Rocketing science: China's newest superpower

This episode discusses China's rapid advancement in the scientific arena, analyzing its achievements, challenges, and the global implications of its rise as a scientific superpower.

1. China has transformed into a powerhouse in applied sciences but lags in basic research.
2. Significant investment in science and technology has fueled China's rapid progress.
3. Western nations express concern and admiration for China's scientific advancements.
4. Collaborations between China and Western countries have yielded significant benefits.
5. The quality and impact of Chinese research are under scrutiny, with issues like "citation cartels" mentioned.

1. Introduction

Overview of the episode and the significance of China's scientific achievements. Rosie Blore: "Hello and welcome to the intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Rosie Blore."

2. China’s Scientific Ascent

Discussion on how China has become a leader in global science, its strategy, and the implications. Ainsley Johnston: "China has completely reshaped its role in global science."

3. Global Implications

Analysis of the global response to China's rise in science and technology. Ainsley Johnston: "It's a double-edged sword. Western governments are worried about the rise of China."

4. Conclusion

Reflections on future trends in China's scientific progress and its impact on global science. Rosie Blore: "Is it just going to keep on going up and up, do you think?"

1. Stay informed about global scientific developments.
2. Encourage open dialogues on international scientific collaboration.
3. Promote investments in diverse scientific fields.
4. Understand the implications of geopolitical dynamics on science.
5. Foster educational programs that emphasize both applied and basic research.

After decades as a scientific also-ran, China is becoming a superpower particularly in the physical sciences. We examine the risks and opportunities that poses for the West. Our correspondent looks into why denizens of the Mediterranean live so long (10.32). And this year’s confluence of two broods makes for a rare preponderance of cicadas (17.53).

People

Rosie Blore, Ainsley Johnston

Content Warnings:

None

Asana
Are your team struggling to find the latest plans with Asana? The enterprise work management, platform tasks and company wide goals are in one place, so your teams understand how their day to day work connects to those goals and everyone's aligned. Asana a smarter way to work? Try for free today@asana.com. that's Asana.com dot.

The Economist
The Economist.

Rosie Blore
Hello and welcome to the intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Rosie Blore. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

We all know that the Mediterranean has amazing weather, landscape and culture. People there even live longer. Our correspondent selflessly took on a hardship posting to search for the secret of longevity. And here's a quiz for you. I'm loud, irritating and suddenly everywhere at the moment.

What am I? Nope, not a politician. Not even an election. Swarms of cicadas are now massing in America. We find out why.

First up, though, this month, a chinese spacecraft landed on the far side of the moon and planted a chinese flag. In the coming days, it will return to Earth, the first mission to bring back rock and soil samples from this hard to reach spot. Lunar voyages have long been a symbol of a country's ambitions. The 1960s space race was an extension of the cold war, and no nation. Which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in this race for space.

Yet China's moon landing isn't just a giant step for the country as a global force. Its also an example of Chinas rapid ascendancy as a scientific superpower. The country now dominates many areas of scientific research and innovation. Its developed cutting edge technology and a wealth of talent. But many in the west have a is the rise of chinese science a threat or an opportunity?

Ainsley Johnston
China has completely reshaped its role in global science. Ainsley Johnston is a data journalist and science correspondent at the Economist. 20 years ago, China was miles behind both the US and Europe in terms of producing good, high quality science. But now that is completely flipped. The country has expanded its science production massively in recent years, and the huge amount of growth shows no sign of slowing.

The old science world order, dominated by European America and Japan, is coming to an end. So you're telling us that China is the rising science superpower. Is it dominating all fields? Not quite. Europe and the US are still ahead in a lot of medical sciences and sort of general biology.

A lot of the things that we think of as very, very important. But where China really has a lot of strength is in the physical sciences. So things like chemistry or material science and they're also really great in fields like plant sciences or agricultural sciences. But in general, China's strengths are in areas where there's a particular applied use to the science. They're not so good at what we sometimes call basic research, which is research driven purely by curiosity, where we don't see an immediate goal at the end.

Also, chinese papers tend, on average, to have lower impact than american ones do. So China is producing a lot of these really, really good papers, but they're also producing a lot of not very good ones as well. And if you sort of average all that together, they tend to come out, on average, worse than american papers do. Similarly, China's top universities are really, really great. Universities like Tsinghua or Peking University are really topping the leaderboards now and producing science on par with Harvard or Oxford universities.

But some people think that that's sort of built on shaky foundations. There are a lot of mid tier chinese universities that really are not as good as mid tier universities in the UK or the US or Europe. How have you come to this conclusion that China is a global science superpower? Measuring the quality of science is really difficult. One way we can do it is by looking at how often papers are cited.

That's when you do a bit of science research and then later down the line, that becomes useful to one of your colleagues and they mention it in one of their papers. If we just look at papers that are, say, in the top 1% of citations, China has just climbed and climbed and climbed to now surpass the UK and the EU on this metric. China is now producing more of these really top quality papers. But there are some reasons to sort of cast doubt on this. There have been reports that chinese scientists sometimes club together and make what we call citation cartels, where they'll pump out low quality science, where they're just citing each other's work.

There are other metrics we can look to as well. One of them is called the Nature Index. This looks at the number of publications in a set of high quality journals. This is a lot less susceptible to gaming. In order to get your paper published in one of these journals, you have to get it past a panel of peer reviewers, and they are really interested in things like how well done is the research, how novel it is, and what's the potential impact going to be on this index?

China has also reached the top spot. Now, this is an amazing climb. Just ten years ago, China was producing a third as many of these papers as America was, and now it's producing more. It's not just about these metrics. More and more amazing research and amazing achievements are coming out of China.

And then, of course, there's the amazing moon landing as well. How do you think China's been able to make such progress in such a short time? One of the main drivers has really been money. China has spent a huge amount on research in the past few years. Its research and development spending has grown 16 fold since the year 2000.

It's still a bit behind America, but it's definitely catching up. There's also been a lot of planning about where this money goes. China has specifically set aside money to go towards certain universities that they earmarked to become world class. What about the other ways it's made progress? China's also invested in huge amounts of equipment.

So they have some incredible massive pieces of hardware, like cosmic ray detectors and incredibly strong magnetic fields. But they also just have very well equipped labs, particularly in these very good institutions where staff have access to equipment more easily, maybe, than they might have in the west. And that's part of the draw, I think, for a lot of scientists to go back. They've also invested in manpower as well. So just getting a lot of people to work in their labs.

I spoke to one researcher in the field of quantum computing who was telling me that labs in China sometimes can be more akin in terms of their scale to commercial labs. They'll have maybe 40 people all working on the same problem. And he said they make really good progress. We know that people in the west often worry about what's happening in China. Is the rise of China in science something that we need to be worrying about?

So this is really a difficult question. It's kind of a double edged sword. On the one hand, western governments are really worried about the rise of China, about China gaining technological dominance or advantages over the west. And you can sort of see how improvements in science also link into that. A lot of labs are sort of explicitly linked with the state and the military.

There are loads of really great examples of where China and the west collaborating has had great results. One example is rapid Covid tests. When the pandemic hit, there was a collaboration between Oxford and a chinese institution to develop these tests that were then rolled out and used across UK airports. And that chinese spacecraft I talked about is carrying a lot of instruments from other countries, for example, Italy and Switzerland. We know that the heads of most, if not all, chinese universities are communist party members, that a lot of academics are also communist party members.

Rosie Blore
They have to be. So how do we know where the science ends and the party begins. How can collaboration continue in light of security concerns, some at least of which are valid? I think that's a really difficult question. Partly I think one way that academics in the west should approach it is there are huge areas of science that are just not really applicable to the military or to gaining an upper hand in technology or anything like that.

Ainsley Johnston
There are huge areas of science that are just useful and beneficial for normal everyday life. And in those areas, I think there really are not as many risks with collaborating. Scientists need to be aware of the potential risks, but not let that stop them from collaborating and working together to make useful improvements to the knowledge of the world. China's been making massive strides. What's next?

Rosie Blore
Is it just going to keep on going up and up, do you think? It's hard to say. If you assume that the trends of the past few years will continue, then it certainly looks that way. There is some evidence that China is trying to expand into the fields that it doesn't currently dominate in the things like health sciences. They're pumping a lot of money and doing a lot more work in those fields, but it's impossible really to tell what's going to happen in the future.

Ainsley Johnston
And there are concerns that some of these issues or shortcuts that China's taken to reach this point might kind of catch up with them. Overall, the outlook looks pretty exciting for China, and something I think that's important to bear in mind is that China being good at science isn't just good because of collaborations with the west. It's also just good because the more countries and the more people that are doing really good, high quality science, the better it is for all of us. Ainsley, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Rosie.

Asana
Are your team struggling to find the latest plans with Asana? The enterprise work management platform, tasks and company wide goals are in one place, so your teams understand how their day to day work connects to those goals and everyone's aligned. Asana a smarter way to work try for free today@asana.com. that's Asana.com.

Lane Green
The Calle de Jordan, a short street in the neighborhood I live in in Madrid, encompasses the entire cycle of human life. Lane Green is the economist Spain correspondent and also writes about language. On one block, there's a fertility clinic, which is an increasingly common site in a country that's obsessed with its shortage of babies and its low birth rate. But just a block further down is a day center for senior citizens. It advertises services like memory training and help with mobility, and it's a really common sight in this neighborhood to see women who look like they're in their sixties or seventies leading their mothers who were in their eighties or nineties up to the door of this senior center.

The spanish people are already one of the longest lived in the world, along with countries like Italy and Portugal and France. And what's really striking about this is that these are the poorest members at the top of the longevity tables. You might expect to see ultra rich countries like Switzerland and Singapore and Luxembourg up there, but that does have a lot of people wondering what is going on in the mediterranean countries. So, Elaine, what's the answer? Why are people in the Mediterranean able to live for so long?

One thing many point to is the so called mediterranean diet, which is fish, whole grains, fresh fruit and vegetables, and olive oil. Though critics will tell you that diets are actually quite different if you go all the way from Portugal on one end to, say, Israel on the other. If you walk around spanish city centers where all these old people are, you'll see people drinking wine at noon and they'll be eating potato chips are very salted and highly processed sausages and Jamon iberico and some of those delights. Spains smoking and drinking rates are a little higher than EU averages. And Spain is said to be one of the biggest cocaine use countries.

So you don't exactly see people eating brilliant, healthy foods all the time and living abstemious lifestyles. But Dan Buuter, who has written several books on so called blue zones that feature lots and lots of very old people, so that you can't just look at what you see people eating and drinking today. You have to consider what today's 80 year olds were eating when they were 30 or 40 year olds. So almost half a century ago. And he points out that people ate what he calls peasant foods, that is to say, whole grains and beans, in particular, tubers like potatoes.

These really cheap foods, in his view, are very healthy ones. Eating cheap but healthy foods sounds doable for many of us. Is that the only thing going on here? I definitely think that the diet gets lots of attention, maybe even more than it deserves. And one of the big factors that Dan Buter and many others point to is movement.

According to a study from a few years ago, Spanish lead western Europe in the number of steps they take per day. But what's notable is that it's not just the mean number of steps that Spaniards take per day, but something that the researchers call activity equality or inequality. Whether you get everybody moving a substantial amount in a country where lots of people are very inactive and then a few people are highly active, you can still have very high rates of obesity. But in a country where everyone moves a fair bit, you get much lower rates of obesity. And, of course, that lower rates of obesity predicts lower rates of obesity related diseases that can lower lifespans as well.

Rosie Blore
Okay, so you say everyone in Spain moves a fair bit. Lane, you've been living there a while now. How do you think this population has managed to keep being on the move? Spaniards live in these very densely populated cities that really meet the so called model of the 15 minutes city, where you can walk and do almost all of your life's needs within 15 minutes. And that brings us to another piece of the puzzle, which is social life.

Lane Green
That walkability of a city means that you're seeing your neighbors and your family members and your friends out on the street. Spanish cities, like italian cities and some other places, are really built around plazas, circles, or squares where friends and families and coworkers get together and sit and eat and drink and talk. They spend a lot of time outdoors and together, and that turns out to be good for you, even if you are, say, having a glass of wine or a vermouth, eating crisps at noon. Vermouth and eating crisps at noon. I hope you're speaking from experience here.

Rosie Blore
Explain how that could possibly help you live longer. I think getting too much into my journalistic methods might compromise some of my competitive advantage here. But I can tell you that I have talked to some of the psychologists of the physical benefits of social life. One of them is Julianne Holtlenstadt at Brigham Young University, and she's a psychologist who looks at social connections. And she's made a striking claim that being extremely lonely has an increased mortality risk that is the equivalent of if you smoked about 15 cigarettes per day.

Lane Green
There are a couple of ways that having friends really helps you physically. One is that friends check in on you. So if you're looking like you're in ill health, they'll be the kind that say, hey, can you go see your doctor? And people who see their doctors more often will find their problems more readily diagnosed. There are also direct responses of the body to social life.

If we're alone, Professor Holt Lindstadt says, we're at a higher kind of baseline stress level, because if you're alone, then threats are more dangerous to you. And stress hormones like norepinephrine cause inflammation in your system, which itself is underlying many other health problems. Gallup, an american pollster and meta, which is the company that owns Facebook and Instagram and others, did a big global survey on the level of social connections. And about 76% of Spaniards say that they feel very or fairly socially supported, which is well above the average. And I talked to the head of Gallup, John Clifton, who says that his firm's research shows that Spaniards are not always the happiest people in the world.

For example, they are particularly disengaged from their workplaces. But Spaniards are world beating at just simply seeing other people. They're number four in the world of almost 200 countries surveyed. And number two on that list was Greece, another one of our mediterranean countries. So it sounds like what you're saying is that spanish people live a long time also because they actually have a lot of fun together.

So the southern european countries don't score highest in the world on the sort of happiness scales that you might see in the news. Frequently, that title has been held by countries like Denmark and Finland for a long time, but those scales weigh something that you might call long term life satisfaction or contentment, but they don't measure emotions that are fleeting but quite important things like, did you laugh in the last 24 hours or did you experience a positive emotion yesterday? These are not places where Denmark and Finland rank highly. And in fact, these kind of gleeful emotions are reported most often by Latin Americans. And in looking at southern Europe, Mediterranean Europe, a place like Spain, if you imagine Denmark and Finland on one side, and Latin America, a place like Buenos Aires on the other, and you physically draw a line between those regions, you pass right through Spain.

It's a country with european levels of wealth and excellent health care, while also sharing those cultural traits with Latin America, such as living for the moment and valuing the benefits of friendship and family. Lane, thanks so much for joining me. Next time over Vermouth and crisps, I hope. Thank you, Rosie.

Rosie Blore
There's nothing quite like a hot summer evening. The sun dipping below the horizon, the darkening sky awash with colors.

A breeze gusts by, pleasantly disturbing the day's lingering heat. In the distance, the cicadas chorus.

The air is heavy with the scent of jasmine, their sweet aroma mingling with. You know, I think we can dial it back with the cicadas.

Slowly, the day begins to wind down as. Okay, seriously, what's going on with those cicadas?

Oh, my God, they're everywhere. So this year, across the eastern United States, from Georgia through to Wisconsin, there are going to be something like a trillion cicadas fluttering through the skies. Gilad. Ammit is a science correspondent at the. Economist, and that's a far higher number than you'd normally expect.

The Economist
And it's got entomologists excited because this year there are two broods, a 17 year brood and a 13 year brood emerging in contiguous territory at the same time. So before we get onto this 17 year, 13 year thing, what is a cicada? Or should we be calling it even a cicada? I don't know. I think if there were cicadas in Britain, they'd be cicadas.

But the american ones are normally called cicadas by the Americans. They are paperclip sized. When they are mature, they spend some 99.5% of their life underground, waiting to emerge with their feeding tube plunged into the root of a tree trunk, eating off its SAP. And then when the time comes, when their 13 year or 17 year sentence is up, they dig a hole to the surface and emerge in huge numbers. So are we talking plagues of locusts?

Rosie Blore
Are we talking kind of a biblical swarm here, or is it more just something that you're going to be hearing a lot? Well, it is an election year, so premonitions are bound, but it's something you'll hear a lot, you'll see a lot. There are cars that have their windscreens dirtied by collisions. I think if you live in these states, it's going to be difficult to ignore. Okay, so explain the 13 year, 17 year thing to me.

That sounds weirdly specific. What's happening? So it's something that's fascinated entomologists for a long time. These periodical cicadas, as theyre called, have these 13 year, 17 year life cycles. For a long time, people assumed that the fact that these two numbers are prime and have no common factors was an evolutionary trick to outsmart a predator.

The Economist
So if you had a predator living on a four year life cycle, it would take a very long time for that predator to be able to gorge on two different cicada broods. But now scientists think that, as one scientist put it to me, this is a red herring. They just have a very long life cycle. They've found cicada broods in other parts of the world that have even numbered life cycles, also very long, but even numbered. And it's just the fact that they can appear and then hide for long enough for predators to forget about them and then re emerge in vast numbers, numbers so vast that the odds are very good that the species will survive even if one individual doesn't.

Rosie Blore
So is it just the sheer number of cicadas that's exciting entomologists, or is there something that we can actually learn from their mass together? So what's going to be really interesting is the line across central Illinois where the 13 year brood will meet the 17 year brood because their territories don't really overlap other than in that stretch. And along that line, researchers will be looking to see, do cicadas from one brood respond to the mating calls of the other? Are there going to be viable offspring between the two broods? If so, which lifestyle will they choose and where will they live?

The Economist
And scientists are also keen to understand how climate change is affecting their lifestyle. These are all questions that are very difficult to answer because these events happen so rarely. The last time these two particular broods met was in 1803. Ok, so watching the mating and dating of cicadas is interesting. How do scientists expect that climate change might threaten these incredible swarms of cicadas?

So one way that scientists think that these insects keep track of time is by counting how often SAP starts and stops flowing within the trees that they feed off in different temperatures in different climates. The SAP flows for longer, and potentially it allows individuals to be fully mature sooner. So it might mean that they no longer need to wait all 17 years. It might interfere with their ability to count the passage of time. And it may also allow cicadas to colonize trees and territories that were previously too cold.

And the scientists need to get to work quickly, because the last time these two broods of cicadas emerged, Thomas Jefferson was president. Who knows what sort of state the country will be in the next time they come out? Gilad, thank you so much. Thank you, Rosie.

Rosie Blore
That's all for this episode of the intelligence. Let us know what you think of the show. You can get in touch@podcasteconomist.com. we'll see you back here tomorrow.

Asana
It's hard to reach your goals when your teams are pulled in too many directions. With Asana, the enterprise work management, platform tasks and company wide goals are in one place, so your teams understand how their day to day work connects to those goals. Asana a smarter way to work try for free today@asana.com. that's asana.com.