China’s next big leap: becoming a frontier science civilisation

Singapore’s founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew once offered a striking observation on the nature of American power, wrote Harvard professor Joseph Nye in 2011. China, Lee argued, could draw upon its massive population but the United States possessed a deeper structural advantage: the ability to attract and recombine global talent within an unusually open, diverse and creative ecosystem. America’s innovation system was not merely large. It was generative.Fifteen years later, on April 30, President Xi Jinping convened China’s top scientific leadership in Shanghai for a symposium on strengthening basic research. On the surface, it seemed another high-level science policy meeting. In reality, it was a strategic declaration that China intends to compete not merely in manufacturing, commercialisation or industrial deployment, but in foundational scientific discovery itself.Remarkably, this meeting received almost no coverage in Western media. Yet its significance may ultimately rival the “China-2025" class="entity-link entity-topic" data-entity-id="135421" data-entity-type="topic">Made in China 2025” plan and many widely discussed geopolitical events of the decade.