The emphasis of Beijing’s 14th five-year plan, released in October, ranges from 5G, artificial intelligence, quantum computation, semiconductors, the life sciences and biological breeding to aerospace technology. Its objectives are ambitious, and the outcomes deserve attention and scrutiny.
Influenced by Joseph Stalin’s centralized economic planning, the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) founder Mao Zedong (毛澤東) introduced the first five-year plan in 1953. It aimed to increase economic growth, with an emphasis on industrial development.
Throughout its 71-year history, the PRC has often filled its national plans with unrealistic and unattainable objectives. The Great Leap Forward, the most notable, resulted in widespread famine, with an estimated 18 million to 45 million deaths.
Despite many failures, on March 1986, China founded the 863 Program, or the State High-Tech Development Plan, as part of its seventh five-year plan. The program continued through three successive five-year plans, only to end in 2005.
The program has been credited with the Tianhe supercomputers and the Shenzhou spacecraft, among other achievements.
China’s 2017 breakthrough in satellite-based quantum communications had its roots in the 973 Program, also known as the National Basic Research Program.
However, alongside such glamorous “pockets of excellence” have been many not-so-successful high-tech endeavors.
A prominent example is China’s semiconductor industry. The untold resources devoted to the sector over the past 20 years have prompted some to compare it with Mao’s “two bombs, one satellite” program in the mid-1950s.
Although Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) has become China’s national champion, it is entirely dependent on foreign technology. Even worse, the company is about a decade behind the cutting-edge foundries of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co and the US’ Intel Corp.
Although the West generally views China’s mobilization and devotion of state resources through central planning and selection as effective, there are a few explanations for why China has yet to achieve significant success through its high-tech industry, despite having allocated a substantial amount of its national budget to it.
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) selectivity runs counter to creativity — a fundamental component of innovation, which requires a liberal, free environment (bottom-up approach), not a state-controlled model (top-down model).
Tu Youyou (屠呦呦) won the Nobel Prize for physiology in 2015 — China’s first in the natural sciences — with her discovery of artemisinin and dihydroartemisinin, used to treat malaria, a breakthrough in 20th-century tropical medicine.
In the 1970s, when Tu discovered that the substance was effective for treating malaria, she wanted to pursue the subject, but was told by the party secretary at her research institution to abandon the idea.
The reason was that the subject did not conform with the CCP’s research directives. Although people might find this laughable, the selectivity model remains rampant in China’s state-owned research institutes. Without the party’s sanction, Chinese researchers find it difficult, if not impossible, to innovate.
Over the past few decades, one can only imagine how many Chinese researchers had Nobel-quality discoveries quashed under the state-controlled model.
People tend to be more creative in research and development environments that are liberal and free-spirited.
Japan’s Kyodo University has 19 alumni and faculty members who are Nobel Prize recipients, while the more conservative Tokyo University has 12. Japanese tend to credit Kyodo University’s liberal environment for its Nobel prizes.
Massachusetts Route 128 — nicknamed the Technology Corridor in the 1980s — is near liberal Boston, while Silicon Valley is near liberal San Francisco.
Since 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) has decreed a long list of reform measures, not least in high-tech sectors, but the CCP continues to determine the winners and losers through its “state enterprises advance, private sectors retreat” policy. As a result, production efficiency has suffered as resource allocation becomes unbalanced. The private sector bears the brunt of the policy and innovation is impaired.
Xi and his lieutenants seem to have forgotten former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s (鄧小平) “conceal one’s strengths and bide one’s time,” and have instead espoused conceited policies of “Made in China 2025” and the Belt and Road Initiative.
With Xi’s vast expansion of power — making himself China’s paramount leader for life — the US has shifted its China policy toward one of confrontation, through trade disputes and high-tech competition.
History is full of lessons. For example, Japan launched the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Thirty-seven years later, the Japanese defeated the Russians in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. Another 36 years later, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Faced with the US’ superior technology, Japan’s imperial ambitions ended with its defeat in World War II.
Since the Mao era, “beat the UK and catch up with the US” has been China’s obsession. It has only been 42 years since Deng’s “reform and opening” in 1978, but Xi has dreamed of challenging the US technologically, economically and even militarily.
Why Xi is not following Deng’s advice and biding his time is anyone’s guess, but the stakes are high and China stands to lose on most fronts.
On the military front, China has fielded many modern weapon platforms, but relying on “mighty battleship, powerful artillery” is not enough. Unquantifiable factors — such as doctrine, training, process, management, humanity and culture — are equally important, if not more so.
In the 19th century, the Qing Dynasty did not pay attention to the unquantifiable factors and it was defeated by Imperial Japan in 1894. The CCP also appears to have paid little heed to these factors.
China has achieved remarkable successes in its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs due to concentrated resources, effective coordination of distinct specialties and determined leadership directed at the achievement of well-defined goals.
The Chinese management of nuclear projects in the 1950s and 1960s resembled the effectiveness of the US’ Manhattan Project of the 1940s and the Soviets’ “big push” style of research and development.
Unlike weapons programs, which are generally developed in government secrecy, dual-use technologies are developed in public. In the West, information technology is typically developed in the civilian sector and then adapted for military use.
Over the past two decades, the Pentagon abolished many military standards used for system development and instead adopted standards of professional organizations, such as the International Organization for Standardization, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the SAE International, and the Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics.
As a result, US weapons systems are heavily embedded with commercial off-the-shelf hardware and software components. This gives them technological superiority and economic competitiveness, while enabling the US to more rapidly develop and field powerful military technologies.
Similarly, cutting-edge cyberwarfare technologies and capabilities are largely developed in an open commercial market and are outside of direct government (and military) control.
As a result, the rapid development of electronics and computer applications seems to have bypassed the PLA, despite its technological modernization programs.
In information technology, China’s civilian sector, with its many foreign contacts and more up-to-date technology, has surpassed research and development efforts associated with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). As a result, the civilian sector is being pressured to have closer contact with the military and the PLA increasingly relies on “borrowed” expertise from abroad.
The PLA’s highly selective procurement and deployment of modern technologies for military operational capability is a difficult challenge, because technology is advancing faster than it can be acquired, tested and applied in a military environment.
As other nations’ militaries continue to advance, the PLA’s modernization efforts face moving technological goalposts.
Most notably, China’s military-industrial complex seems to suffer from technological disadvantages in areas such as semiconductors, computers and software — areas in which the civilian sector experiences significant advances on an almost weekly basis.
The Chinese military-industrial complex, with its top-down control, might not have the resources to compete with democratic nations’ information technology industries.
Despite China’s technological achievements in many areas, the PRC has an arduous and long road ahead if it is to compete against the West on all fronts and win, but its capabilities are increasing and its intentions are ever more treacherous — and that should be most alarming for the West.
Holmes Liao has more than 35 years of professional experience in the US aerospace industry and served as an adjunct distinguished lecturer at Taiwan’s National Defense University from 1999 to 2004.
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