Predicting China's Future: Technology and the Path to 2049
A Chinese economist argues that technology is the key variable in national power
China is filled with dreams of 2049.
The Communist Party of China treats the hundredth anniversary of the PRC’s founding as the deadline for the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” In theory all workings of party and state are aimed towards this date. The stated purpose of all Chinese policy is building China into a “great modern socialist country in all respects” by 2049. In party parlance, this means that by mid-century China must become an example of “prosperity, strength, democracy, advanced culture, social harmony, and beauty” for the entire world.
This is well known in China; an entire intellectual cottage industry has sprung up to analyze and forecast China’s journey to 2049. Newly published by the Center for Strategic Translation is a translated excerpt from one of the most prominent entries in this genre: Yi Changliang’s 2020 book Predicting the Future: A Study of China’s Composite National Strength in 2049.
Yi heads the editorial board of Macroeconomic Management, a publication of the Chinese National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC). This makes him an official advisor to the ministerial-level agency tasked with harmonizing macroeconomic policy across the PRC’s many bureaucratic bodies. Yi’s views should not be read as the official NDRC line, but they are representative of the sort of views that inform macro-economic policy making in China.
“Composite national strength” [综合国力]—an all embracing abstraction intended to synthesize all elements of national power (military, economic, cultural, etc.) into a single metric of national success—is the central organizing concept of Yi’s analysis. Yi attempts to quantify the many sub-components of China’s composite national strength and forecast how they will evolve over the next three decades. In our introductory essay to this translation we describe these calculations with more depth, but the info-graphic below, which is adapted from a figure included in Predicting the Future, shows the variables that Yi believes are most important:
In Yi’s view, “among the components of composite national strength, science and technology are the most critical.” “On the stage of global economic competition,” he informs us, “only countries with strong scientific and technological innovation capabilities can play a leading role in the exchange of goods and services in the global economy or lead global development.” In Yi’s view technology acts as a multiplier for both military and economic power: “Techno-scientific prosperity will make the nation prosper; techno-scientific strength will make the country strong.”
Yi believes that China is not well positioned to take advantage of this truth. He argues that Chinese industry imitates more than it innovates. This dooms China to play the second fiddle: Yi calculates that unless China changes course it will not catch up with American composite national strength by 2049. Yi insists that dramatic victories in the scientific and technological front must occur in order to realize Chinese visions of 2049. His recommendations for securing these victories are the subject of the excerpt we have translated.
His recommendations can largely be placed into two buckets. Yi believes that SOEs, government agencies, academic research centers, and private sector firms are poorly integrated: scientific innovations in one domain are not easily ported to the others. In order to fix this the CPC must construct “a market-oriented industry-university-research alliance with enterprises as the mainstay.” In this system “a government driven approach” will coordinate “basic and fundamental” scientific research among academic labs and research institutions, while private firms motivated by profits will take the lead in the “market development of technology.”
Even more important than striking the proper balance between market and state, however, is ensuring that China has the human capital it needs to push scientific frontiers in the first place. Yi’s recommendations for transforming education are bold and sometimes radical. Among other things, this means that education budgets must reach similar levels to military spending, curricula from primary school to the university level should be overhauled, and the entire system of tenure must be abandoned. Special effort must be given to cultivating and caring for a narrow band of scientific geniuses: “candidates must be selected from the best, so that the universities, for the sake of the country and humanity as a whole, can shape and educate the true techno-scientific elites that will lead the world.”
Westeners tend to think of education as a tame, low stakes area of policy making. Yi insists that—for China, at least—education policy will decide whether China’s future is defined by peril or power, crisis or triumph, stagnation or prosperity.
Read the full translation HERE.
Glossary
Beyond the translation, CST publishes a glossary of key terms in the PRC political writing. Each entry is an essay that summarizes the meaning and traces the history of key concepts invoked by the translated authors. Many are relevant for understanding Yi Changliang’s prediction of the China’s fate in the year 2049, including:
Composite National Strength [综合国力]
Key Core Technologies [关键核心技术]
The Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation [中华民族伟大复兴]
Coming Soon
The Center for Strategic Translation will continue its investigation of Chinese techno-nationalism in the weeks to come. We will publish additional excerpt of Wang Huning’s America Against America, as well as a CICIR report on the relationship between technology and the rise and fall of great powers.