USA vs. China Ways (8.1)

Is Science & Technology Now the 1st Productive Force in China?

On August 9, 2021, according to a new CSET (Center for Security and Emerging Technologies) report by Georgetown University, China could graduate nearly twice as many STEM PhDs (about 77,000) as the United States by 2025.

Does this mean China will supersede the US as next super power of science and technologies? Here we want to give this trend some insight.

About 43 years ago when China started its Reform and Openness, its leadership proclaimed that science and technologies should become the 1st productive force in China. Sounds pretty impressive, right? But we need to understand the background of such an announcement.

In general we can categorize science into natural science and social science. After the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took power in 1949, it found out while natural science can be a useful tool, social science can often get off track from CPC’s main ideology — Marxism and Leninism. Even in natural science, it is full of rules and laws that reflect the Western thinking and concepts that CPC often found disturbing.

Consequently science was treated often as a hostile force in China’s politics. The Chinese intellectuals as a group were deemed low in social status and sometimes purged as enemies. Such anti-science and…