As the United States marks the 250th anniversary of its founding, it confronts a new world order dominated by its relationship with China. In this wide-ranging collection, we study the strain factors and prospects in these ties, from arduous tech to mushy energy. Here, Vincent Chow seems to be at how China challenges core American assumptions about innovation and know-how, and the historic stakes of their competitors in synthetic intelligence.
In 1969, the famend British sinologist Joseph Needham posed a collection of questions on China so influential that they turned often called the “Needham Question”.
At its core, Needham was making an attempt to reconcile China’s previous glories with what he noticed in the China of the mid-Twentieth century.
Namely, why did the 18th-century Industrial Revolution occur in Europe and never China, a rustic that had led the world in technological innovation up till the fifteenth century, and what have been the causes for know-how and science in China stagnating for hundreds of years thereafter?
Like Needham, Erik Baark – professor emeritus at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology – additionally spent a lot of his decades-long profession researching Chinese innovation and know-how. But at a visitor lecture at the Hong Kong Baptist University final month, Baark proposed a essentially completely different query – an inversion of the unique.
“The central question is now this,” mentioned Baark, creator of Innovation and China’s Global Emergence. “Why is China now able to contribute to global science and innovation? More than that, why does there even seem to be an alternative dynamism in Chinese innovation?”
For many years, the West questioned China’s potential to innovate and to invent actually unique applied sciences. China can solely copy Western know-how or be reliant on fats authorities subsidies, the critics claimed.