Can China regain its lead in innovation?
Andrew Sheng says the question of 'how' is what preoccupies policymakers the world over
History moves in funny ways. Watching a BBC programme on the power of science, I learned that a retired British East India Company civil servant called John Walsh financed a naval expedition in 1772 to discover whether the torpedo fish, which stuns its victims using electricity, was producing the same electricity as that generated by lightning discovered by Benjamin Franklin. The dissection of the fish's cells inspired the creation of the first battery by the Italian scientist Alessandro Volta.
The storage of electricity helped create telegraphy, which, together with the invention of the steam engine, launched the industrial and telecommunication technology revolution in the West.
How was a former civil servant able to finance such an expedition? Walsh was the former secretary to Robert Clive, the conqueror of India for the British empire. Walsh was rewarded for his contribution to the British victory at the 1757 Battle of Plassey, and he returned to England with an estimated fortune of £147,000.
At the end of the 18th century, the difference in population and gross domestic product between the East and the West was amazing. According to the economic historian Angus Maddison, the population of western Europe in 1820 was only 133 million, whereas China had 381 million and India 209 million. The United States' population was only 10 million. At that time, China accounted for 32.9 per cent of world GDP, compared with 16 per cent for India, 23 per cent for Europe and 1.8 per cent for the US.
By 1950, when China and India became new republics, their numbers had declined respectively to 4.6 per cent and 4.2 per cent of world GDP, whereas the US accounted for 27.3 per cent and Western Europe 26.2 per cent.
The contrast could not have been greater in terms of knowledge and economic power. The Chinese imperial encyclopedia, commissioned by Emperor Kangxi in the 1600s, comprised all extant knowledge in China at that time and was made up of 10,000 volumes. But that knowledge was useless in the face of the West's superior scientific technology.
Why China did not build on its scientific achievements to compete with the West is a question that has puzzled many historians. The Sinologist Joseph Needham, who compiled the famous Cambridge Science and Civilisation of China, did not fully answer that question, today called the "Needham puzzle".