A future in which China is the dominant scientific power in the world fills the imagination of leaders in both the East and the West. In Beijing, China has entered its last period of political planning, the 14th Five-Year Plan. Based on good performance in common science and technology indicators and advances in cutting-edge areas such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing and hypersonic flight, China is striving to achieve two of the remaining milestones described. to its 2016 innovation-driven development strategy: to join the top ranks of innovative countries in 2035 and become a “great global scientific power” in 2050.
All of this has encouraged calls for an American response to secure the U.S. leadership position in scientific and technological progress. Countless articles and reports frame it as a new “Sputnik Moment” and a key element of strategic competition between the United States and China. This has led to a number of new policy proposals and initiatives, ranging from increased DoD research spending to the recent debate on China’s competition bill in Congress.
China’s ability to realize these visions depends on its answer to the question any government must ask in its science and innovation policy: “What is the best way to organize and monitor scientific research to achieve the goals? nationals? ” That is, how can the regime better support the scientific research community, nurture scientific talent, and harness the power of S&T to advance national goals?
A recent BluePath Labs report for the Institute of Aerospace Studies of China found that answering these questions may not be as easy as Beijing expects and these fearsome narratives portray. Examining Beijing’s approach to S&T planning, processes, and financing, the research found that while China has made impressive scientific gains in recent years, it continues to suffer from multiple structural problems that hinder its goal of become a self-sufficient innovation. power plant. These include an imbalance between basic scientific research and technological development; a top-down approach that prioritizes party control over effective S&T policy; and a disproportionate, and often self-destructive, approach to quantitative indicators to measure performance.
The first challenge for the Chinese Communist Party is marked by the 19th century circumstances surrounding the origin of modern Chinese thought on science policy. A series of catastrophic defeats in the opium wars showed Chinese leaders the dire consequences of neglecting the development of science and technology. In the Enlightenment Treaty of the Maritime Kingdoms, perhaps the first significant Chinese work on the West, official scholar Wei Yuan proposed the idea of ”learning the skills of foreigners to master them.” The “skills” here referred primarily to “warships, firearms, and methods of training soldiers.” Thus, Western technologies were accepted as a “means” in the service of “national salvation,” leading to a vision of the S&T that was both highly utilitarian — as simply a means to an end — and often falsely equated science with technology.
This utilitarian vision continues to this day, with important implications for China’s science and science policy. One example is an overly strong emphasis on R&D, at the expense of spending on the type of basic and applied science that is fundamental to innovation and scientific advances. In recent years, basic and applied research accounted for 36% of US R&D spending, compared to 17% in China. The estimated total spending on basic and applied research by the United States in 2018 was $ 211.5 billion, roughly four times China’s $ 51 billion. This problem is recognized by CCP leaders. Xi Jinping himself has said that China pays too little attention to basic research to achieve original and transformative scientific and technological advances. However, the imbalance remains in politics and strategy.
In addition, China continues to apply a highly nationalized “nationwide” approach to scientific research, influenced by its top-down Marxist-Leninist culture. This prioritizes party control over S&T policies. Premier Zhou Enlai said, “Science cannot be separated from politics, and it is dominated and governed by politics,” while more recently Xi Jinping has strengthened the Party’s control and leadership over all aspects of politics. S&T ecosystem, declaring that the Party has firm control over S & amp; The policy; T “offers a fundamental political guarantee for the advancement of China’s science, technology and innovation efforts.”
Freedom of research, which is a hallmark of Western scientific research institutions, remains, therefore, an important blind spot for Chinese S&T. Simply put, there is a comparative inability to pursue scientific truth in the direction it can lead, with the promise that technological progress will finally follow.
China’s preference for top-down centralized S&T planning not only stifles innovation, but also means that advances can be programmed through large-scale mobilizations and R&D megaprojects. This is trying to predict the unpredictable. Sure, planning can facilitate technological advances, but scientific advancement is characterized by a embrace of uncertainty. Beijing’s long-term development plans are often hidden and unable to adapt to unexpected scientific advances. This can often leave Chinese researchers one step behind their global peers, who can pivot faster than a 5-year plan.
All of these factors result in a system that is too focused on quantitative S&T indicators for both performance appraisal and staff decisions. While quantitative indicators provide useful metrics for progress, the figures do not always tell the story of a truly successful policy. For example, China has become number one in number of patents and second in journal publications, giving an impression of imminent scientific dominance that can be reported to CCP leaders as well as citing the Western expert. .
But a narrow focus on raw numbers hides a wide range of serious problems. There is the widespread phenomenon of xueshu laji: the “academic rubbish” that takes the form of mountains of useless “garbage papers” produced just to tick a box instead of advancing on the field. In a survey, 93.7 percent of researchers said their primary motivation for publishing is to meet the requirements for promotion. More seriously, it has led to a culture of widespread academic dishonesty, including plagiarism, falsification of results, and the use of personal relationships to gain promotion. In one particularly egregious case, 107 articles in the peer-reviewed cancer journal Tumor Biology were massively withdrawn when it was found that “their reviews had been fabricated and many papers had been produced by paper mills,” as he said. Nature.
The result is a massive inefficiency of science policy. Even according to Chinese government statistics, Beijing has seen a remarkably low return on investment due to the massive amounts it has invested in R&D. For one metric, China’s “transfer and conversion rate” of technology born of government-funded R & D is less than 10%, a fraction of the rate of 40 to 50% of developed countries. This suggests a deficiency in turning research into concrete gains in innovation.
None of this minimizes the great gains in science and technology that China has made over the last generation and will likely do so in the next. In fact, Chinese policymakers have recently begun to recognize and try to improve many of these limitations. They have developed plans to more generously support and fund basic research for the next five years. They have also begun to address China’s faulty research evaluation mechanisms, seeking to stifle harmful publishing practices and improve the overall quality of research.
However, the most important problem can be incorporated into the system. Suggestions for freeing the scientific community from party and bureaucracy influence have been actively ignored, and it is difficult to see how this policy could coexist with China’s increasingly repressive political environment. The authoritarian system also makes it difficult to attract, recruit, and retain researchers from abroad, happy to make China their home, and help create world-class innovation ecosystems the way Silicon Valley grew in the last generation. .
Therefore, it is crucial in any strategic competition not to focus only on the strengths and weaknesses of the Chinese model of science, but also on what they shed light on what it takes to compete with it. Ultimately, human capital is at the center of the competitions of great powers in science. Therefore, U.S. science policy must be designed to attract, support, and retain bright minds, free to pursue the truth wherever it may lead.
Ma Xiu is a senior analyst at BluePath Labs, LLC. This article has been extracted from the research report of BluePath Labs analyst Alex Stone for the Institute of Aerospace Studies of China, Model of Science: Rationale, Players, Issues.
