In a Project Syndicate essay republished by the Taipei Times (“China’s long march to technological supremacy,” page 7, June 1) Johan Rockstrom and Inga Strumke argue that China’s technological rise is the predictable outcome of long-term planning, scientific investment and strategic governance.
China deserves credit for many of its achievements, but in presenting China’s industrial successes as evidence of the virtues of its state-directed model, the authors overlook several inconvenient realities.
First, the article assumes that China’s official data can largely be taken at face value. Earlier this year, Beijing claimed it had nearly met its carbon-intensity reduction targets. However, Lauri Myllyvirta of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air reported that China had altered the methodology used to calculate carbon intensity, excluding categories of emissions that had previously been counted. The result was a dramatic statistical improvement achieved not through a technological breakthrough, but through a change in accounting. If China’s environmental achievements are to be celebrated, they should first be independently verified.
Second, the authors praise China’s dominance in solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles without asking whether such dominance has been achieved efficiently or sustainably. Much of this success rests on enormous state subsidies, cheap financing and chronic overcapacity. Entire industries have produced far more than the market can absorb. An article celebrating environmental stewardship ignores the environmental cost of manufacturing products at scales exceeding demand.
Third, the essay implies that China’s authoritarian system has demonstrated the superiority of centralized governance over democratic politics. The argument is rarely stated directly, but it hovers over every comparison between China’s long-term planning and the supposedly chaotic nature of Western democracies.
Democracy was never designed to maximize the speed of industrial policy. It was designed to limit power, protect liberty, permit dissent and allow citizens to correct governmental mistakes.
Indeed, the US presents a powerful counterexample. Few democracies have been more partisan, polarized or politically contentious over the past half century. Yet the same period produced Silicon Valley, the Internet, modern software, biotechnology, cloud computing and artificial intelligence.
Fourth, the West should certainly acknowledge China’s technological progress, but China’s rise did not occur in isolation. It benefited enormously from Western capital, markets, universities, research collaborations and decades of technology transfer. The question facing the West is not why China became stronger. The question is why Western governments failed to recognize that they were helping create a strategic competitor while simultaneously hollowing out portions of their own industrial base.
The answer is not five-year plans imposed from above. It is to strengthen scientific research, invest in infrastructure, accelerate permitting for strategic industries, rebuild critical supply chains, protect intellectual property and maintain the openness that continues to attract the world’s most talented minds.
Europe in particular must learn that environmental goals and strategic dependence are not the same thing. A green transition that merely replaces dependence on Russian energy with dependence on Chinese manufacturing is not resilience.
China’s rise is real, as are its achievements, but technological success alone does not prove that authoritarianism is superior, nor does it require democracies to abandon the principles that made them innovative in the first place.
John Cheng is a retired businessman from Hong Kong now living in Taiwan.
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