China wants to win the race in science with Manhattan Project-like campaigns. It may not work, some experts warn

In this context, it is more likely that qiang is used to express the urgency of the task, the rush to get to the top of the global scientific and technological race faster, rather than anything as nefarious as the word’s other meaning.

To realise this vision, CAS’ subordinate research institutes have been called on to “take advantage of the new ‘whole-nation’ system” by innovating the way their resources, including talent and platforms, are structured, according to Hou.

CAS is the world’s largest government research organisation, with more than 100 research institutes, 130 state-level key laboratories or engineering centres and 69,000 full-time staff. Along with major institutions such as Germany’s Max Planck Society, CAS was among the top five in a Nature Index that measured the research output of academic institutions between February 1, 2022 and January 31, 2023.

The “whole-nation system”, or juguo tizhi, refers to mobilising the resources of the entire country to achieve specific goals, such as gold medals in sporting events, key scientific breakthroughs or economic targets.

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But while the centralised system has produced impressive gains, and it has been hailed as one of China’s main institutional advantages over the US, some scholars have questioned whether it continues to work well today.

Still, Xi’s call remains paramount. An annual CAS meeting in December, which set the agency’s agenda for the coming year, determined that the “overall goal, task and requirement” was taking the lead in science and technology.

Hou highlighted that, under Xi’s instructions, focusing on national strategic needs as well as global frontiers and accelerating the occupation of a number of top positions in science and technology is “a critical mission that the Chinese Communist Party has entrusted to CAS”.

A physicist at the academy surnamed Li, who declined to give his full name due to the sensitivity of the issue, said that almost since the beginning of the geopolitical shift between the West and China – marked by the start of the trade war – CAS has been promoting its role as “a national innovation power that should take on national responsibilities”.

But in recent months, the emphasis on the mission’s political priority has been “unprecedented” within the CAS system, he said, and all branches have held conferences to keep abreast of Beijing’s latest direction.

“I can smell a sense of anxiety in Hou’s talks,” Li said, though he described it as “understandable” given the pressure China is under both to achieve self-sufficiency in cutting-edge technology to counter Western containment and to transform its economy into an innovation-driven one.

Hou Jianguo, head of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is leading the rallying cry to get all parts of CAS working towards making China a world leader in science and technology. Photo: University of Science and Technology of China

Denis Simon, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based think tank, who has been observing China’s science and technology sector for four decades, said Beijing is taking this approach to protect itself into the future.

“Since it can’t rely on easy access to the United States or Europe, the Chinese leadership has gradually realised that it must generate its own basic or fundamental knowledge that is going to feed the long-term trajectory of China’s innovation system,” Simon said.

“Now the leadership is asking the CAS to play a constructive role in looking for special opportunities in the battle.”

In a speech in 2021, Xi outlined some indicators to define what the key areas are, saying they should be relevant to the country’s urgent and long-term needs, and that they are frontiers related to national security and future development.

It is a long list. Areas range from crop seeds, medical products and advanced chips to artificial intelligence, quantum information, space and deep-sea technologies.

Hou set the tone that the sub-institutes, as the basic building blocks of CAS, should base their development positioning and research layout on these needs, and concentrate their talent and other resources on this critical mission to produce a batch of core, original and leading technological innovations.

He also instructed that research projects in the academy should be condensed and organised to revolve around core tasks and avoid being “small and scattered”.

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Historically, China’s ability to pool limited national science and technology resources has yielded astonishing results, especially in high-priority national space and military missions, helping an economically impoverished and technologically backward China build the atomic bomb in 1964 and launch a satellite into space in 1970.

Similarly, the unprecedented mobilisation of people and resources by the US government during the second world war had far-reaching effects. Many wartime discoveries – intended for military use – are now widely used in civilian areas, such as medicine and communications.

In a speech in 2020, however, Xue Lan, a public policy scholar and dean of Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University, warned against unrealistic expectations of this policy.

He said for systematic projects with a clear scientific path, it is an effective way to divide the work and have different teams operate closely together, citing the success of the Human Genome Project as an example.

“But many major challenges entail high uncertainty, and in such circumstances, the whole-nation approach has its limitations,” Xue said. The production of advanced chips, for example, is far beyond specific scientific problems that can be easily solved by relying on national investment; it is a global, highly networked, capital-intensive industry.

While Beijing wants the Chinese scientific community to take a whole-nation approach to its work, complex research, such as in advanced chips, cannot rely on national investment alone. Photo: AP

Richard Suttmeier, who studies science and technology in the dynamics of US-China relations at the University of Oregon, also acknowledged to the Post the complicated landscape for generating large-scale innovation today.

China has become a very complex techno-industrial society, quite different from the early days, he said, and thus it is unclear how “incredibly diverse interests can be efficiently aligned”.

If not implemented properly, Suttmeier said the whole-nation mechanism “has the potential for failures and waste”.

For example, China’s National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund (also known as the Big Fund), has raised US$45 billion since 2014 to fund a number of important projects, some of which have been found to be riddled with financial waste and corruption, and have failed.

Indeed, compared to some national missions, such as China’s manned space programme, many cutting-edge technologies today, including artificial intelligence and quantum computing, are highly relevant to national security, but their sustained innovation is largely driven by the private sector.

There seems to be an inherent contradiction between the new encouragement of curiosity-driven research and the continuing political pressure for research to serve national needs

Richard Suttmeier, University of Oregon

Scientists are also concerned that a mission-driven innovation paradigm may run counter to the nature of scientific inquiry, which is supposed to be granted freedom and time.

“There seems to be an inherent contradiction between the new encouragement of curiosity-driven research and the continuing political pressure for research to serve national needs,” Suttmeier said.

As a scientist, Li echoed these sentiments.

Admittedly, he said, top-down policymaking combined with nationwide resource allocation might be pragmatic for achieving some important goals, such as catching up quickly in the tech war, but it comes at a cost, one of which is the potential loss of diversity in the scientific community.

He noted that there is a tendency for Chinese researchers to be eager to demonstrate that their studies can help solve China’s “neck-choking” problems. But he believes basic research should delve into uncharted territory, even if some of it may seem useless at first.

The risks and rewards as China makes a big push for science and tech

Likening the scientific community to an ecosystem, Li said strong task-oriented management is similar to productive farmland – but wild forests with less interference can thrive and withstand adverse conditions better.

That said, some historians also caution against the persuasive techno-libertarian sentiments that underestimate the role of government in advancing scientific progress.

For instance, in an article published in Wired in 2022, Margaret O’Mara, a professor of history at the University of Washington, disputed the claim that Silicon Valley’s success was purely the result of entrepreneurial hustle, saying that the billions of dollars in federal grants and contracts that poured into a 10-by-10-mile strip of rural California during the Cold War became the foundation of the tech hub.

Citing considerations such as investing at scale, supporting mass education and incentivising private markets to push the technological envelope, she summed it up, saying: “These are things that only governments can do.”

South China Morning Post