China's scientific muscle

Its technological advancement will have global implications

In the past 10 days, China has made two impressive demonstrations of its technological capability. It has put a new space station into orbit, and landed a rover on Mars. It has also demonstrated its disregard for international norms by letting the Long March 5 rocket that carried the space station module to crash in an uncontrolled fashion. A combination of dazzling scientific accomplishment, and the disregard of international opinion, is characteristic of China’s engagement with the world. Many things have changed since the time when “The Great Helmsman” Mao Zedong led the country. But China has always, consistently and determinedly, built scientific muscle. In the 1960s, it created a nuclear arsenal and is now a world leader in fields as diverse as genetic engineering, higher physics, quantum computing and communications, artificial intelligence, and neurosciences. Breakthroughs in such areas have huge implications. Innovations out of China could shape the future. Indeed, new discoveries in genetic research and AI could alter the ethical understanding of what it means to be human.

China has never had a problem with acquiring intellectual property by clandestine means, or through forced technology transfers, via its rare earth policy, for example. But after overcoming the anti-educational horror of the Cultural Revolution, China has also set up excellent scientific and technical institutes. Acquiring STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) capacities accelerated under Deng Xiaoping. Deng created “market communism”: The party would stay in charge; the state would control resources; but wealth creation would be encouraged. STEM could, therefore, be commercialised. This works better than the Soviet model of focusing government resources on research and ignoring commercial opportunity.

By the mid-1990s, China was a manufacturing powerhouse. It leveraged labour arbitrage to export a basket of sophisticated goods. It also acquired the associated intellectual property (IP). Where technological transfer could not be enforced, hackers gained access to sensitive information. This IP “acquisition” was coupled with much original research within China itself. China makes its own stealth warplanes and aircraft carriers. It can destroy satellites in orbit. It also makes millions of smartphones and builds ports, telecom networks, roads and power systems abroad. The R&D comes from a multi-pronged system. The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) oversees some 120-odd institutes of blue sky science. There are also government research institutes under specific ministries. Then, there are the univer­si­ties, which encourage collaborations with industrial enterprises, which also do their own research. By some estimates, company-based R&D investment accounts for up to 80 per cent of the known investment in STEM. And finally, there’s the opa­que defence R&D establishment, which seamlessly co-opts what it wants from other R&D sectors and the People’s Liberation Army also finances outsourced research.

While this is a top-down system, it generates profits too and it meshes with the ideological compulsions of China’s policymakers. China is not only a superpower which can flex its STEM muscles at need; it is also the most sophisticated of surveillance state which tightly controls what its citizens say or do. This is in contrast to other leading scientific nations, which tend to pay lip service at the very least, to IP rights, and human rights. Can research in STEM flourish indefinitely under the oversight of an authoritarian regime that bans certain kinds of thoughts? China’s future, and the future of the world, will depend on the answer to that question.