China is also unburdened by the myth ( falsehood ) that government is an
impediment
to technological innovation. BR
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China investing billions to become a superpower in science
By John Pomfret, Washington Post | July 4, 2010
SHENZHEN, China — Last year, Zhao Bowen was part of a team that cracked
the genetic code of the cucumber. These days, he is investigating the genetic
basis for human IQ.
Zhao is 17.
Centuries after it led the world in technological prowess — think
gunpowder, irrigation, and the printed word — China has barged back into the
ranks
of the great powers in science. With the brashness of a teenager, China’s
scientists and inventors are driving a resurgence in potentially
world-changing research.
Unburdened by social and legal constraints common in the West, China’s
trailblazing scientists are also pushing the limits of ethics as they create a
new — and to many, worrisome — Wild West in the Far East.
A decade ago, no one considered China a scientific competitor. Its best
and brightest agreed and fled China in a massive brain drain to university
research labs at Harvard, Stanford, and MIT. But over the past five years,
Western-educated scientists and gutsy entrepreneurs have conducted a
rearguard action, battling China’s hidebound bureaucracy to establish research
institutes and companies. Those have lured home scores of Western-trained
Chinese researchers dedicated to transforming the People’s Republic of China
into a scientific superpower.
“They have grown so fast and so suddenly that people are still skeptical,
’’ said Rasmus Nielsen, a geneticist at the University of California
Berkeley who collaborates with Chinese counterparts. “But we should get used
to
it. There is competition from China now, and it’s really quite drastic how
things have changed.’’
China has invested billions in improving its scientific standing. Almost
every Chinese ministry has some sort of program to win a technological edge
in everything from missiles to medicine. Beijing’s minister of science and
technology, Wan Gang, will visit the United States this month and is
expected to showcase some of China’s successes. In May, for example, a
supercomputer produced in China was ranked as the world’s second-fastest
machine at
an international conference in Germany. China is now in fourth place, tied
with Germany, with the most supercomputers. China has jumped to second place
— up from 14th in 1995 — behind the United States in the number of
research articles published in scientific and technical journals worldwide.
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