Can we innovate in a conservative society? This question is old. “Any innovation presents itself ten, a hundred times in front of the obstacle to be overcome, it is the war of lost opportunities”, said the historian Fernand Braudel, evoking the idea that technological inventions largely preceded industrial revolutions, but generally failed to find fertile ground in which to thrive. Obviously, a society that puts religious taboos, moral prohibitions or dictatorial submission before the scientific spirit seems less inclined to develop in the field of technology. To bring another angle of view, in an excellent work of 2019, The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation, economist Carl Benedikt Frey presents societies that are conservative not so much in terms of morality or religion as by the strength of representation of their craft elites. It is the latter’s loss of power that would have led to the spread of technological progress in Europe in the 18th century, more than a profound change in the mores of the majority of the population.
China will serve as a life-size test of this thorny question. At first, the power decided to sort out the good and the bad technology. In 2011, American investor Peter Thiel lamented the slow pace of technological innovation with this famous sentence: “We were promised flying cars and, instead, we have 140-character tweets. ” Ten years later, the Chinese could paraphrase it: “We were promised 5 nanometer chips and instead we have [enveloppes rouges données lors du Nouvel An chinois, NDLR] digital.”
Tired of seeing powerful service, mobile payment, people transportation, video game and online education platforms frustrate consumers and fail to deliver genuine technological breakthroughs for the benefit of the country, Beijing’s elites have led 2021 a crusade against these giants, making Alibaba, Tencent or even Didi Chuxing tremble. If power has recently watered down its wine, it still wants to promote the little giants, these mid-sized companies active in robotics, semiconductors, life sciences, which embody the slogan Zhuan Jing Te Xin for “specialization, sophistication, differentiation and innovation”.
Limited offer. 2 months for 1€ without commitment
The very weak cultural influence of China
The desire to decouple from the Western world, however, raises questions about the capacity for action of Chinese scientists and innovators. China’s cultural influence globally is nil. Among the major cultural exports, we can only count the work of science fiction The three-body problem by Liu Cixin, the video game Genshin Impact and TikTok. A starving balance sheet compared to Japanese and Korean successes in this area, from manga to Squid Game to K-pop. Never has an economy grown so much by producing so few cultural exports.
The country’s political elite seems to have accepted this state of affairs and decided to accelerate decoupling. A veritable war is waged on the English language, with international private schools and their 450,000 pupils opportunely swept up in the crusade against private education. More recently, it was decided to replace 50 million computers used in administrations and public enterprises running on the Windows operating system with local models. No longer the same Internet, soon non-interoperable operating systems?
Scientific cooperation between the United States and China has steadily progressed in recent years, with 5,213 articles co-authored by binational teams in 2020 compared to 3,412 in 2015. It has stagnated since. The prioritization of the political reading grid in society also presents a risk. Yingjiesheng, a leading job site for recent college graduates, saw a 20 percent increase in jobs requiring a degree in Marxism compared to last year. In another register, faced with the continuing decline in the birth rate, the promotion of family values and the decline of women’s rights could weaken one of the strengths of the scientific world in China: its strong feminization. Women represent 47% of employees in the “science, technology, engineering and mathematics” sector, compared to 26% in the United States. See you in ten years to answer our initial question.
opinions
The chronicle of Christophe Donner
Chronic
The chronicle of Frédéric Encel
Robin Rivaton’s Chronicle
