The following is part of Cornell Contemporary China Initiative Lecture
Series under the Cornell East Asia program. The arguments and viewpoints of
this talk belong solely to the speaker. We hope you enjoy. It's an honor and
pleasure to speak to all of you today. Big Science with Chinese Characteristics.
Actually the initial title I submitted to Robyn was called
"My thoughts on Science with Chinese characteristics for a new era".
As you might recognize, this is a
play on the so-called Xi Jinping's "Thought on Socialism with Chinese
Characteristics for a New Era". That's being written into the Party
and the Constitution. Of course I'm not authorized to think Xi Jinping's thoughts so
I'm just here to share some of my thoughts on science in China. I would
like to start this lecture with a question. Should liberal democracies have
a technological advantage over authoritarian regimes? I asked this
question because as a Chinese scientist studying and working United States, this
is a question I've asked myself many times over the past eight years.
Whenever I see technological and scientific breakthroughs coming out of
China I view it with mixed emotions.
The scientist in me is excited at the advancements in human understanding of
nature. The citizen in me wonders how these technology would be used by an
authoritarian regime and what it might mean to the Liberal Democratic World
Order when a free world could no longer claim a technological advantage.
This question has an increased urgency with the news coming out from the past couple
of weeks as Xi Jinping further consolidates power and indefinitely
extends it as a leader of the unfree world while the free world appears leaderless.
I would like you to keep this question on the back of your mind as we walk
through the history and contemporary landscape of science in China. China is
home to one of the oldest civilizations in the world, has a splendid history
including in science and technology. However it did lag behind the West since
the time of Enlightenment. As presented by 20th century British psychologist
Joseph Needham as the so called Needham's grand question. He said gunpowder,
the magnetic compass, paper and printing, what Francis Bacon
called the inventions that were most instrumental in bringing the West
out of the Dark Ages were invented in China. Then why did modernization of
science, the mathematization of the hypothesis about nature and the
technological advancements that come with it
only happened in the West since the time of Galileo but not in the Chinese
civilization? The Needham question is hypothetical in nature and there are
many ways to answer it or challenge its premise. What is not a hypothesis is that
China and the Chinese people paid a heavy price for its lagging behind in
science and technology over several centuries resulting in a devastating
defeat at the First Opium Wars, leading to a century of humiliation that
technically ended when Mao Zedong stood on the Gate of Heavenly Peace and
announced that the Chinese people have stood up at the founding of the People's
Republic. Science in Mao's China largely mirrored the Soviet model where the
space and nuclear programs were given priority. The so-called Liang Dan Yi Xin -
two bombs and one star - the two bombs referring to the atomic bomb and the
ballistic missile and one star referring to the man-made satellite. China
successfully detonated the first atomic bomb in 1964 and its first man-made satellite
six years later in 1970. It was named Dong Fang Hong - the Sun rises in the East.
In the meantime through the anti-writers' campaigns in the late 1950s to
the decade of madness called the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976
scientists were among the most persecuted groups in China through Mao's
reign, tragically and ironically. The veterans of the Chinese space and
nuclear programs were not immune to political persecutions. The rebuild from
the era of devastation of Mao's reign was difficult and urgent. In 1977, the so-called
full modernization was enacted referring to the modernization of
agriculture, industry, national defense, science and technology.
Sige Xiandaihua as it is called in Chinese came to symbolize the time when Deng Xiaoping
was the paramount leader in China. On March 3rd, 1986, four of China's top
weapon scientists, all of them veterans of the Chinese space and nuclear program,
wrote a private letter to Deng Xiaoping, saying that China must join the Xinjishu Geming,
the new technological revolution. This moment came to be known
as China's Sputnik moment as it launched the so-called 863 jihua - program 863,
named after the date of the letter or the national high-tech R&D program. It was
followed a decade later by program 973 again named after the date in spring of
1997, the national program on key basic research project. In the meantime there
were also a number of university development plans that were put forth,
most notably Project 211 which is named in a way to indicate "build a
hundred university successfully facing the 21st century". It started in 1995
enacted by Jiang Zemin and a few years later in May of 1998, the project 985
which also identified a group of key universities to put resources in. I grew
up on the campus of University of Science and Technology of China as the
daughter of a professor in Mechanical Science & Engineering and I remember as
a little kid in the late 90s hearing my parents say these obscure number
combinations and sounding quite proud that their university is being selected
for both programs. Both programs are now superseded by Xi Jinping's Double First
Class which means building first-class universities and first-class disciplines.
And growing up this line is passed down through generations. It traces back to
the 1950s so-called "Xue hao shu li hua, zou bian tian xia dou bu pa" （学好数理化，走遍天下都不怕）.
Learn well math, physics and chemistry and you can walk around the world unafraid.
Three decades since China Sputnik moment, the country has made remarkable
progress in terms of Science and Technology and I
will use the next several minutes to walk through some of the key areas and
highlight some recent breakthroughs. First is China's space program. As
mentioned earlier this is an area that was prioritized since the
founding of the People's Republic. However this is also an area that is
extremely resource-intensive and where the United States and Russia had a huge
lead. In the fall of 2003 China launched its first crewed space mission with its
first astronaut Yang Li Wei. I remember as a middle school student at the time as
cynical and hard to please teenagers, my classmates and I were wondering how much
pride we could derive from this breakthrough when the United States and
Russia have done this decades before. On the other hand a decade and a half later
China is not only establishing itself as a player in space technology but also
becoming a leader in this field with its space stations and laboratory programs
so named Tian Gong, Heavenly Palace. Its rocket systems are named Long March after
Mao's romanticized and propagandized massive military retreat during the
Second World War. Changzheng and the Long March 5 are the
heavy load rockets that are going to propel these missions to the
further end of the universe including the far end of the moon which has never
been explored before, Mars missions and beyond.
In the meantime, China also has launched a number of ground-based astronomical
and cosmological experiments including telescope experiments
such as the fast 500 meter telescope experiment located in Guanxi Province
that's designed partly with a specific purpose to search for extraterrestrial
intelligence and the December issue of the Atlantic last year had
a beautiful essay by Ross Anderson called "What if China makes first contact on the
fast telescope". So as mentioned space technology is a field where it's
resource-intensive and China has been playing catch-up. On the other hand there
are also other nascent technology fields where China can
quickly establish itself as a player and become a leader. One of these fields is
quantum technology. One of the Long March rockets launched into space the world's
first quantum science experiment satellite in the summer of 2016
named after an ancient Chinese philosopher Mozi or Micius and then a
year later, summer of last year, it was reported that the first object was
teleported from Earth to orbit. A photon was teleported from Earth and received
by Mozi - the satellite and then just a couple of months ago it was announced that
the first quantum encrypted video conference was conducted across a
significant breakthrough of distances between continents in this case between
China and Vienna in Austria. In the meantime China is also constructing the
world's largest quantum research facility. It's actually my
hometown, Hefei, Anhui, by a lake and the construction cost is about 10
billion dollars and the idea is to consolidate the resources, to achieve
supremacy in terms of quantum computing communications and encryption. The lead
scientist Pan Jianwei as he stated, "the goal is to achieve quantum supremacy by
2020 or as early as 2018". Another field that China has been making strides in is
biotechnology. As many of you might have read in the news, a couple of months ago,
Chinese scientists announced that they produced the world's first cloned
primates through somatic cell nuclear transfer. These are the very
adorable monkeys and it was using the same technology that created Dolly the
sheep 20 years ago. On the other hand there is another phrase that might have
been the news for the past several years the so-called CRISPR gene editing
technology which is why far the cheapest and most powerful gene technology ever,
and in the summer of 2015, Chinese scientists shocked the world by
being the first using CRISPR geno- editing technology to edit human embryos.
That experiment was not successful but two years later, the first successful
gene-editing in human embryos was conducted by an
international group of scientists from United States, South Korea and China to
fix a disease gene that would lead to heart disease. In the meantime there are
at least nine ongoing clinical trials in China using CRISPR genome editing
technology to treat cancer. On the other hand, due to a lot of ethical concerns
and regulatory constraints, there is only one such clinical trial planned in the
United States and just starting. When we think about quantum technology or
biotechnology these are fields that have an explicit applicable application
values and might even sound a bit sci-fi ish and one might understand why China
would want to make strides in it. On the other hand I should also highlight that
China is also making a lot of investments and progress in fundamental
sciences and basic research and one of these fields is my field of research
which is particle physics. There are a number of world leading particle physics
experiments located in China including the Daya Bay Neutrino Experiment located
at the Daya Bay Nuclear Reactor in Guangdong Province, the Panda X Dark
Matter direct detection experiment which is located in Sichuan province in the
world's deepest underground laboratory 2.4 kilometers or 1.5 miles underground
using a giant xenon tank to try to detect dark matter particles that might
have traveled through earth. On the other hand my specific field is collider
particle physics. China has one particle collider which is the Beijing Electron
Positron Collider. The project started in the late 1980s under
explicit directives from Deng Xiaoping at the time when the country was still
very poor but he thinks it's extremely important for China to become a player
in collider particle physics and being on this campus I should also mention that
the Beijing Electron Positron Collider is very similar to the collider
experiment that used to be here the Caesar Cornell Electron Storage Ring and
the main detector on the Beijing Electron Positron Collider, the Beijing
spectrometer, is also very similar to the CLIO experiment here. One of my
college research supervisors Professor Zhao Zhengguo, he actually worked here
for quite a while and know some of the folks at the physics department
well and he talked about back in 80's as an ambitious young scientist, how he
would use to rally his colleagues to write letters to Deng Xiaoping to ask
him to support particle physics. On the other hand China is putting forth an
extremely ambitious plan to become the leader in collider particle physics
within a generation so the experiment I work on is the Large Hadron Collider
which is the biggest, most expensive and most complicated machinery ever built
located at the Swiss French borders operated by the European Center for
Nuclear Research CERN. The LHC would reach its technological limit in about 20
to 30, in about 20 years, so there would need to be a successor to it and China
is bidding to become the successor to build the future super collider, a hundred
kilometer tunnel with about six times the energy of the current LHC and
one proposed site is at Qinhuang Dao just outside of Beijing where the Great
Wall meets the sea. China's advances in science and technology is getting noticed.
If you flip through newspapers whether in the United States or Europe these days,
almost every week you are going to see a headline talking about China's
breathtaking breakthroughs and becoming a scientific superpower. Some reporters
and analysts might even think that America is already yielding its throne as
the leader in global science and yielding the leadership to China. The
Economist. Interestingly I read this editorial earlier this year saying,
arguing that the next super collider should be built in China. Some of my
colleagues are very much welcoming the idea as one of the quotes from Peter
Jenni who is known as the father of the two largest experiments on a Large
Hadron Collider, a 70 year-old Swiss scientist who said, "If I were younger
I can totally see myself working in China". But if you read the rest of his quote
you could see that this enthusiasm on one hand understandable and admirable
but it's also deeply rooted in the sense of ignorance and naivete about China, its
science and its political landscape. So science in China has made a lot of
progress but has also has a lot of problems. Some of the problems are easy
to spot and are getting attention. For example the poorly advised incentive
systems. There are these, even this is not just that medium level or
universities but even top universities have these kinds of incentive systems
where they will give cash rewards to papers published. The better the journal,
the more the money and also there are poorly enforced ethical standards that
could lead to massive academic fraud. According to a New York Times report
recently, since 2012, China has retracted more scientific papers because of fake
peer reviews than all the other countries combined. This has been getting
attention within China with Chinese authorities as well. As the Chinese
Ministry of Science & Technology said in last summer that this academic fraud has
quote seriously harmed the international reputation of our country scientific
research and the dignity of Chinese scientists at large. No one would think
about it right? Why would advance to crackdown on academic fraud but
China is so good at censorship and cracking down on any kind of political
dissent, why wouldn't it be able to crack down on academic fraud or let it
exist in the first place? As late as the late 2010 only about half of Chinese
hospitals and health ministries at the municipal level have ethical boards but
every work unit, lab, school, hospital has a communist party branch. These issues
with poorly advised incentive systems or academic fraud are only the symptoms, not
the disease. If one truly wants to understand the flaws with science in
China one needs to go to its political ideology and its political system
itself.
Astronomy is an area that developed in nation China since imperial times with
the first recordings of lunar and solar eclipses recorded on oracle bones.
However astronomy developing in Imperial China not for the primarily for the
purpose of navigation as a Eurocentric perspective might suggest. On the other
hand it is used to justify imperial rule - jun quan shen shou (君权神授）-
as if the
movement of the stars somehow is a divine indication of the Emperor's rule.
I think one should always be careful in drawing from Chinese history and ancient
culture to understand contemporary China because the current Chinese party state
is very much more a Soviet import than an imperial heritage. However I mention this
specific example of astronomy in Imperial China because there is a direct
analogy to communism. Communism is a political ideology that purports
objectivity and the scientific method but it does so in order to justify its
power and demand obedience. If a government is scientific and if science
is the one and only truth then this government's hold on power must be as
undefiable and absolute as the laws of the universe or so as the ideology goes.
And this kind of ideology doesn't actually respect science and actually
sees itself as the paramount power above the laws of the universe.
One example is after the nuclear reactor accident at Chernobyl in the former
Soviet Union 20-30 years ago the local political officers were asking
the people that they have to win this struggle, this fight against the atom, the
universe, physics itself. They were boasting that the red flag was
flying over the 4th reactor just four days after the catastrophe. Of course the
laws of the universe cannot be defied and the flag was quickly damaged,
destroyed by radiation and so the flags were constantly being replaced by human
beings at great personal cost and ironically the reward to the workers
who asked to replace the red flag above the flaming radio active
reactor was Pepsi. When a political ideology takes the shape of an
authoritarian regime its weapon is the sense of patriotism as a tool of
control. This parochial nationalism is antithetical to the cosmopolitan ideals
of science. Here we see a picture of two dashing young man. The one on the left is
Chen-Ning Yang who happened to be from my hometown in Hefei, Anhui and I went
to the same high school as he did and I should emphasize not at the same time.
He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1948 as a student of Edward
Teller and Enrico Fermi. He spent most of his professional career in the United
States, later going on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics and was the Yang in
the groundbreaking Yang-Mills theory. The one on the right was his best friend
since adolescence, a man by the name of Deng Jiaxian, a couple years younger.
Deng received his PhD from Purdue University in 1950. He boarded a boat
back to China nine days after his Ph.D. graduation to devote himself to the
scientific enterprise of the new China. He later became the father of the
Chinese nuclear weapons program. Growing up both young and Deng was household name
and I was always told that Deng was the superior scientist.
Unlike Yang he did not make significant contributions to advancing human
understanding of nature but what I was told was that Deng's science served a
higher purpose, that's in defense of one's nation and one's people. What was lost in
this patriotic propaganda was the ethical debate behind Deng's
actions itself. Why would a scientist choose to build bombs, build the most
powerful weapons on earth for a regime that has killed more of its own people
than any foreign invaders in history? Why would a scientist choose to make weapons
at all? In our middle school history textbooks we learned that going
from the atomic bomb to the hydrogen bomb it took the Americans seven years
it took the Soviets less than four years it took the Chinese two years and eight
months. The idea that China was able to
build the bombs faster albeit not the first was supposed to be a sign of the
superiority of the Chinese science and in turn the superiority of the Chinese state.
And again in this kind of debate it doesn't leave room for any ethical
considerations. A more recent example is with these cloned monkeys. They're named
Zhongzhong and Huahua where Zhonghua means the Chinese nation and people. They were not
just the products of science. They were the products of Chinese science. If we
think back at Dolly the sheep born in Scotland 20 years ago her name had beared
no reference to British monarchs or Scottish kings but rather was a cheeky
reference to the American country singer Dolly Parton and her well-endowed figure.
The Chinese Party State constantly invokes the sense of patriotism in its
scientific endeavours. One thing it is trying to do is to recruit scientists
from overseas to return to China to work.
My undergraduate research supervisor whom I mentioned earlier Zhao Zhengguo so
he was among the first of the so-called thousand talent plan recruited back to
China from the University of Michigan in the summer of 2008. If we look at the
English-language website for China's thousand talent plan the banner in black
reads, "welcome overseas high-level talent to come back to China" and then in
parentheses: "Come to China to do innovative and enterprising work". However
in larger font and in red it reads Zuguo （祖国） needs you, Zuguo welcomes you,
Zuguo places her hope in you. Well naturally think the subject
here would be Zhongguo, China, but it's not. It's Zuguo, the Motherland. The
Chinese government is once again invoking a sense of blood and belonging.
It's another reflection of how the government sees itself as not only
controlling over a territory and a citizenry but actually claiming
ownership of a people including its diaspora. The thousand talent plan does
provide a number of tantalizing incentives to draw overseas talent. Some
of these are more general like funding lab, space, staff and student resources. On
the other hand there are also other incentives distinctively with Chinese
characteristics from housing vouchers to spouse settlement and in particular the
hukou guarantee. Hukou is China's notorious household registration system which is
basically a caste system with Chinese characteristics that determines where
you can get any kind of social benefits, where your children can go to school,
where you can buy apartments and for these overseas returning high-level talent
they are guaranteed Beijing or Shanghai or these first-tier city hukou if
that's where their institution is located. Many scientists of Chinese
ethnicity did answer the call of the motherland. From early in the
aforementioned Deng Jiaxian the father of the Chinese nuclear weapons program
to the father of the Chinese space program Qian Xuesen who returned to China
in 1950s amidst the height of the McCarthy era Red Scare and he was
actually accused of being communist spy placed under house arrest in the United
States for an extended period of time before he was finally allowed to return
to China. In a more contemporary era the aforementioned several areas of
Science and Technology where China has been leading, making great progress in,
they are almost always led by an overseas returnee. The top quantum scientist in
China is Pan Jianwei who received his PhD from the University of Vienna.
Wang Yifang, the director of the Institute of High-energy Physics in Beijing who is
spearheading the super collider plan received his Ph.D.
from the University of Florence. The principal investigator on the experiment
that cloned the monkey twins Mu-Ming Pu. He was born in Hong Kong, emigrated to
the US at a very young age and until recently was a faculty member as UC
Berkeley. I have great personal respect and professional respect for my
colleagues who do answer the motherland's call and go back to China
to work and I believe their love for China is genuine, so is their curiosity
in terms of exploring nature. However one is to understand that when one
answers the call of the motherland had returned to China one is also subjecting
themselves to the control of the Chinese Communist Party despite its market
reforms and private enterprise. China remains a Leninist state which means
that the Party controls everything as evident from Xi Jinping's speech at
the 19th People's Congress last fall. Government, military, society and schools,
north, south, east and west, the Party is the leader of all. The party's control is
only intensifying. Some of the news coming out from last fall with China's
asking even foreign enterprises and multinational corporations, their China
offices have to set up a Communist Party branch as well and there is this almost
comic news that Shanghai Disney Resort's Communist Party Chief held a study session
of Xi Jinping's thoughts and presented the speaker with a Mickey Mouse doll.
And if we go to the website of the Institute of High-Energy Physics, at the
Chinese Academy of Sciences, we could see that there is a specific section
dedicated to party building and one of these sections is the so-called "related
knowledge on the United Front". The United Front, the term first came from the
Soviet era, it's called, Mao Zedong called The United
Front one of the three magic weapons, San Da Fa Bao, 三大法宝, the other two being Armed Struggle and
and Party Building and the United Front is one of the ways the
Chinese Communist Party exerts its influence and control and if we read
here the ultimate goal is to win over hearts, act as a unifying force and
strive towards the grand goals of the party and the State. One of the targets
of the United Front efforts is explicitly overseas returnees. As a
separate document on the same site host the numbers of overseas returnees, their
family members, their respective levels of employment and this document is from
almost ten years ago and this effort is only going to intensify as explicit
directives from Xi Jinping and since the last People's Congress. Some of my
colleagues in the West don't necessarily understand what a Communist Party branch does.
They asked me if it is just a formality. However anyone who has an
understanding of a Leninist state knows that the party branch is never just a
figurehead, it's always the real boss. One example was last fall I wrote an article
for Foreign Policy magazine on the future supercollider plan in China for
which I interviewed a high-level official at the Chinese Academy of
Sciences and I asked him a very simple question which made him extremely upset.
I asked him, "would there be a communist party branch at this future
supercollider" and he said, "I only agreed to the interview because you said you're
a scientist. Why are you stirring the pot? You are too young. This is too sensitive.
It could destroy the project. Don't you dare kill my project. Science cannot be
independent from politics if science is subject to politics" and what he is
referring to and which I understand very well he will keep saying “自己回去想”,
“go home and think about it, why I am saying this". Through
the history of contemporary China, science was supported by the government
when it serves a political purpose but it can be crushed at any moment
when it defies party doctrine whether for ideological, professional or personal
reasons. The pseudoscience of traditional Chinese medicine is being
supported because it serves a political purpose. On the other hand astrophysics, a
field as fundamental as astrophysics, was risky business in China through the 70s
and 80s because it was said that the ideas of the formations of the
universe runs counter to Marxist ideology. On the individual level one of
China's foremost astrophysicists, Fang Lizhi, his advocacy emerging as a leader of
the democratic movement through 80s China not only led to his own demotion
and eventual exile but because he served as Vice President of my undergraduate
alma mater University of Science Technology of China, even years after
Fang had left for the United States the university suffered political backlash
and a reduction of funding. When China, when the Chinese government
supports science, it has an explicit goal when they see science as a tool of
national greatness. When Xi Jinping announced the Made in China 2025 plan it
is with an explicit goal not of possession of foreign technology but
internalization of it. A report from Mercator Institute for China Studies
warned that political economic decision makers should not be blindsided by the
lucrative business opportunities that made in China 2025 offered to foreign
high tech suppliers in China. They should be aware that China's long-term goal is
to replace foreign with domestic technology. One great example is a story
of two synchrotrons. This is the Australian Synchrotron
located just outside of Melbourne and then the Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation
Facility. The two synchrotrons are almost identical in design. However according to
Professor Robert Rosner who is the former director of Argonne National
Laboratory, the Australian synchrotron they imported every component from
foreign firms because they were only interested in having a
working synchrotron. However at the shanghai synchrotron they imported one
of everything and they replicated the rest because they were really intent on
obtaining the technology and it's not clear where, who actually obtains the
technology whether it's for a civilian, commercial or military use. Another
anecdote I should mention is we could see that the outside architectural
design, the Australian synchrotron is very plain it's just a circle,
well the Shanghai synchrotron is stunning. It is true that the Shanghai
synchrotron was, the outside building was designed by a very famous architect and
when the blueprint was already approved it was found that this building design,
stunning from the outset, is actually not ideal for scientific experiments inside
because they create inconveniences to extract the beam from the synchrotron.
However the architecture cannot be changed because it was favored and
approved by the local party boss so the science just has to find its way to
work around it. The so-called 师夷长技, to learn the advanced technologies
from foreigners, this phrase was first coined by the Qing Dynasty scholar Wei Yuan
and the full sentence went: "师夷长技以制夷", to learn the advanced
technology from the foreigners in order to subdue them. The Chinese
government has been pushing this notion of the so-called 军民融合,
military civilian fusion and we should take the Chinese government at its words
this time, that when it says so we should assume that any technology acquired by
the Chinese government would be to use for both civilian and military means and
for an authoritarian state like China, any technology can be used for national
defense could equally be used for its internal security. China is already using
advanced technology such as artificial intelligence, advanced surveillance and
imaging tools to build these 21st century police states in its further
West regions like Xinjiang province and what happens in Xinjiang is
only a testing ground and what happens there would not be assumed
to be contained there. There is being a number of really incredibly brave and
stunning investigative journalism on the plight of the augurs in ancient province
and the overall so-called digital Leninism, the kind of social control
aided by new technology. Another thing I should mention is the advances of
biotechnology in China. China is already collecting massive amounts of biometrics
information including DNA information from residents in Xinjiang masked as
mandatory health check-ups and this is one of the things that actually keeps me
up at night. When I think about this as a state that has used extremely crude
measures such as forced abortions and forced sterilizations for population
control and massive social engineering. It's a state that has written eugenics
into the law. What is it going to be able to do with advanced biotechnology
including genome editing. The new advances in biotechnology would become a
powerful tool in the Chinese security and surveillance state and in the worst
nightmares it could become a weapon of genocide. The potential military
applications for these new technologies is rightfully getting attention outside
of China, rattling quite a few feathers in DC. There has been a flurry of news
coming out from DC over the past several months. Both the legislative and
executive branches are considering putting, using different measures to put
barriers in terms of Chinese investment in US high-tech firms
or technological transfer from the United
States to China. The FBI director Christopher Wray made a shocking claim a
couple weeks ago basically saying that Chinese students and scientists are
taking advantage of the open academic environment in United States to steal
technology and act as agents of the Chinese State. The
Eurasia group listed as one of its top global risks for 2018, a global
tech cold war. This is a point where I would like to
return to my opening question. Should liberal democracies have a technological
advantage over authoritarian regimes? When if we think about the development
and application of technology it's a reflection of the society and the values
it is created in, then the idea of the free world losing its technological advantage
is a frightening one. The analogy is not quite what if Hitler had acquired a bomb
first but what if China had invented Internet? Would the internet still be a
platform for the free exchange of ideas or would it become as a tool of state control
and surveillance? Would the Internet be invented at all? I asked this question
once last December when my graduate school alma mater at University of
Chicago commemorated the 75th anniversary of the first self-sustained
controlled nuclear chain reaction. It was achieved on the campus of the University
of Chicago on December 2nd, 1942 in the beginning of the Manhattan Project. The
experiment was led by a group of scientists, many of them refugees who
fled Europe amid a rising anti-semitism. They were refugee
scientists who joined who were embraced by America and who joined a war against
their home countries that denied their humanity. The story at the dawn of
the nuclear age told in a certain way could be an ode to American
exceptionalism. As told by the head of the Manhattan Project during the Second
World War General Leslie groves, when Manhattan Project scientists and then
Chair of the Physics Department at University of Chicago Arthur Compton
asked General Groves this question if he would ever put the welfare of the United
States above the welfare of mankind, General Groves said, "if you put it that
way you have to put the welfare of mankind first but show me, if you can, an
agency through which it is possible to do more for the service of men
than can be done through the United States". The sentiment
expressed by General Groves was echoed by Arthur Compton himself who wrote in
his memoir, "Atomic Quest", how he believed the United States has to organize and
lead an effective World Police and to keep weapons of mass destruction out of
the hands of authoritarian regimes. But is the world really this simple? Is the
United States really almighty? When the bomb invention was eminent the Manhattan
Project commissioned a group of scientists at the University of Chicago
led by University of Chicago physicist James Frank to advise on whether or not
to use this new weapon in war the Frank report advised against its usage and
made this warning, "it may be asked whether we cannot achieve monopoly on
the raw materials of nuclear power. One could further ask whether we cannot
feel ourselves safe in a race of nuclear armaments by virtue of our greater
industrial potential including greater diffusion of scientific and technical
knowledge". The Frank report which was published in
June 11th of 1945 its suggestion of not using an atomic bomb was not adopted,
the rest was history but this prediction of him proved prescient as the United
States was not able to keep nuclear technology to itself. An arms race during
the Cold War brought the world to the brink of nuclear armageddon multiple
times and also it significantly weakened the US's own democratic
institutions from the expansion of executive power. Congress has not
formally declared war since the United States acquired nuclear weapons saying
that it needs quick executive action with these kinds of powerful tools and
also the buildup of a massive security State. The co-inventor of the first
nuclear reactor Leo Szilard said the most powerful weapon coming out of the
Manhattan Project was not the atomic mom but the secret stamp. The United
States cannot have its monopoly on technology nor could any entity. In April
of 2011 Congress passed a resolution banning NASA from engaging in bilateral
agreements and coordination from China. That has not stopped the Chinese space
program. On the other hand China has its space program continue with increased
collaboration with EU and Russia. First of all no country can have a monopoly on
any branch of science or any technology. On the other hand when President Obama
said in his first inaugural address, "As for a common defense we reject as false
the choice between our safety and our ideals". No one should make false
equivalencies between liberal democracies and authoritarian states but
belief in liberal democratic values should not become blind faith in its
omnipotence or infallibility. The United States also abuses its
technology from surveillance to extrajudicial killings to, as Daniel
Golden, author of Spy School, said, "the U.S. intelligence agencies also actively
tries to infiltrate academic circles for intelligence gathering". When the United
States betrays its liberal democratic values in a self-reported arms race it
not only hurts its own credibility on the global stage it also makes itself
less democratic and more authoritarian.
At the end of the day when we think about these new technologies, whether its
artificial intelligence, biotech, or anything on the horizon its innate risk
is not a derivative of and cannot be masked by its nature of ownership. A tech
race squeezes out the space for an ethical debate, reduces the transparency
and actually makes everyone less safe and less free. So how should the global
science community engage with China? There has been a lot of reckoning among
China watchers or policy makers in the West these days saying how the West has
gotten China wrong when we thought when China opened up its markets four decades
ago, when China joined the WTO a decade and a half ago, if there is free
choice of Starbucks Coffee, China is going to want free choice of political
parties. It did not happen and I, my own argument on this, is the global community
has often underestimated its power and influence but overestimated its
commitment to values. It's easy to say, oh China's often a sealed scientific world
to be cracked open by an infusion of foreign physicists as The Economist
wrote in its argument why the next supercollider should be built in China.
This kind of view is almost neo-colonial, to think that it will be just like
knights in shining armor coming to China and opening it up. However when it really
comes to occasions where one needs to defend basic principles of freedom,
independence and transparency, Western participants in the Chinese sphere,
whether it's science or business, are often willing to curb its own standards
in order to meet Chinese government requests. The Internet is not free in
China, nor at any of its scientific experiments with the global
collaboration. When I asked my colleagues in the West whether or not they would
demand, for example, if China builds next supercollider it needs to provide the
free Internet. They tell me that they are not as dependent on Facebook or Twitter
and will be okay with it as long as China provides free stream of data
from the experiment and it's not unusual that scientists and
technologists can be blinded by a technological arrogance
and think that democracy and democratic institutions can almost be a hindrance.
For example when Nima Arkani-Hamed who is one of the founding directors of China's
Future Fuel Center for Future Particle Physics and the most prominent non Chinese
face for China's supercollider plan told me that democratic systems make it
harder to do long term things. In the top-down system of China can be more
efficient in decision making. One really needs to question how much Western
scientists saying that these huge scientific collaboration with China will
be a beacon of hope, an open window, are really committed to these liberal
democratic values. When I'm being constantly asked what is your priority,
science or human rights, as if these are mutually exclusive, I would like to tell
a story of two publishers. Last summer Cambridge University Press announced that
it had responded to Chinese Government's request to censor over 300 journal
articles from its China Quarterly Journal in order to meet the Chinese
Government's censorship requests. It instigated a giant uproar from the
academic communities including threats of boycott. Cambridge University Press
quickly backed down and put the censored articles back online. However later in
the year, Springer Nature, the world's largest
academic publishing firm, blocked at least a thousand articles per China's
request and the estimate, this is an initial estimation, it's
actually estimated to be much greater at a percent level of Springer's entire
archive. In this case Springer is not only passively responding to China's
censorship requests but it is actively participating in the
Chinese government's propaganda machine including obtaining the English
translation rights of Xi Jinping's new book and signing scientific partnerships
with Chinese technological firms. It has Springer Nature has also put forth
advertisements in simplified Chinese hence targeting an audience in mainland
China asking Chinese scholars in geography and history to use Springer Nature's
global platform to put forward its research. There is nothing inherently
wrong with having more Chinese scientists and scholars, having their
work being presented on the global stage but one needs to understand that
subjects such as geography and history are heavily censored and essentially an
arm of the Chinese government propaganda and it's now going to be aided by
Springer's global platform. I would like to conclude by going over what we talked
about today. We know that China has made great progress in science but it has its
strengths and we should acknowledge that but it also has a lot of challenges. Some
of these issues are managerial and easier to fix but the deeper
structural flaws are rooted in its political system and ideology. Nature is
not political but science as a human enterprise especially as a primary
government-funded enterprise is and no one should kid
themselves otherwise. When we face China's rise in science technology, the
West first should overcome its neo-colonial prejudices whether or not
the Chinese people can do science or whether or not it can simply change
China through a scientific experiment. What it should do is strengthen its own
commitment to education and research. It's not only good for its own
national security, it's good for science globally that any country should
be committed to it because no entity can have monopoly on science. If we simply
buy into a dichotomy of a Cold War mindset,
it makes everyone less safe and less free. It will be incredibly tragic if in
order to win a tech race with an authoritarian
régime the free world becomes more authoritarian in the meantime. China's
rise is not a reason to doubt liberal democracy but does present an urgency to
defend it and I'd like to conclude this lecture with two messages. The first
message is to citizens of the free world. What do you value? The global community
should not seclude China. It should engage China but engagement must be
conditioned on principles of transparency, independence and freedom of inquiry. It
does carry a certain level of professional personal risk. But
principles are only empty slogans unless one takes the risks to defend them
and then to the people of China I ask, what do you deserve?
There are no perfect dichotomy of the oppressor and the victim in an
authoritarian regime. The people contribute to their own oppression by
keeping their head down, keeping their mouth shut,
becoming obedient and taking temporary personal comfort and hence
becoming complicit in a system. When I spoke with the senior Chinese Academy of
Sciences official on the supercollider project
I left that conversation with a deep sense of sadness for someone of his
generation who came of age during the Cultural Revolution who saw the
remarkable transformation of China and the world, for someone as bold and
ambitious as himself who has the grand vision of building and 100 kilometer
tunnel in the mountains at the foot of the Great Wall, to create an experiment
tens of billions of dollars in value with technology that doesn't yet exist
to smash particles at nearly the speed of light to recreate the
split-second at the creation of the universe with technology that doesn't
yet exist which means this is an experiment that is not for the next year, the
next five years or the next decade. It is for the next 30 years or next half of
century. In that audacious and long term vision he could not see one of
a lab free from a communist party branch let alone a free China and I
think that is the ultimate tragedy. No matter how high the red flag flies
Communist Ideology is not above the laws of nature.
Whatever the Chinese government tries to tell the world that Chinese people
are somehow unique and democracy doesn't apply to them, we know that there are
certain values and certain principles that are as universal as the fundamental
forces that bind us and our shared cosmological history. Thank you very much.