, that had established themselves in education, agriculture, and industrial management. This was chaotically and brutally enforced by the Red Guards. It decimated Chinese science in the same manner that German science was decimated between 1933 and 1945.
During the 1950s and 1960s there were few encounters between western scientists and their Chinese counterparts. In one encounter between scientists from the British Royal Society and Chinese scientists their British colleagues were impressed by their technical competence. There was some amusement. even among left-wing scientists sympathetic to Communist China about its research publications. Apparently one of the most prolific contributors who co-authored many science papers was Chairman Mao himself.
China’s space programme: prestige with a military imperative
China’s space programme has its origins in the successful ballistic missile programme developed in the 1960s and 1970s. Qian Xuesan, became the team leader for China’s first missile tests in 1966. He was a Chinese scientist, who had worked in the U.S, but had come under suspicion during the early Cold War and returned to work in China. China launched its first satellite in 1970. The satellite did little more than play the revolutionary song, The East is Red, and hoisted its first recoverable satellite in 1978. China entered the commercial satellite business in 1986 with its Long March (Chang Zheng) rocket series. In developing this satellite programme China was dependent on the US for the critical components involved having to use American licences throughout the 1990s. Bi-lateral cooperation was subject to periodic interruptions whenever there were political tensions, not least following the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. China started a human flight space programme in 1992. Chinese taikonauts – astronauts - were trained in Russia and the China developed Shenzhou - Sacred Vessel - space vehicle was based on old Russian Soyuz models. The Chinese claimed it was an original design but acknowledged Russian assistance docking, flight control, and life support systems on it. China now has an ambitious space programme. A distinctive feature of the Chinese space programme is that it is run by the People's Liberation Army PLA unlike the American and European space programmes.
Deng, recovery normality and reform
Everything in China changed in 1978 as Deng Xiaoping began to initiate the radical programme of market and economic reforms. Science and technology was central to this agenda of modernisation from the start. Science and technology was one of the Four Modernizations planned. A technocratic approach was taken to science policy from the start of the reform process. Colleges and universities, that had been either closed or sidelined during the Cultural Revolution, were reopened, and expanded, and new research centres were set up. It explicitly looked back to an older self-defined Chinese concept of learning from more advanced countries that originating in late imperial China: the Chinese essence, Western application.’
The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) is China’s leading state research institution and absorbs about a fifth of the Chinese government science budget. Established on the Soviet research model 1949, the academy was significantly restructured in the 1990s. It encompasses 125 institutions, around eighty-four research units, a university and a graduate school. It has facilities located across China and employs around 50,000 people of whom over two-thirds are science and technology researchers.
State backed research that emphasises applied science working with the market and private sector
Science policy has evolved progressively since 1978. Four major changes in policy can be identified. At the start in the early Deng period, 1978-1984, China organised a simple S&T system that was included in the inherited socialist planning regime. Before 1985 almost all R&D was undertaken in government-run public research institutions. Between 1985 and 1991 as changes gathered momentum the R&D system began to make connections with local indigenous Chinese firms. At the same time starting to attract foreign firms with tax incentives and joint ventures projects that connected research to market activities. Foreign manufacturers operating in China as part of this were required to transfer technologies to their local partners. This included basing research on contracts with State Owned Enterprises SOEs and also with private firms. In the 1990s R&D activity became closely connected to the Socialist Market Economy, carrying out applied research as business enterprises. A further significant institutional change took place between 1999 and 2004 when nearly all state-run research institutes apart from the CAS were either merged or sold off. From the mid-1990s science and technology was generously funded by the state, but much of the technological effort has been generated by corporate, foreign-invested, or joint foreign-Chinese commercial enterprises. Since 1978 when the reform agenda started, China’s outstanding technological strength has been an ability to quickly adapt foreign technology and then to develop export-oriented manufacturing production.
Science and technology industrial parks (STIPs) learning from Taiwan
A distinctive feature of Chinese applied science has been the development of science parks. This reflects a deliberate attempt to replicate Asia’s most successful technological innovation sites, the Hsinchu Science-based Industrial Park (HSIP), located in Taiwan’s southwest of Taipei. HSIP has become the centre of Taiwan’s electronics and computer industries. It has fostered many of Taiwan’s leading high tech firms. The Chinese government has constructed a national chain of science and industrial parks across the country.
Before a firm can operate in a STIP, it must meet four criteria. It must create or employ technology in new or high technology products that meet the Chinese Government's definition of ‘new and high-tech products’. It must spend at least three percent of annual gross revenue on R & D for products or services. At least thirty per cent of its employees must possess college degrees, and at least ten per cent must be involved in work on R&D. And firms must be annually recertified by China’s provincial science and technology offices. Firms that qualify get a range of tax and regulation benefits. These include the deferral of corporate taxes for three years, along with reduced rates tax, tax relief on the first RMB 300,000 (approximately $45,000) produced from technology acquired abroad, and exemptions from needing to obtain import licences for technology materials or parts used in export production.
But how productive have the parks turned out to be?
The Torch Center estimated that in 2006 China possessed over 43,000 high tech firms. Over 27,000 of these firms were located inside parks, but nearly 16,000 chose to locate the outside parks. On-park firms have lower revenues, value-added production, and export earnings than their off-park counterparts. This may be because off-park companies can be less technology intensive, and can employ a less educated workforce that is cheaper. It is not clear park based output and overall productivity levels have greatly increased in the last decade. The parks did not bring about the dynamic effects of raised productivity growth hoped for by the promoters of STIPs.
The Green Agenda de-carbonisation and the China Paradox
Theodore Chia in a blog How China is Winning the Race for Clean Energy Technology posted in October 2022 lays out the oddity of how a country that is continuing to increase its carbon emissions is leading the world in the applications of the technology that will facilitate green energy. In the US carbon emission peaked in 2007. They are now 2 per cent below their level in 1990. In the UK the position is more dramatic. UK carbon emissions are now 44 per cent below the position in 1990. In contrast China’s emissions continue to rise and the Chinese Government expects that to continue to 2030 when they will peak.
Yet in terms of the technologies needed to bring decarbonisation, China is far ahead of advanced countries. Kelly Sims Gallagher, Director at the Tufts University Center for International Environment and Resource Policy, explained at an event at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies that ‘China saw an economic opportunity in low-carbon industries’. While Europe moved early in relation to clean energy, China harnessed its competitive advantages in terms of policy consistency and lower-cost capital to lead the market in solar, wind, and EV technology exports. China is a green power, leading the world in renewable energy production. It is the largest producer of wind and solar energy, as well as the largest domestic and outbound investor in renewable energy in the world. China seems to have an all-round lead on the U.S. in terms of trade balance, R&D investment, and patenting. China’s lead is in relation to solar energy power . China has an estimated 2.7 million people employed in the solar energy sector. This accounts for more than half of the world’s 4.3 million solar jobs.
Gallagher explained how China accomplished this. China’s solar industry started in the 1990s in response to Germany's high demand. The Chinese government provided tax incentives and credits to attract investors and as importantly searched the earth for supplies of machinery and polysilicon. This resulted in a vertically integrated supply chain in China and enabled it to create a huge solar manufacturing industry that produced more solar panels for less. When western economies-imposed tariffs, making allegations of dumping, the Chinese Government swiftly developed a domestic market. This contrast markedly with the U.S. which outsourced its solar production to China. In 2014, the U.S produced Photovoltaic wafers and ingots in a dozen factories. By the Autumn of 2022 they had gone. In Gallagher's judgement the disassembling of clean energy infrastructure will make it difficult for the U.S. to reestablish itself as a major competitive producer of green technologies. The CHIPS and Science Act, Infrastructure Deal, and Inflation Reduction Act is a bi-partisan American political response to Chinese success that will apply half a trillion dollars in fiscal incentives and investments to support green technologies and investments. It is in many respects an American attempt to replicate the success of state guided mission science and economic policies that China appears to have excelled at.
China's green energy research ambitions are not limited to wind turbines and solar panels. Chinese engineers are reported to have set a new world record in nuclear fusion. World Nuclear News reported on 13 April 2023 that “China's experimental advanced superconducting tokamak (EAST), known as the 'artificial sun', set a new world record and successfully achieved a steady-state high-constraint mode plasma operation for 403 seconds. The previous record was 101 seconds, set by EAST in 2017”. Realistically viable commercial nuclear fusion remains a long way off as the US General Accountability Office GAO report has reminded its enthusiastic supporters, writing that Several challenges must be overcome to achieve commercial fusion, and stakeholders' projections of this timeline range from 10 years to several decades," GAO said. "One key scientific challenge is in the physics of plasmas, the state of matter needed for fusion. Yet the Chinese achievement in what should be regarded still as basic research is impressive.
The scale of China’s achievement in science
The scale of China’s science and technological research base is clear. China has achieved a great deal in terms of the growth of its research capacity over the last thirty years. This is particularly the case in relation to applied research. There has been increasing investment in R&D, a great expansion in the numbers of research personnel and publications. Data from OECD suggest that China’s investment in R&D has increased from 15.95 billion (Chinese yuan) in 1991 to 2.214 trillion (Chinese yuan) in 2019. The number of researchers has increased from 3.18 million in 1991 to 7.12 million in 2019. US National Science Foundation’s statistics show that China as a science publisher was number one in the world with 528,263 publications in the S&E field in 2018.
By 2019 China’s GERD (total expenditure on research and development expressed as a percentage of GDP) had risen to 2.23 percent in 2019, translating into RMB 2.2 trillion. However, as 2020 drew close the planned increase in the ratio to 2.5 per cent was not achieved. As Richard Suttmeier reports in Chinese Science Policy at a Crossroads in Brookings Issues in Science and Technology in winter 2020, Chinese R&D expenditures are second only to those of the United States, and now constitute 22 percent of the global share. China competes with the United States in producing PhDs in STEM fields, and leads in the total number of publications in science and engineering. The quality of Chinese publications has also improved, with Chinese authors now contributing roughly 9 per cent of the top 10 per cent of highly cited papers. This is up from 5 per cent in 2005.
Caroline Wagner, an American professor from Ohio in a blog on The Conversation in January 2023 China now publishes more high-quality science than any other nation – should the US be worried? concluded that ‘my research shows that Chinese scholars now publish a larger fraction of the top 1 per cent most cited scientific paper than scientists from any other country. In 2022, Chinese researchers published three times as many papers on artificial intelligence as U.S. researchers; in the top 1% most cited AI research, Chinese papers outnumbered U.S. papers by a 2-to-1 ratio. Similar patterns can be seen with China leading in the top 1% most cited papers in nanoscience, chemistry and transportation’.
China appears to be well placed take advantage of changing technological landscape
China, particularly since 2006-07 in Professor Haider Khan of Denver University’s judgement, ‘has been working to build a more innovation-oriented nation. In the meantime, the government has introduced industrial policies that support the development of high-tech sectors, aimed at strengthening industrial competitiveness, encouraging larger investment in innovation, and promoting high-tech trade. We should recognize that innovation financing, preferential tax treatment, and better management of S&T, R&D, and innovation funds also have become more important systemic forces in China that can be modelled as a dynamic nonlinear model of innovation during the 4th industrial revolution’. In Khan’s view ‘There is little doubt that China is well on its way to the technical frontiers of the fourth industrial revolution’.
In Khan’s judgement the two critical dimensions are needed to engineer this. They are a ‘high-grade semiconductor industry which is the foundation for technology of the coming era, and China’s rapid progress in AI. AI requires innovative software and a high-grade semiconductor base. Both in his judgement are present in China, a high grade semiconductor base and appropriately innovative software. This will integrate the ‘digital revolution with other technology systems to create a grand synthesis or super convergence of advanced technology systems through AI, Robotics, biotechnology, and nanotechnology’.
Khan’s assessment of China’s technological and economic prospects, however, turns on the confident assertion of aspects of new endogenous growth theory. This includes constant and increasing returns to scale arising from R&D, new innovation and investment spending. China in this analysis is unusually well placed to benefit from these opportunities and the non-linear changes that they will provoke. The combination of actively managed government enterprise, a visible directing hand guiding the market and the significant elimination of what are perceived to be unhelpful research gaps between university research and the technological absorption and innovation needs of the enterprises system. As Haider Khan recognises his analysis is based on the complete rejection of the neo-classical paradigm with competitive markets and resources being allocated at the margin where diminishing marginal returns constrain nonlinear outcomes. This confidence about nonlinear outcomes based on constant or even increasing returns goes to the heart of the central propositions of new growth theory and endogenous growth modelling and invites caution on the part of economists whose ideas are framed in the neoclassical tradition.
China has neglected its support for basic fundamental science
Yet while China has been hugely successful in applying technology in the market place it has neglected basic science. The result is that it does not yet appear to be able to generate novel innovation that is completely different from what has gone before. This is reflected in the fact that only one Nobel Prize for science has been awarded to a Chinese based scientist. This was awarded to Tu Youyou for the discovery of Artemisinin in the field of physiology and medicine in 2015. China has until recently placed its principal emphasis on the role of strategic basic research to fulfil the economic and social demands. This is in common with most OECD countries, where research spending is dominated by government ambitions in specific objectives such as defence, agriculture, health, energy, and other areas.
Evolution and Features of China’s Central Government Funding System for Basic Research a paper by Aruhan Bai, Cong Wu and Keija Yang identifies basic science as the critical challenge for Chinese science. China’s problem is that ‘lacking capabilities to conduct ground-breaking scientific work remains one of the daunting challenges for the country’. Its challenge is ‘how to restructure its funding system for basic research so as to reinvigorate its indigenous innovation capacity’.
The paper identifies some of the problems of a potentially over centralised and directed active enterprise state. ‘Another persistent challenge faced by China is the increasing homogeneity of the national research institutes and universities. There is no clear distinction of missions between national research institutes and research universities, which has caused over-competition between the two and further leads to waste and low efficiency of national research resources’.
The combination of the completive structure for funding and centralised goals and objective for assessing the work of scientists has mitigated against the quality of research in China. There has been an emphasis on quantity, inputs and publication over quality. Evaluation and assessment as often the case with public sector funded programmes appears to have been weak. An LSE science blog looked at this Farewell to ‘SCI worship’ reported that ‘indicators based on WoS will not be applied directly in evaluation and funding at any level. An alternative citation index with Chinese characteristics and international influence will be established’. And there will also be a ‘new focus on novelty, scientific value, research integrity, innovation potential and societal outcomes will replace the “paper only” orientation in panel evaluations’. This change will include an effort to encourage the publication of quality Publications in Chinese academic journals. This reflects an appreciation of the problem of quality and productivity as originality in Chinese research science.
Basic research is generally defined as research activities “performed without thought of practical ends. It results in general knowledge and an understanding of nature and its laws. Kenneth Arrow and other economists regard it as a public good or merit good that the market will not provide. Basic research generated positive externalities and social and economic benefits that are not captured by market prices. This gives rise to a market failure that invites public subsidies to remedy it. This point was made in 1945 to President Trueman by Vannevar Bush in his report Science––The Endless Frontier summarising his experience in US science in wartime and the Manhattan Project in particular.
Scientists need freedom to develop their own research interests. There needs to be different centres of research excellence that are funded on the understanding that benefits arise from unplanned serendipity. Overly prescriptive direction of research efforts and complex competitive bidding processes for research grants can hinder the freedom of thought needed for new ideas. Aruhan Bai et al conclude the lack of support for basic science both in terms of money and a supportive culture ‘remains one of the persistent challenges for the country to level up its original innovation capability (yuanshi chuangxin), i.e., the capability to conduct ground-breaking scientific work, such as the scientific breakthrough that can lead to a Nobel Prize’.
Official Chinese attempts to remedy some of these perceived deficiencies
President Xi has set out several bold ambitions for Chinese science. The CCP leadership aims to turn the country into the global science superpower by 2050. It has also made changes in policy directed at achieving this. These include new funding organisations and research executive agencies, modelled on European organisations. Their purpose would be better management and to attempt to reduce the systemic inefficiencies, fragmentation, and waste of funding that has been apparent in Chinese science.
The Made in China 2025 initiative announced in 2015 to reduce reliance on Western technology. It is modelled on Germany’s Industrie 4.0, and is intended to bring together all existing policies across related fields that relate to ‘strategic emerging industries, such as robotics and AI’ and targeted priorities in automation, IT, robotics, AI. Under President Xi, Chinese science has continued to suffer from bottom-up basic research being overshadowed by the public policy concentration to pursue innovation in niche, preselected areas, priorities that are decided in a top-down manner. In the 14th Five Year Plan (2021-2025) for the first time an overt attempt was made to correct the neglect of basic science, the plan called for the formulation of a ten-year action programme and the share of basic research spending in the overall R&D budget to increase to at least 8 percent. The Chinese Government also plans to improve the quality of its universities and their academic research. This includes attracting foreign scientists to come to work in China, particularly scientists of Chinese origin.
Growing international caution about aspects Chinese research practice
The end of ‘Learning from the West’? Trends in China’s contemporary science policy by Andrea Braun Střelcová, Stephanie Christmann-Budian, and Anna L. Ahlers published by the Lise Meitner Research Group China in the Global System of Science at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science look at these changes in Chinese science policy. They identify several challenges for Chinese science. While it has become internationally salient with the several high-profile achievements such as the launch of the FAST radio-telescope in Guizhou, the Tianhe supercomputers, exploration programs on the Moon and Mars, there are concerns about the ethical regulation of Chinese research, not least in relation Jiankui’s gene editing of babies with a CRISPR technology. There is growing international unease about ‘the extent to which China’s unprecedented scientific rise was driven by unfair, unethical or even illegal practices, have become more prominent in recent years.’
Renaissance of party ideology and nationalism in Chinese science policy
Under President Xi leadership there has been a reassertion of the Communist Party’s primacy over all aspects of Chinese life and culture including science and academia. As the Max Plank researchers note ‘soberly worded technocratic policy documents issued by the State Council and the Ministries of Science & Technology and Education are, with increasing frequency and vehemence accompanied by blazing statements and speeches by which the Communist Party – in keeping with the overall tone of the moment – asserts its dominance over academia and stresses its ambition to determine the direction of research and teaching’.
The paper notes the overt ideological nationalism involved – ‘ideological training and adherence to the Party line is monitored more systematically than ever since the start of the reform era. The Party-state not only predefines research themes, it also sends warnings regarding those it sees as detrimental to the national interest. Scientists and scholars are called upon to help weave the “China Dream'' in the “New Era,” and to excel globally—while not forgetting their affiliation with the “motherland” in whose interest they compete’. The authors point out that the Chinese ‘leadership continuously encourages the creation of national characteristics in science, including the building of “Chinese theory,” and world-class universities “with Chinese characteristics.”’ While China maintains its commitment to international science, ‘the juridification of national rules for international academic exchange and collaboration that were formerly handled relatively loosely establishment of government centres for the control of scientific data (export), further backed by the general Export Control Law 202), the Cyber Security Law 2017 run counter to this’. The paper asks ‘is China’s science policy attempting to end “learning from the West”.
China is emphasising under President Xi the top-down science agenda that has distinguished Chinese science policy since the 1980s. The lack of transparency, the increased emphasis of the primacy of the party and the closed notion of Chinese science as opposed to any other science will impede Chinese innovation and the development of a genuinely ground breaking indigenous Chinese science base.
Trump and Biden Administration’s attempts at the scientific and technological containment of China
The Trump administration effectively decided to cut China off from US suppliers and technology. Some Chinese industry leaders were not worried by the ban initially as it only applies to technologies that are considered to be ‘uniquely’ capable of producing semiconductors at 10 nanometers in size or below. China has in practice faced heavy pressure on the self-reliability of China's technology industry as a whole. China is currently estimated to be at least two generations that is to say four years behind the chip manufacturers in the US. That is behind US corporations such as Apple, Google, Nvidia, Intel and Qualcomm.
Haider Khan’s analysis is that ‘China is firmly on its way towards forming a SECENIS for the 4th industrial revolution. Among other things, this has led to a new model for indigenous platform economy, which will not effectively be blocked by the US measures maintained by the Biden administration. As Richard Suttmeier suggests in Chinese Science Policy at a Crossroads ‘US efforts to decouple from China’s innovation system could end up making China more independent and more capable’. Moreover, while commentators have drawn attention to poor evaluation, scepticism about the quality of the quantity of research, Caroline Wagner’s research suggests that Chinese published research is of increasing quality and novelty. It may turn out, however, that any impediment to scientific progress in China may eventually come from the handicaps applied to Chinese science by China’s own deliberate autarky and desire to subject science to an ideological framework where politics trumps scholarship in the interests of nationally determined Chinese science.
Conclusion
The achievement of Chinese science and technology is palpable. The capacity that China has displayed in catching up since 1978 is hugely impressive. Its distinguishing feature has been the diffusion of technology to innovative manufacturing production, taking existing science and technology and applying it. In many respects it is a lesson in the way economies can prosper without a strong domestic basic science base if they are open to international trade and applying foreign science and innovation. Japan in the post-war years displayed similar economic progress on the back of limited genuine science innovation. Whether the Biden administration’s effort of technological containment will have any effect on China’s continued progress is not clear. Not least because the fundamental rationale for public policy supporting science is that much of it is non-rivalrous and non-excludable. Whether China will be able to make comprehensive progress on the sort of radical indigenous innovation that is associated with strong fundamental basic research is yet to be shown. Yet the starting ingredients appear to be in place.
Warwick Lightfoot
23 July 2023
Warwick Lightfoot is an economist and was Special Adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer between 1989 and 1992.
This note drew heavily on The end of ‘Learning from the West’? Trends in China’s contemporary science policy by Andrea Braun Střelcová, Stephanie Christmann-Budian, and Anna L. Ahlers published by the Lise Meitner Research Group China in the Global System of Science at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 2002 Evolution and Features of China’s Central Government Funding System for Basic Research by Aruhan Bai, Cong Wu, Keija Yang New Frontiers December 2021 and Becoming a Techno-Industrial Power: Chinese Science and Technology Policy Joel R. Campbell published by Brookings Issues in Technology Innovation 23 April 2013, Geoeconomics, China, Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Future by Haider Kahn 2023 published by University Library of Munich, Germany.