The State of Chinese Science

We must regard science and technology as our primary productive force, talent as our primary resource, and innovation as our primary driver of growth.

—Xi Jinping, October 20221

Chinese science is a force to be reckoned with. The Chinese Academy of Science has ranked first on the Nature Index since it began measuring national scientific output in 2014, and Chinese institutions in aggregate have become the biggest single contributor to peer-reviewed scientific publications.2 Considering that preliminary research often begins years before entering academic literature, such a lagging indicator shows that we are already are in the throes of China’s planned transition from a low-cost export and property-driven economy to a consumption/innovation economy. If climate change is considered the most significant global problem to be solved, we could understand the Chinese economy as reorienting itself to become the solution by using technology-driven means to generate new forms of energy and allow for decarbonization in China and globally. Given the deep historical entanglement of Western societies with carbon and fossil fuels, this shift alone has the potential to alter the global order. It could reposition the Chinese state—as well as the state more generally—as a central driver of technological, social, and cultural transformation. For these reasons, science and technology has become the highest priority for China’s leadership—and its competitors abroad.

China itself contains a diversity of approaches to economic growth, from national capitalism in Guangdong province, to multinational capitalism in Shanghai, to straightforward political administration in Beijing. That diversity has led to regions with distinct approaches to scientific development, in the way that state institutions interact with scientists and through access to foreign capital and technology: Beijing, whose role in Chinese science is an expression of state-driven planning with a cluster of research institutions in the Zhongguancun district3; the Yangtze Delta area of Shanghai and adjacent provinces, with corporate R&D centers for biotech and semiconductors as well as hybrid research institutions such as Shanghai Tech and Hangzhou’s West Lake University; and the “Greater Bay Area” of Hong Kong (supplying capital), Guangzhou (supplying labor), and Shenzhen (supplying technology and engineering). As proof of economic concept, companies such as BYD and Huawei command tens of thousands of STEM PhDs in a rich research ecosystem bolstered by Shenzhen’s SUSTech. If the US or Europe want to build a different sort of political economy, what can they learn from China’s approach to development? If we observe China’s changes from the outside, what sort of human subjectivity do we see being created there? Can science and technology liberate us, or just imprison us in new ways?

It’s difficult to make the perfect recipe for innovation, but most in the world can agree that government support, at least indirectly, helps. The presence of strong institutions, like universities and hospitals, supplies many brilliant thinkers; large amounts of money, either provided by investors or by governments, is needed. Then there’s an element of luck. Focused on outcomes above all, China today tolerates many different approaches to technological development—if it works, it works. That is the state of play today, but funding and political support for research is multiplying through new laboratories and entire communities being built around research, not to mention immense solar panel fields, wind turbines, batteries, storage units, and large-scale research facilities like particle accelerators, massive telescopes, and quantum computing labs. Beijing’s Changping district, for example, is trying to create a new biotech research hub. As China’s population ages, the state is trying to develop new technologies for health care and aging.

Crucially, from its research settings to its funding structures and the society that the technologies are used in, China’s model has an intentionality and degree of planning that makes it different from the model—or lack thereof—dominant in the West since the advent of neoliberalism. Whether compared to the Cold War USA of the RAND Corporation, or even to the USSR, science in China is driven by the state and central planning. In that sense, it does in fact make sense to talk about “China” doing this or that, making plans and carrying out actions with a high level of intentionality that would be hard to ascribe to the US, or even Silicon Valley.

Heavy government subsidies for research should not be unfamiliar to many countries in the West where cultural funding comes largely from the state. In China, government support of culture is widespread and takes many forms, most if not all of which is what the US government would call propaganda. Xi Jinping calls it “telling China’s story well.”4 There’s a sense that China would even be willing to pick up the tab for cultural institutions in the West facing austerity budgets, given a meaningful quid pro quo of some kind. China’s cultural sector is both regulated (censored) by the government and funded extensively both in the country and overseas, primarily targeting the Belt and Road Initiative countries. Chinese universities are 100 percent government funded and tuition (including for foreigners) is subsidized. Art museums have had a boom, built either directly by the government or in tandem with a complex web of incentives on taxes, regulation, and so forth. And there are conscious and prominent efforts by China to forge partnerships with European institutions, of which Centre Pompidou is the most obvious, with its connection to the West Bund Museum Project in Shanghai.

The three centers mentioned above (Beijing, the Yangtze Delta region, and the Greater Bay Area) occupy distinct positions vis-à-vis multinational research flows, the Chinese state and military, and China’s homegrown tech ecosystem. One also finds research clusters of note elsewhere: Kunming for botany and biology, Harbin for engineering fields like hypersonics and avionics (the Harbin Institute of Technology has the rare distinction of being sanctioned by the US government), Changsha for chemistry, and Hefei’s USTC, with its quantum computing research program, to name just a few examples. While scientific research excellence is concentrated where population and capital are, the vision of a high-tech society spans the country, from the spaceships launched from dusty Gansu deserts to the high-tech agriculture in Xinjiang and northern Heilongjiang to Guizhou’s “big data valley” and the battery company CATL in southeastern Fujian. Scientific research and commercial use cases are seen as a way to enhance local economies and drive economic productivity, even as scientific prowess becomes a matter of national security in the broader geopolitical competition with the US-led West. From “each according to their ability” to “each according to their need,” the shared national project of scientific modernization breaks down into specific tasks, giving different regions a sense of participation in the national story as well as potential sources of economic vitality. It’s all part of the plan.

Is China Really Communist?

China’s approach to science has a precedent in the Soviet Union, which structurally corresponds to Chinese institutions in many ways, including the key role of the Chinese Academy of Science as a postrevolutionary institution.5 Chinese scientists may have been educated in Anglo-America, but the funding structures are centralized, state-driven, and ideological (to the extent that the confrontation with the US over tech is ideological) in a way reminiscent of the Soviet Union. Though we often remember the USSR’s repression holding back its scientists, the Soviet education system strongly emphasized STEM, and its governing structure was nevertheless orientated towards technological breakthrough. Compared to China’s model, if the USSR’s science had an imbalance, it was its skew towards basic science and away from applied science. Lacking market mechanisms to popularize technology for consumer application, Soviet innovations often never made it out of the military-industrial complex. For China, as analyst Dan Wang has observed, the issue is reversed: China’s strong manufacturing ecosystem is great at recreating existing technologies at scale—whether solar panels, pharmaceuticals, or semiconductors—by leveraging China’s vast consumer market.6 Rarer are pure science breakthroughs that challenge the frontiers of science but have no clear immediate application.

China’s contemporary economy might be best understood as a dialectical synthesis of a centrally directed economy—a plan decided and articulated by a sovereign in a way that has no analogy in the West—and Western market mechanisms, which do not determine the path of travel, the group traveling, nor the reasons for the trip, but do enable a more rapid and comfortable journey. To some extent, China’s governance has a reality check built into it; if semiconductor researchers don’t come up with semiconductors, they run into problems. Deng Xiaoping quoted the Chinese idiom “实事求是,” “seek truth from facts,” to emphasize that development should be something tangible and of concrete benefit. In this sense, the Chinese economy as it relates to the scientific breakthroughs of the future embodies the approach of “Chinese learning for essence, Western logic for application,” or “中体西用” as advocated by intellectuals of the late Qing dynasty, literally “Chinese body, Western medicine.” The Western techniques that China assiduously studied are being put in the service of a very different civilizational logic.

Four-segment panorama of Pudong, Shanghai, China, 2017. License: CC BY-SA 4.0.

Timber transported from a woodlot in the hills of Zhangpu County, Fujian, China, 2015. License: CC BY-SA 3.0.

Four-segment panorama of Pudong, Shanghai, China, 2017. License: CC BY-SA 4.0.

Boris Groys has described China as an “anti-modern modernity” that adopts technology fundamentally as a defensive carapace.7 Faced with colonization, Chinese elites decided that if you can’t beat them, join them—but also find some secret part of yourself that you can hide away from the world and protect from change. There is no “Western” science according to most elite research institutions in the US, UK, and Europe staffed by people from around the world who perceive themselves as researching universal questions. Chinese science, on the other hand, is Chinese because it is a tool China uses to fend off absorption into somebody else’s cosmos, even as China itself is internally transformed in the process.

Although directed by a central-planning state formally setting goals within five-year plans, including scientific goals, China’s current model deviates from the Soviet model. Rather than in state-owned enterprises, organizations structured as corporations such as Huawei are where breakthrough applied science (e.g., science with immediate use applications, for example the creation of a semiconductor) is done. But applied science happens in tandem with basic science (more abstract research oriented towards theoretical questions) in research institutes directed by the government (for example, Chinese research into atomic fusion or quantum computing). In other words, the Chinese model sees profit-driven companies put in the service of goals defined by the state. Those companies later seek to realize their advances in the form of consumer products. Once the technology-driven organization has developed a successful product, the subsidies and state support are withdrawn. For example, China’s government supported the development of EV cars for many years, but has withdrawn subsidies in recent years, since the technology has developed; all that’s left is administration and marketing, which the market can handle. Today, the state is helping to finance flying cars and self-driving cars instead, still with an eye to public infrastructure. This financing could be subsidies, regulatory assistance, tax breaks, free land, or any other manner of support. In Shenzhen, the government built a subway station to Huawei HQ called “Huawei station.” Science is the guest and China is the hotel. Or, as in Hegel’s aesthetics, they try to create a temple for the spirit to enter.

In the Soviet Union, state-owned entities did research without seeking market applications. The United States, although it has powerful funding bodies like the National Institutes of Health, doesn’t centrally direct a plan of research. The market handles that, but the market, unlike the state, seeks to maximize profits. One could say that the Chinese state is trying to harness market forces in the service of the communist project, a goal that right-wing populists in America and Europe might envy, from Peter Thiel to “Fully Automated Luxury Communism.”8 While some debate whether China’s state acts with the interests of its population in mind, it nevertheless has a concrete set of priorities beyond the profit motive—what financiers call “values-based investing” towards social, environmental, and political goals. When Canada’s state pension fund divests from tobacco companies or fossil fuel companies, it is passively channeling capital away from these fields; when China’s state deliberately invests in emerging technologies, it is actively pushing their advance. While the resulting Chinese technological model appears to be a hybrid, the state is hierarchically superior to the market. Even the biggest IPOs, like that of Alibaba’s Ant Group, can be canceled. You could say that the state is the protagonist of the economic story, and like a protagonist, makes mistakes and experiences successes on its way.

China has a fundamental tension: it is run by conservatives who want to control everything to prevent change, but they are also forced to embrace change defensively against the US. Like an alcoholic who desperately and anxiously must match drinks at a bar with his rival, there is always the risk of losing control and destroying oneself. One might say that in assuming it knows more than the collective consciousness of the stock market, the Chinese government is showing hubris. On the other hand, one might say that the market itself is skittish, shortsighted, and prone to getting overly excited about phenomena that will never be realized as useful products; the recent AI boom in the US might become yet another example of the bubble-to-bust cycle.

Companies in China such as Huawei and BYD are often under sanction in the Eurozone and the US precisely for their relationship with the Chinese state. They have invested large sums of (the government’s) money in research and development to create globally significant businesses that challenge the existing economic order while upgrading China’s economic profile and ensuring ongoing support at the highest levels. Key fields include synthetic biology, semiconductors and their downstream AI applications, quantum computing, and a wide range of somewhat obscure but highly significant fields in environmental and earth science—the drivers of innovations in batteries and other aspects of the energy transition.

At the same time, there’s no bureaucracy as overpowering or tedious as the Chinese bureaucracy. In endless meetings of formulaic give-and-take discussions around cups of tea, government officials and scientists discuss quantum technology, new-generation artificial intelligence, integrated circuits, brain science, and—if you’re dozing off already, you wouldn’t make it as a CCP official because the list goes on.9 This means, for example, that Chinese AI is regulated by “doomers,” and Chinese synthetic biology is funded by people who constantly ask: Why are we doing this? When can we see practical returns on investment in pig farming? Chinese science is always on a tight leash and must always serve the people. Chinese governance is depoliticized from within, because there isn’t any room to discuss whether something should be a priority or not. If politics is the contestation of different views and ways of being, there isn’t much happening. Rather, the politics is in the choice, for example, between an ethnically Chinese scientist remaining in the US because he likes life in California, or returning to China because the funding is great and he worries that the incoming Trump administration might relaunch the “China Initiative.” The resulting atmosphere is distinctly corporate—business suits, PowerPoint presentations, men writing down ideas in notebooks in air-conditioned office suites.

Much like China’s economy more broadly, Chinese science takes place in the hothouse environment of a market economy with distinct corporations geared towards profit and listing on stock exchanges like Shanghai’s STAR market (especially for tech companies), with unlimited fertilizer, heat lamps, and protection from adverse weather provided by the state. Although the organizations that grow in this soil are distorted and unusual—not unlike how a bonsai tree is different from a tree—Chinese companies are different from companies that emerge from capitalism. Constantly pruned, trimmed, and forced to grow in a certain direction, they also get results in a way reminiscent of the glory days of the American military-industrial complex. Chinese investments in research are growing both in absolute terms and as a percentage of GDP. Every indication is that this growth will continue, with technology posed as the critical factor for the nation’s development. As China emerges as the world’s largest manufacturer of automobiles—a direct consequence of its superior technology in EV batteries—and begins to get regulatory approval for cancer drugs and other crucial biotech breakthroughs in overseas markets, it becomes clear that Chinese science is not just a matter of socialist utopianism but also of China’s ongoing economic development.10 For Americans like Marco Rubio, this threatens to displace the American political model, bringing the Chinese political model in its place. To some extent, for China, that is the point.

The scientific research practices of the Soviet Union have a complex legacy, one that in many ways is the opposite of Chinese science’s pragmatic focus today. Mirroring the society from which it emerged, Soviet science imagined all things to exist in the context of each other, in networked forms, whether in the prototypes of the internet that never found consumer application, or in the ecological and biological thought of Vladimir Vernadsky and his followers. Soviet thinkers like Lev Gumilev often seemed to be theoreticians above all else, proposing compelling pseudo-scientific ideas, but with no real reference to empirical data or formal experiments. Scientists from the Soviet bloc dispersed after the collapse of the USSR, especially to California and Israel, where they have seeded market-funded technologies driven by the idea of networks, like Google for example. In a sense, what China has sought to do is to create a similar combination, bringing top-down political thought on ecology, computing, and biology into a competitive and marketized sphere. The Chinese Communist Party has studied at great length the fall of the USSR, and its adoption of market practices and orientation to outcomes rather than processes has been the pragmatic result. The EU never put tariffs on Lada despite its endless subsidies. The fact that it puts tariffs on Chinese EV cars reflects the fact that Chinese science translates into competitive consumer products, which the Soviets were never capable of. Through not only production, but also consumption, human resources are China’s key resource.

What Future Are Chinese Scientists Building?

Scientific research boomed during the era of high globalization, whereas today’s research papers splinter into geopolitical blocs. When the University of Virginia and Tsinghua University collaborated on research about what climate policies are most effective, Fox News seized on it, attacking UVA for collaborating with Xi Jinping’s alma mater.11 The issue went all the way up to the Virginia governor’s office. For American China hawks, “Chinese” seems to be an ethnic category, as a wave of neo-McCarthyism sweeps US scientific institutions. Meanwhile, China invites American and European scientists to China as long as they don’t transgress political red lines.12

Whatever happens next in the US, China’s path is clear: double down on science as the solution to almost all problems. Prompted by the first Trump administration’s ethnic-profiling “China Initiative,” Chinese scientists have been returning from the US to China.13 At the same time, many Russian scientists are moving to Chinese institutions and aiding in breakthroughs in quantum computing and other fields. Perhaps more intriguingly, China is actively funding PhD researchers from the Global South, meaning that many of the African scientists of the future will have gotten their start in China. China is the second-largest funder of scientific research, with 434 billion USD invested by the government in 2022, a figure that rose by 2 percent in 2023. At the same time, the peril of such reliance on science is clear when the CPC warns, “Don’t forget the original intention,” reflecting the nervousness of contemporary Chinese conservatives facing an atomized society of childless nerds in urbanized regions playing with their phones all day, far from the intention of Mao.14

Chinese leader Xi Jinping with US President Joe Biden at the seventeenth G20 in Bali, November 2022. License: Public domain.

It’s forecast that Chinese STEM graduates will be double the number in the US by 2025.15 Of course, many STEM graduates from US universities are themselves from China, and many return there to work; increasingly, elite students from China prefer to study in China anyways.16 Some describe Chinese research environments as a feudal hierarchy, with graduate students expected to do whatever their advisers ask. At the same time, many elite Chinese scientists, including administrators who are themselves CCP members, were trained at American institutions like Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, or the NIH. Best practices from overseas are increasingly adopted with the only nonnegotiable Chinese characteristic of retaining research breakthroughs for domestic use.

With the rise of scientifically trained government officials like Shanghai party secretary Chen Jining, an environmental scientist of some note before his political career began, it’s not exactly right to say that being a CPC member is important to advance in a scientific career in China. It might be more accurate to say that the structure of the CPC has been influenced by the large number of members and leaders with a STEM background, which leads to a certain analytical and problem-solving approach. People with science/technical training are rising in the ranks, whereas previous generations such as those that surrounded Mao had more literary or aesthetic inclinations.17 The best proof is the simple fact that many in China’s rising leadership class, such as Chen, made careers using science and technology to solve concrete problems such as air pollution in Beijing in an empirically observable way. There’s no political debate about whether air pollution is a worthy price to pay for retaining working-class jobs in Hebei, just an application of carbon capture and other solutions to solve the problem in a technical way.

Boris Groys commented during the 11th Shanghai Biennial in 2016 that the land of philosopher kings proposed in Plato’s Republic could be compatible with society being seen as a math or engineering problem, one to be resolved by the manipulation of numbers and matter via scientific and mathematic calculation, rather than a political problem to be resolved by protest and debate. The implicit alternative would be how institutions like Harvard and Stanford face major tensions over political views expressed by administrators, even causing the firing of Harvard’s president. In fact, ideology is in charge in US science institutions. Would a Chinese semiconductor research lab employ a Taiwanese national? They would happily, and are already actively poaching them.

Public exhibitions in China have shifted from theoretical and aesthetic questions towards an emphasis on science, whether in selfie-oriented projects like teamlab, in the recent Shanghai Biennial “Cosmos Cinema,” or in individual artists like He Zike, not to mention the burgeoning genre of science fiction. At the same time, discussion of Chinese science in the Western art world has been sporadic or voyeuristic, adopting a childish insouciance about a matter that is, for China, a very important topic—the most important of all, judging by government policy since the twentieth CPC.18 As science and scientific innovation increasingly occupy the culture’s space for futurism and utopianism, artists in China like Cao Fei and Cui Jie, and overseas like Lawrence Lek, increasingly situate their work within a Chinese futurism. In this Chinese future, Chinese people are mostly the same, but their built environment, with its technological enhancements, is different.

The logic of blocs has led China to emerge as a center not only for Chinese scientists but also for scientists from across Eurasia and the Global South, even as Western countries such as Germany receive pressure to cut off scientific collaborations with China.19 In short, the “new Cold War” takes place on the frontiers of science, stifling both scientific advances and cooperation on climate change and driving increased research funding from the Chinese military-industrial complex.

The original Cold War contained many tragedies and missed opportunities: chief among them, the failure to connect ecological thinking from Vernadsky to US scientists. Vernadsky, who arguably thought of the “Gaia theory” of James Lovelock fifty years earlier in his “noosphere,” seems to have foreseen some of the ecological problems we experience today. Biotech advances that are only now being explored were first hinted at by Nikolai Fedorov. In a different world, the worst of climate change could have been averted far earlier. Opportunities for different sorts of computation, or a different sort of internet, could have emerged. An alternate history of scientific collaboration in the service of a greater humanity can only be speculative, but there’s a lot to speculate about.

At the root of this topic is a question thought to have been disposed of in the late 1980s: Can a planned economy innovate like a capitalist economy can? While China has market mechanisms, China’s scientific advances are clearly the outcome of a central government plan with attached funding, not an invisible hand. The answer must be that innovation is a process. Chinese innovation provides low-cost food and energy with the goal of bringing poor people into middle income. American innovation innovates planlessly, or with the sole plan of generating shareholder returns—even in the example of Elon Musk’s extensive Chinese interests—leading to flashy frontier science that struggles to find applications among the poor people who are the majority of humans alive today. In that sense, Chinese science and American science are trying to achieve very different things.

Ya-Wen Lei of Harvard calls the new Chinese panopticon a gilded cage, but as far as one can tell, most of the Chinese population embraces the brave new world.20 This world includes the universal use of digital payments systems, e-commerce taken to an extent unheard of elsewhere, constant use of the communications platform WeChat, omnipresent surveillance, and the most sophisticated industrial system in the world—which is actively being disrupted by robotics and AI. While China isn’t at the frontiers of basic scientific research in all fields, it is certainly at the frontier of its application to everyday life as inexpensive and functional technologies available to a wide base of ordinary people. The medium is the method.

The overwhelming emphasis on science in Chinese society and its education system means that analyzing and discussing science and technology has become central to the culture today, much as explorations of urbanism and cultural change were a generation ago. If a decade ago the Chinese economy manufactured products for the West, and elites sought to join or access the West via emigration, education, and real estate, today the dynamic parts of Chinese society are aimed at creating popularly accessible technology to improve the lives of Chinese people—and then export it to the Global South.21 As the energy transition gains speed, the future of socialism may be very different from the history of the USSR. This time, it may succeed in building the future.