China: the next science superpower?

China in 2007 is the world's largest technocracy: a country ruled by scientists and engineers who believe in the power of new technologies to deliver social and economic progress.

The Chinese science and innovation system has its weaknesses but it excels at rapidly mobilising resources. The country is currently at an early stage in the most ambitious programme of research investment since President John F Kennedy's America embarked on the moon race.

Since 1999, China's spending on research and development (R&D) has increased by more than 20 per cent each year. In December 2006, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development announced that China had moved ahead of Japan to become the world's second highest R&D investor after the United States.

Researchers at Demos, in the UK, have been working on The Atlas of Ideas — a study of science and innovation in China, India and South Korea, focusing on opportunities for collaboration with the UK and Europe. In a series of reports, published in early 2007, the project explores how these emerging 'science powers' are reshaping global science and innovation.

While there are some signs of reform and openness within the Chinese innovation system, there is also a growing undercurrent of 'techno-nationalism'. This is expressed in trophy projects such as human spaceflight and in the desire for a Chinese scientist to win a Nobel Prize. As China's innovation capabilities grow, a central question is whether techno-nationalism will grow, or whether impulses towards global collaboration and exchange of new ideas will prove stronger.

Science and technology is one of many arenas in which China faces choices about how proactively to engage with international networks and institutions. Other countries need to strengthen both the political case and practical mechanisms for closer integration and beneficial collaboration with China. They need to work with China to shape science's contribution to globalisation in ways that are not just about trade, markets and economic competitiveness, but also about using global knowledge to address shared environmental and social challenges:

• Approaches to climate change need to see China not just as a problematic source of emissions, but also as a potential developer of innovative low-cost solutions that will be essential to move all our economies onto a low-carbon path.
• Strategies for poverty reduction need to recognise the role that innovation has played in achieving social change within China — a country that has lifted more people out of poverty in the past 15 years than any other.
• Alliances between China and other emerging players should be supported; particularly in Africa, where China is now hugely active in terms of investment and resource extraction, but could still do much more to help build African science and technology innovation capacity.

How all this is done — the policies, the support mechanisms, the incentives — will be complicated. But more brains, working on more ideas, in more places around the world, must be good news for innovation. The impulse to collaborate must win out over the drive to compete if vital benefits are to be achieved for everyone.

James Wilsdon
Demos, Third Floor, Magdalen House, 136 Tooley Street, London SE1 2TU, UK
T +44 (0)845 4585949
james.wilsdon@demos.co.uk
www.atlasofideas.org

See also

The Atlas of Ideas: How Asian Innovation Can Benefit Us All, London: Demos, by Charles Leadbeater and James Wilsdon, January 2007

China: the Next Science Superpower, London: Demos, by James Keeley and James Wilsdon, January 2007

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