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The next science superpower?
Maybe not, but it will certainly try, writes James Wilsdon.
China in 2007 is the world’s largest technocracy: a country ruled by scientists and engineers who believe in the power of new technologies to deliver social and economic progress. The Chinese science and innovation system has its weaknesses but one thing it excels at is the rapid mobilisation of resources. And right now, the country is at an early stage in the most ambitious programme of research investment since John F Kennedy embarked on the moon race.
The headline numbers are enough to make anyone pause for thought. Since 1999, China’s spending on research and development (R&D) has increased by more than 20 per cent each year. In 2005, it reached 1.3 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP), up from 0.7 per cent in 1998.
Next generation know how: schoolchildren in Henan province test a robot they have made
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In December 2006 the OECD surprised policy-makers by announcing that China had moved ahead of Japan for the first time, to become the world’s second highest R&D investor after the US.
In January 2006 China’s Science and Technology Congress approved a new ‘medium- to long-term science and technology development programme’. This starts by acknowledging that while manufacturing remains crucial, it will not be sufficient to carry China through the next stage in its development. The plan mentions a series of “acute challenges”, including the availability of energy and resources, levels of environmental pollution, and weak capabilities for innovation. These can be overcome only through a new focus on “independent innovation” (zizhu chuangxin).
Certain slogans and concepts have defined different periods in China’s history: Zizhu chuangxin looks set to become another period-defining mantra. Policy-makers have decided that independent innovation is what China needs. It is no longer enough to import or copy high-end technologies from the US and Europe.
Yet you don’t need an MBA from Harvard Business School to spot a potential weakness in the government’s approach. China’s success over the past 20 years has relied on the architecture of bureaucracy and central planning. Can the same approach be used now to encourage innovation, experimentation and change?
One person who is well aware of these contradictions is Ze Zhang, the vice-president of Beijing University of Technology. We met him when he had just returned from the general assembly of the Chinese Association for Science and Technology (CAST). “Everyone there was talking constantly of innovation,” he told us. “But I think we are only just beginning to understand what this word really means. It’s like gears grinding against one another. There’s a lot of tension between the push for innovation and the capacity of the political system to deliver it.”
Since the new plan was finalised, Chinese policy-makers have become more willing to debate how it should be implemented. The readiness of scientists such as Ze Zhang to speak out perhaps reflects a more open climate. Adam Segal, a China expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, a US think tank, detects a different tone
in recent debates: “There is a growing and refreshing scepticism among policy-makers in China about how much policy and planning can actually deliver in relation to innovation. There’s no longer a simple dichotomy between top-down and bottom-up.”
A new techno-nationalism?
Yet while there are some encouraging signs of reform and openness within the Chinese innovation system, there is also a growing undercurrent of techno-nationalism, which finds expression in efforts to set new technological standards, in trophy projects such as human space flight and in the desire for a Chinese scientist to win a Nobel Prize.
Over the next decade, as China’s science and innovation capabilities grow rapidly, a central question is whether techno-nationalism will gather momentum, or whether the countervailing impulse towards global collaboration and exchange of new ideas – what we might call ‘cosmopolitan innovation’ – will prove stronger.
Science and technology is one of a number of arenas in which China faces choices about how proactively to engage with international projects, networks and institutions. The question for the UK and Europe is how to strengthen both the political case and the practical mechanisms to underpin closer integration and collaboration with China, to the benefit of both sides.
The alternative is to turn inwards. It is important to recognise that this is not only a danger for China, but also for Europe, where the speed of economic and social change under globalisation can breed fear and suspicion of new rivals as much as it encourages collaboration.
In the new geography of science, it is those who are good at sharing, rather than protecting knowledge, who will flourish. Rather than shoring up our scientific defences, our priority should be developing better mechanisms for orchestrating research across international networks, and supporting scientists in Europe and China to collaborate in pursuit of global research goals.
It is worth reflecting on the parallels between present fears about China and those that surrounded Japan in the 1970s. Then, as now, all the talk was of a new technological superpower that threatened European and US jobs. This is not to underplay elements of competitive challenge, which clearly exist. But as much as it is a competitor, China is also a trading partner, a potential research collaborator and a huge market for European goods and services.
Science is caught up in a bigger unfolding debate about the pace, scale and direction of China’s economic and political reforms. Given the levels of investment and ambition represented by the new 15-year plan, there can be little doubt that China will be a growing force in global science and innovation. But a lot still depends on the playing out of a complicated set of tensions: between the planned economy and the market; the hardware of research infrastructure and the software of culture and ethics; the skills and creativity of the scientific workforce and the entrepreneurialism and networks of returnee scientists from abroad. In the decades to come, China is likely to change science just as much as science changes China.
James Wilsdon is head of science and innovation at Demos and co-author of The Atlas of Ideas (available free at www.demos.co.uk/publications/atlaschina )
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