Waiting for Innovation

The Chinese nation is known throughout the world not only for its industriousness and stamina, but also for its ardent love of freedom and its rich revolutionary traditions.
- Mao Zedong, from The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party, December 1949

Today’s global superpower status, according to William Pfaff, requires a very high level of autonomous technological capacity and a sophisticated and innovative industry to make use of it. Regardless of its economic growth and international influence during the past 30 years, China is lacking in both of these requirements, he notes in this opinion piece from the International Herald Tribune.

Here are his reasons:

Lack of innovation: China has recognized the importance of educating the next generation of scientists and technicians crucial for its continuing development by sending them overseas to learn. Once they return, however, they find an “industrial base too limited to put them to proper use.” China makes “unsophisticated goods” which were designed abroad, as is its technology.

Widespread corruption: China’s uncontrolled and corrupt manufacturing sector reaps destruction and devastation on the environment. A modern superpower works against this disruption of the environment. Furthermore, corruption from a similar source in what Pfaff describes as “the massive, backward, impoverished and politically restless Chinese agricultural population” could lead to a “major political crisis in China in the foreseeable future.” The “inadequacies, corruption and political illegitimacy of a self-perpetuating ruling class, whose only claim to authority is its bureaucratic descent from the catastrophic Communist regime of Mao Zedong” have created this predicament.

Backlash from economic exploitation of other countries: China’s foreign investments in “advanced countries” and “massive purchases” of raw materials from underdeveloped and unregulated “resource-rich countries” creates economic influence but also creates a sort of resented dependence on China. China takes what it needs and then abandons these countries, all the while having destroyed local industries that cannot compete with cheap Chinese imports.

Pfaff goes on to recognize the conclusions of François Hauter who, in a series of articles, finds that two Chinas co-exist: the so-called modern China that foreigners see and the hidden China in which nothing has changed in 25 years. Also commenting on the modern lack of innovation, he wonders, where "is the China that gave mankind paper, printing, the compass, gunpowder?" and "Is China's genius now imprisoned in its current role of copyist for the West?”

… it is not at all surprising but entirely to be expected that a capitalist economy will develop to a certain extent within Chinese society with the sweeping away of the obstacles to the development of capitalism after the victory of the revolution.
-- Mao Zedong, from The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party, December 1949