Behold China's Innovative Golden Age

2025-03-05 12:02:14

(MENAFN- Asia Times) Writing about Trump's chaos every day is exhausting. I'll get back to it tomorrow, but today I'd like to take a short break to write about a civilization that isn't currently tearing itself apart and accelerating its own decline: China.

The 20th century had a bunch of rising powers that all reached their peaks in terms not just of relative military might and economic strength, but of technological and cultural innovation.

These included the United States, Japan, Germany and Russia. So far, the 21st century is a little different, because only one major civilization is hitting its peak right now: China. All the old powers are declining, and India is just beginning to hit its stride.

China's peak is truly spectacular - a marvel of state capacity and resource mobilization never seen before on this planet. In just a few years, China built more high-speed rail than all other countries in the world combined. Its auto manufacturers are leapfrogging the developed world, seizing leadership in the EV industry of the future.

China has produced so many solar panels and batteries that it has driven down the cost to be competitive with fossil fuels - a huge blow against climate change, despite all of China's massive coal emissions, and a victory for global energy abundance.

China's cities are marvels of scale - forests of towering skyscrapers lit up with LEDs, cavernous malls filled with amazing restaurants and shops selling every possible modern convenience for cheap, vast highways and huge train stations.

Even China's policy mistakes and authoritarian overreaches inspire awe and dread - Zero Covid failed in the end, but it demonstrated an ability to control society down to the granular level that the Soviets would have envied.

But it's still an open question whether China will be as creative as the great civilizations of the 20th century. Many people (including myself ) compare early 21st century China to early 20th century America . But by the start of World War 1, Americans had already invented the airplane, the light bulb, the telephone, the record player, air conditioning, the automatic transmission, the machine gun and the ballpoint pen.

And the country had already given rise to jazz music, Hollywood movies, and lots of well-known literature. Japan's cultural explosion came a bit later , but was every bit as impressive.

It's pretty obvious that an autocratic, repressive government stifles cultural creativity. I still expect China's cultural exports and influence to increase as time goes on, due to increased personal wealth and leisure time that make Chinese people feel more free to pursue artistic interests. But everything in the country is heavily censored , which means that the movies and music and video games and TV and art that come out of China will usually tend to be bland, anodyne stuff.1

It's much less clear whether scientific and technological creativity suffers from autocracy, though. Autocrats want to develop science and technology to make their countries strong. They sometimes squelch private entrepreneurs out of fear that an alternative center of power would threaten their rule, but at the same time they tend to direct large amounts of resources toward research and development.

The USSR beat the US to space (twice), and Germany was pretty autocratic for most of its run as the world's leading scientific and technological powerhouse.

Modern China is certainly a very innovative country. Chinese scientists now publish the majority of high-impact papers in fields like chemistry, physics, computer science, materials science, and engineering:

Source: The Economist

The country's true dominance is probably less than depicted in this chart, due to “home bias” in the citations used to measure papers' impact. But even correcting for that bias, China is undeniably a scientific superpower.

China's innovation outside of the laboratory is just as impressive. A vast number of incremental improvements and process innovations allow many Chinese businesses to improve product quality and decrease manufacturing cost much more effectively than their foreign rivals. Without Chinese innovation, most of the manufactured goods we consume would be either lower-quality, more expensive, or both.

In fact, Chinese companies are responsible for most of the nation's research spending . As a result, Chinese companies dominate the global market for a number of high-tech products:

Source: RAND

And in terms of deploying technologies so that people can use them, China is now ahead of most or all of the rest of the world. It has the world's biggest high-speed rail system, one of the world's best 5G cell phone networks , the world's best mobile payments system, the world's best delivery robots , some of the world's most automated factories , and the world's most futuristic cars .

But in terms of actual big scientific and technological breakthroughs - game-changing inventions, theories, and empirical findings - what has China produced in its golden age so far? The answer to this question might not be economically important - it's hard to name an invention that came out of Singapore, and yet it's among the richest countries on Earth. But it's kind of an interesting question nonetheless.

Now, some people argue that big breakthroughs are just less common than they used to be. Some believe the low-hanging fruit of science has already been picked . It's also possible that the much greater competitiveness of today's global scientific enterprise and today's global economy mean that it's harder for a single inventor or discoverer to get far ahead of the pack.

Nevertheless, we have seen a bunch of big breakthroughs and game-changing inventions in the last two decades - AI, generative AI, mRNA vaccines, Crispr, smartphones, reusable rockets, lab-grown meat, self-driving cars and so on. And it's usually not too hard to identify a few researchers or a single company that made the big breakthrough for each one of these.

So what big ones have come out of China in the last decade and a half? First of all, I think it's helpful to differentiate three different types of breakthrough innovation:

Scientific discovery : This is when someone either finds some important empirical result, or invents a new useful theory.

Prototype invention : This is when someone demonstrates some technological functionality in a lab setting.

Commercial invention : This is when a company creates a version of a technology that has sufficient functionality to achieve mass commercialization.

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