Around 1760, the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) failed to recognize the world-changing impact of the First Industrial Revolution, which greatly expanded the technological capacities of Western colonial powers, leading to China’s “century of humiliation” under the thumb of foreign aggressors. Since then, a lot of water has passed under the bridge.
Under the leadership of Chairman Mao Zedong, the nation stood up (China 1.0). Under the leadership of paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, the country got richer (China 2.0) through reform and opening-up. Now, under the leadership of President Xi Jinping, the nation is embracing common prosperity (China 3.0) in a steady trajectory toward the nation’s second-centennial goal of national renaissance, to become by 2049 “a modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced and harmonious” with a beautiful ecology.
With the nation’s rapid rise, however, the United States’ anti-China pushback has been intensifying. There is solid bipartisan consensus that a rising China poses an “existential threat” to US world hegemony and other national interests. Under a coordinated mantra of “small yard with high fence” “de-risking”, a host of trade and technological restrictions have been imposed by recent US administrations, including a stranglehold on nano-semiconductor chips and related technologies, hoping to thwart or derail China’s rise.
Under President Xi’s directive on technological self-reliance, China is beginning to narrow the nanochip gap. According to a Semiconductor Insights report of Jan 24, the Harbin Institute of Technology has achieved a groundbreaking extreme ultraviolet lithography technology breakthrough, offering a cost-effective and energy-efficient solution for advanced semiconductor manufacturing so far monopolized by US-allied Dutch firm ASML.
On Jan 27, a young Chinese AI company DeepSeek caused a trillion-dollar “Sputnik moment” earthquake on Wall Street’s AI market, shattering faith in billions of dollars of computing-power investments in AI data centers.
These technological breakthroughs are perhaps not so surprising. Witness China’s success in building from scratch and operating its own Tiangong space station, its delivery of humankind’s first soil samples from the far side of the moon, and its steady progress toward achieving a crewed lunar landing by 2030, America-led technological exclusion regardless.
China has become a “scientific superpower”, proclaimed The Economist leader of June 12, 2024 with some overhype, considering the fact that China doesn’t have many scientific Nobel laureates to speak of. Perhaps the term “technological superpower” may be a little more accurate.
The following salient developments are nevertheless noteworthy.
From 2022, China had surpassed both America and the European Union (EU) in the number of high-impact peer-reviewed scientific papers, according to data from Clarivate, a science analytics company, topping citations in material science, chemistry, engineering, computer science, environment and ecology, agricultural science, physics and mathematics.
The US and the EU still retain top slots in molecular biology, space science, neuroscience, clinical medicine, and immunology. However, the areas where America and Europe still hold the lead are unlikely to be safe for long. For example, China is growing impressively in biological and health sciences.
China now contributes around 40 percent of the world’s research papers on AI, compared with around 10 percent for America and 15 percent for the EU and Britain combined. In areas like computer vision and robotics, China has a significant lead in research publications.
There are now six Chinese universities or institutions in the world’s top 10, and seven according to the Nature Index. Tsinghua University is considered the No 1 science and technology university in the world.
All in all, notwithstanding geopolitical and economic headwinds, both domestic and international, China is now relatively well-placed technologically to capitalize on the Fourth and Fifth Industrial Revolutions that are set to reshape the world in the 21st century
China excels in applied research, for example, in perovskite solar panels, producing more patents than any other country, helped by its unrivaled extensive industrial base.
When it comes to basic, curiosity-driven research (rather than applied), China is still playing catch-up — the country publishes far fewer papers than America in the two most prestigious science journals, Nature and Science. America still spends around 50 percent more on basic research.
However, China is spearheading applied research and experimental development in quantum technologies, AI, semiconductors, neuroscience, genetics, biotechnology, regenerative medicine, and exploration of “frontier areas” like deep space, deep oceans and the Earth’s poles.
China’s universities paid staff bonuses — estimated at an average $44,000 each up to a whopping $165,000 — if they published in high-impact international journals. Between 2000 and 2019, more than 6 million Chinese students left the country to study abroad. Since the late 2000s, more scientists have been returning to the country than leaving, partly attracted by state-of-the-art equipped labs in China and partly pushed by increasing suspicion and discrimination in Western countries. China now employs more researchers than either America or the EU.
The Economist piece tallies with the following findings of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI):
China is leading in 37 of 44 critical technologies, often producing more than five times as much high-impact research as its closest competitor, the US. Among the categories of critical technologies, China dominates in all the subsectors in artificial materials and manufacturing; energy and environment; and sensing, timing and navigation with a substantial lead in all other categories.
These observations are supported by China’s immense scientific manpower pool, according to Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. By 2025, Chinese universities will be producing more than 77,000 STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) PhDs per year compared to approximately 40,000 in the US. Excluding international students, Chinese STEM PhD graduates would outnumber their US counterparts more than 3-to-1.
In the coming years and decades, as more Chinese scientists are either homegrown — driven in part by China’s pivot to technological self-reliance, or returning from abroad, due to an increasingly misguided “China threat” — China’s technological advancement is likely to continue apace, perhaps even more rapidly.
According to a year-end review by Earth.org, the first 10 months of 2024 saw the hottest sea surface temperatures on record. Mount Fuji was snowless in October for the first time in over 130 years, following the hottest Japanese summer on record. Driven by rising ocean temperatures, global coral bleaching registered was at its highest on record. One in 5 migratory species is now threatened with extinction. An October UN report revealed that global temperatures are set to increase by 2.6 C to 3.1 C by the end of the century, far exceeding the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 C target.
The world is now in the midst of a game-changing green-energy transition, driven by technology. As foreseen by former Saudi Arabia oil minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the Age of Oil is coming to an end, not for lack of oil, in a similar way to the Age of Stone.
According to a World Economic Forum report of Jan 17, China spent more than twice as much on green transition in 2023 than any other country, including electric vehicle (EV) battery technology. Chinese EV battery makers had a global market share of 60 percent, and are growing 30 percent year-on-year. The world’s largest green hydrogen project is located in China, as are around 40 percent of the world’s hydrogen refueling stations. In 2023, the country commissioned as much solar photovoltaic capacity as the entire world did the year before and was responsible for 75 percent of global wind farm installations.
More than 800 large Chinese companies have undertaken to reach carbon neutrality by 2050, deploying energy-saving automated processes and AI from farm fields to factory floors. A Chinese agri-tech venture has deployed drones and algorithms to collect and analyze soil and weather data with the goal of using less water and fertilizer while improving crop yields.
The world’s first zero-carbon factory is in Sichuan province, where AI monitors data in real-time and algorithms optimize energy consumption, enabling the operating company to reportedly reduce carbon emissions by 400,000 metric tons annually.
Along with green-energy transition, the digital and borderless Fourth and Fifth Industrial Revolutions characterized by big data, AI, human-machine synchronization and the internet of things, are reshaping how people live, how productions are optimized, how trade and business is conducted, and indeed, how nations compete.
Above all, China’s peerless global economic connectivity enhanced by technology is without doubt a massive advantage. The nation has become the very center of a highly interconnected global supply and value chain, thanks to its highly competitive production processes in most domains, its vast economy of scale, its global linkages, and its lion’s share of critical rare earths. This trade and manufacturing centrality is enhanced by borderless e-commerce, where China’s giant multinational technological players like Alibaba and Tencent and “fast fashion” enterprise Shein are making their mark.
All in all, notwithstanding geopolitical and economic headwinds, both domestic and international, China is now relatively well-placed technologically to capitalize on the Fourth and Fifth Industrial Revolutions that are set to reshape the world in the 21st century.
As a special administrative region of China, Hong Kong has been embracing the Fourth and Fifth Industrial Revolutions’ challenges in technology and green energy transition. According to the government’s Innovation and Technology Development Blueprint, the city has in recent years been awarded top ranking in performance, readiness, talent and digital intelligence in the World Digital Competitiveness Ranking released by the International Institute for Management Development and other related institutions.
Hong Kong is also making good progress in the key initiatives of “smart mobility”, “smart living”, “smart environment”, “smart people”, “smart government” and “smart economy” in its Smart City Blueprint.
The author is an international independent China strategist, and was previously the director-general of social welfare and Hong Kong’s official chief representative for the United Kingdom, Eastern Europe, Russia, Norway, and Switzerland.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
