Technological Progress in Chinese Political Culture: An Intellectual Genealogy

Where there is no vision, the people perish.
—Proverbs 29:18

China’s rise has put America’s vanishing technological edge and decrepit industrial base in sharp focus. As the Chinese Communist Party relentlessly pursues technological breakthroughs and industrial dominance, a faction of elites in the United States has begun to coalesce around the objective of reversing America’s relative decline. Bringing together trade hawks, defense technologists, and policy experts working on topics from immigration to permitting reform, this new coalition fears that without serious government attention and action, America’s best days are in the past.

While still embracing private innovation, this techno-industrial coalition nonetheless realizes that the government must play a more active role in accelerating innovation and supporting industrial development. Yet the long-standing neglect of American technological strength stems from the fact that neither technological innovation nor industrial capacity have preoccupied America’s political culture for some time. This presents a significant hurdle as this coalition seeks to affect enduring changes in policy. Fortunately, history offers instructive models for overcoming such obstacles. The challenge before America’s techno-industrialists today resembles that confronted by generations of Chinese reformers as they reckoned with how far their country had fallen behind the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

No nation has more successfully inculcated these priorities into its political culture than China. From Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping, Chinese leaders have consistently privileged technological innovation as the key determinant of national power.¹ “Strengthening the nation through science and technology” (科技强国) has become one of Xi’s lynchpin slogans.² State agencies regularly publish reports highlighting techno-industrial strength as the main driver of great nations’ rise and fall.³ The seriousness with which China treats technological progress has translated to many concrete achievements, including its world-class ability to build modern infrastructure, growing dominance in critical technologies, and a series of global firsts at the technological frontier.⁴

China’s modern technological perseverance was born out of a 150-year struggle to reinvent its ideological foundations, which was triggered by its nineteenth-century crisis of modernity. While imperial China was a preeminent power for much of its two-thousand-year history, its decline had become evident by the mid-Qing dynasty after a string of costly military defeats by European powers during the 1800s. Yet China’s political elite resisted drastic reform until 1895, when the Qing’s crushing defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War marked the most significant loss in its “Century of Humiliation.” Any remaining vestiges of Chinese exceptionalism were stamped out. Most Chinese scholars of that time finally admitted what was already obvious to Western observers: China was a land devoid of “progress.” Denizens of China became aware of this as well: the term for progress, jinbu (进步), exploded in usage as the emperor, court officials, and local newspapers all grappled with China’s crisis of modernity.⁵

Where earlier reformers presumed Western technology could be imitated without deeper economic or social changes, post-1895 reformers recognized that China’s intellectual foundations required improvement. As Yan Fu, the leading translator of Western thought during this period, observed in 1895, “The greatest and most irreconcilable difference between Chinese and Western thinking is that the Chinese love the past and neglect the present, while Westerners strive in the present to surpass the past.”⁶

A century later, Wang Huning, who would become the Chinese Communist Party’s chief ideologist, echoed Yan’s sentiment while visiting America in 1991: “To Chinese people, the idea of innovation is in opposition to tradition, and it is not easy to counteract thousands of years of tradition.”⁷ He contrasted this with America’s “tradition of innovation,” noting that American power—rooted in its technological progress and industrial strength—resulted from its “spirit of futurism.”⁸ For Yan, Wang, and the century of reformers in between, overcoming China’s cultural resistance to change was paramount.

China’s long and halting quest for progress has borne fruit. It is no longer the Chinese who experience “future shock” upon arriving in America,⁹ but rather the American tourist who, using China’s high-speed rail, e-commerce “super-apps,” and next-generation cars, feels left behind. Today, innovation is not just an aspiration; China’s political elite, once dominated by Confucian scholar-bureaucrats who cast technology as mere “instruments of the barbarians,”¹⁰ is now filled with engineers who believe science, technology, and industrial power are the “decisive factors for national strength,” the “foundation for a world power,” and necessary for achieving the “great rejuvenation” of the Chinese nation.¹¹ As the United States stands at the crossroads of stagnation and revival, China’s transformation holds essential lessons, in both its failures and ultimate success, to guide America’s aspiring reformers.

China’s Clash with Modernity

In their quest to salvage national pride following China’s “Century of Humiliation,” twentieth-century Chinese scholars found a hero in Zheng He, a Ming dynasty eunuch admiral.¹² From 1405 to 1431, he projected Ming naval power as far as the East African coast with sixty-two of the largest wooden ships ever built. The Chinese, in another timeline, might have reached America before Columbus. (Some scholars propose that they did, albeit unconvincingly.)

Yet the voyages came to an abrupt end shortly after the deaths of Zheng He and his patron, the Yongle Emperor. Confucian scholar-officials, embroiled in bitter power struggles with eunuchs at court, came to view the voyages as a symptom of the eunuchs’ decadence. Many of Zheng He’s plans, designs, and logs were allegedly burned by disdainful officials.¹³ When the scholar Gu Yingtai compiled a history of the dynasty in 1658, he devoted none of its chapters to Zheng He’s voyages of exploration.¹⁴ When the Ming finally fell to the Qing in 1644, memory of the eunuch-admiral, along with imperial China’s prospects of global empire, had long faded into history.

China’s disinterest in the external world did not stop the world from becoming interested in China. Isolationism had become untenable by the mid-nineteenth century, when a series of military defeats to Western nations forced the Qing to cede vast territories, pay debilitating reparations, and open ports to foreign spheres of influence. Recognizing that China had to adapt to the “changed situation” (变局) if it was to survive, leading statesmen such as Li Hongzhang, known in European newspapers as the “Yellow Bismarck,” initiated the Self-Strengthening Movement to modernize China after its devastating loss in the Second Opium War (1856–60).

The Self-Strengthening Movement centered on three pillars.¹⁵ First was military modernization, particularly naval, which included purchas­ing ships and weapons from Germany and Britain, improving manufacturing capacity, and repairing shipyards. The secondary priority was commercial modernization, consisting of state subsidies for railroads, textile factories, mines, and other industrial ventures. Finally, the movement helped establish educational programs to train the personnel needed to fulfill the military, intellectual, and diplomatic needs of a modern nation; initiatives included Western-style schools, military academies, and study-abroad programs, which saw the first wave of Chinese students study at American universities.

These efforts yielded ostensible successes. By 1890, China boasted the world’s eighth-largest navy, modern factories began operations, and a new generation of Western-educated students entered the civil service.¹⁶ Nevertheless, deep-seated issues plagued most initiatives. Weak central coordination in naval modernization drove the northern and southern fleets to compete for financial resources, which would later compromise the Qing navy’s fighting ability against Japan’s unified fleet under a single command.¹⁷ State-owned industrial projects and commercial ventures required heavy government supervision (官督商办), causing inefficiency, corruption, and mismanagement that drastically inflated project costs.¹⁸ In one instance, an arsenal finally produced Remington rifles after years of delay, but after two years of production, Chinese-made rifles were still more costly than those imported from Europe.¹⁹

In hindsight, the reforms were doomed to fail. Self-Strengthening relied on the flawed premise that China could selectively appropriate Western technology while maintaining its Confucian essence: “Chinese at the core, Western in its application” (中学为体, 西学为用). As Feng Guifen, originator of the movement’s philosophy, unambiguously stated in 1861: “Herein lies the way to self-strengthening: we should use the instruments of the barbarians, but not adopt the ways of the barbarians. . . . We have only one thing to learn from the barbarians, and that is strong ships and effective guns.”²⁰ A few prescient observers, such as Wang Tao, warned that “superficial imitation” was insufficient without adopting the underlying systems responsible for the West’s superior technology, such as democratic governance and individual rights.²¹ They were largely ignored.

The First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) served as the movement’s ultimate litmus test. While the Qing pursued piecemeal modernization, Japan addressed the structural foundations of national power following the Meiji Restoration in 1868. By overturning 418 years of Shogunate feudalism and centralizing authority under a constitutional monarchy, the Meiji government was able to implement radical changes in all corners of Japanese society, including universal conscription and European-inspired legal and banking systems. The war, which most directly concerned influence in Korea, signified the clashing of two rival visions of Asian modernization.

At first, it seemed that China’s less radical, more equivocal approach to modernization was bound to triumph. Upon the war’s outbreak, the European press largely predicted a Chinese victory.²² The Qing fleet was double the size of Japan’s; Li Hongzhang’s Beiyang Fleet, the crown jewel of Self-Strengthening, roughly equaled Japan’s entire navy. In the decisive Battle of the Yalu River, however, which came just two months after the war began, most of the Beiyang Fleet was captured or destroyed. The Qing’s two prized ironclads had run out of ammo during the battle.²³ Li’s reputation, and that of the rest of the Self-Strengtheners, sank with their ships. Reflecting upon Li’s legacy, his biographer echoed Wang Tao’s prediction from decades earlier: “[Li] was ignorant of the true sources of Western wealth and power, believing that China only needed to learn about guns, ships, and machinery to catch up. By merely imitating these aspects, he thought he had mastered Western techniques. Such superficial imitation inevitably revealed its shortcomings.”²⁴

The crushing loss to Japan served as the Qing’s “Sputnik moment,” jolting the Chinese psyche from its delusion of civilizational superiority. A powerful urgency to learn from the West, as Japan had done, descended upon the elite class. John Fryer, an English missionary who translated one-fourth of the scientific textbooks in China during the 1880s, observed that “a strong tide of demand for Western learning” was now evident among Chinese literati, who were “becoming aware of their own gross ignorance of modern arts and sciences.”²⁵ Chinese self-criticism reached such intensity that Fryer predicted the Chinese would eventually abandon their culture altogether, even adopting English as the national language.

New Theories of History

Chinese intellectuals, hungry for ideas to progress beyond their perilous first encounters with modernity, drew inspiration from two distinct sources. The first was Meiji Japan, whose successful modernization was evident following the war. Thousands of Chinese students and scholars, including Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, Lu Xun, and other prominent second-generation reformers, went to study in Tokyo. Shinpo (進歩), the Japanese term for “progress,” became widely adopted in Chinese reform writings as jinbu (进步)—carrying an explicit sociopolitical connotation of progress that replaced older Chinese terms such as zhangjin (长进), qianjin (前进), and jinyi (进益).²⁶

The second source was the European Enlightenment and its theories of history. By the late nineteenth century, viewing history as a progressive or teleological process had become a dominant intellectual assumption in Europe.²⁷ The Industrial Revolution, the discovery of the New World, and the rise of modern science and capitalism all fostered a sense that contemporary society had broken free of the past. “Progress” distinguished the moderns from the ancients, the industrialists from the agrarians, capitalist nation-states from feudal monarchies, and the Age of Enlightenment from the Dark Ages. Thinkers such as Condorcet, Comte, Voltaire, and Hegel championed the notion of an upward arc to history. Even those like Rousseau and Marx who challenged liberal notions of “progress” still viewed history as a staged, evolutionary process.

These theories of history entered China through translations by Western-educated Chinese intellectuals, none more influential than Yan Fu.²⁸ Through his adapted translations of Smith, Mill, and others (where Yan often omitted sections and added his own commentary), he emphasized that modernity’s essence lay in the ideas and institutions that enabled technological progress, not in the technology itself as the Self-Strengtheners believed. Through his translation of Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics in 1896 and translations of Herbert Spencer and Edward Jenks in 1903, he was also the first to systematically introduce Western ideas of evolution and staged social development to the Chinese intellectual world.²⁹ These works laid the groundwork for China’s embrace of Marxist historical materialism in the following decades.

These new concepts revolutionized how Chinese elites understood history. Traditional Chinese thought held that a dynasty was most glorious upon its founding when the Mandate of Heaven was first granted. Thus, the present would always be inferior to the past. As Yan observed, “The Chinese believe that to revolve from order to disorder, from ascension to decline, is the natural way of Heaven and human affairs; the Westerners believe in the ultimate principle of all learning and government, in infinite, daily progress, in advance that will not sink into decline, in order that will not revert to disorder.”³⁰ Yan’s cardinal achievement was to replace this cyclical theory of history with a linear, evolutionary one, without which civilizational comparisons of Chinese “backwardness” and Western advancement would not have been possible.³¹

As linear theories of history took form, Chinese scholars reframed past periods as “stages” in the path of progress, culminating with the emergence of modernity. Liang Qichao, a famous reformer in the post-Qing period, postulated that China was evolving from an “age of barbarity” (野蛮时代) to the “age of civilization” (文明时代).³² After 1895, Chinese scholars invented or increasingly used vocabulary delineating between past, present, and future, including denotations of time (“past” 过去, “present” 今日, “future” 前途, 未來, or 将来) and historical epochs (“antiquity” 古代, “middle ages” 中古, “early modernity” 近代, and “modernity” 现代).³³

This linguistic shift reflected the broad awakening to China’s stagnant condition, which trickled up to the highest levels of Qing politics. Mounting calls for reform briefly found a champion in the twenty-seven-year-old Guangxu Emperor. In 1898, he empowered “radical” reformers at court to abolish the 1,300-year-old civil service exams, bureaucratic military processes, and other “empty, unpractical, and deceiving things that obstruct our forward progress.”³⁴ However, the aptly named Hundred Days’ Reform was short-lived. After just 103 days, conservative hardliners led by Empress Dowager Cixi, Guanxu’s aunt, staged a coup, placing the emperor under house arrest and beheading most of the reformers. Liang and his mentor, Kang Youwei, fled to Japan, but Tan Sitong, another prominent reformer and protégé of Kang’s, refused to flee. Believing his execution would inspire other reformers, Tan embraced martyrdom: “Every major reform in every country requires the shedding of blood. If anyone must sacrifice their lives for China, please start from me.”

Upon seizing power, Cixi immediately paused or reversed most of the reforms, save for the founding of Peking University. Of course, this did not address China’s underlying problems, and two years later, the Eight-Nation Alliance (comprising Japan, Russia, the United States, and others) occupied Beijing in response to the Boxer uprising. Following yet another unfavorable peace treaty, Cixi instituted the late Qing reforms (晚清改革) in 1901, reinstating some policies from the Hundred Days’ Reform and even experimenting with constitutional monarchy. But it was too little, too late: The Qing dynasty—and two thousand years of Chinese imperial rule—collapsed in 1911 amid widespread revolts.

In summary, under the weight of ideological dogma and bureaucratic inertia, necessary change was thwarted for decades—even as the failure of the status quo became apparent. Beginning in 1842, the Qing lost Hong Kong, Taiwan, Outer Manchuria, and billions in today’s dollars for indemnity payments in its “unequal treaties” to Western nations. None of this was enough to dispel the elites’ faith in tradition and China’s inherent superiority. Neither was internal instability from the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64) and Dungan Revolts (1862–77), which combined killed more people than World War I. Only after the 1895 defeat in the Sino-Japanese War did a critical mass of reformers finally recognize the need for fundamental change, but the political establishment violently rejected them. Reformer-writer Lu Xun captured this tragic condition in his renowned 1918 novel, Diary of a Madman (狂人日记), in which only a madman recognizes the insanity of a society so hostile to change that its own children are cannibalized.

The Birth of Progress

The fall of the Qing dynasty and the founding of the Republic of China in 1912 marked a turning point in Chinese discourses on “progress.” Between 1911 and 1929, a flood of new ideas competed to guide China’s future at levels unseen since the Hundred Schools of Thought (771–256 BC). Core ideological precepts were formed during this period, and they would evolve over the next century into China’s present obsession with technological progress. First, fervent nationalism drove the rejection of tradition, creating a vacuum for new values. Next, scientism, the belief in empirical inquiry as the only way to determine the truth, elevated science among competing value systems. Finally, Chinese statesmen began to view their national history as a process to be actively managed and accelerated through various stages of development, laying the foundation for its centrally planned economic philosophy today.

The New Culture Movement emerged as the post-dynastic era’s most influential intellectual force. While many enthusiastic statesmen rushed to build the Republic, the New Culturites initially avoided direct political participation, recognizing that better politics first required dismantling old ideologies. Chen Duxiu, the movement’s founder and later cofounder of the Chinese Communist Party, argued that the efforts to establish a constitutional republic in the early 1910s were “political window dressing” without first changing “the thought and character” of the Chinese people.³⁵ His observation proved prescient as Sun Yat-sen, the Republic’s first president, was forced to relinquish his seat as quickly as he gained it to Yuan Shikai, the country’s most powerful military leader. China quickly devolved into old habits when Yuan declared himself emperor in 1915, only to abdicate three months later amid another series of rebellions.

Unlike the late Qing reformers who sought to modernize Confucianism, including the Hundred Days’ Reformers, the New Culture Move­ment advocated for abandoning old values altogether. They promoted Western philosophies while discrediting Confucian tradition in all its forms—cultural, social, literary, political, and ethical. They believed this was the only way China could escape its old political patterns. Chen, not yet a Marxist in 1916 but representing general progressive sentiments as a Peking University professor, argued, “If we wish to construct a Western-style new state . . . then the fundamental issue is that we must import the foundations of a Western-style country. . . . Unless [Confu­cianism] is suppressed, [the new way] will not prevail.”³⁶

Growing nationalist zeal accelerated the discarding of old values. As early as 1875, Li Hongzhang lamented, “For a country as great as China to lack the ability to strengthen and establish itself is not only worrisome but also shameful (非惟可忧，抑亦可耻).”³⁷ After China’s humiliating defeat by Japan in 1895, restoring its rightful place as the “Middle Kingdom” became a rallying cry. As the Qing dynasty waned and the modern Chinese state emerged from its ruins, nationalism took on a new dimension, with the emperor and his subjects becoming the Chinese “nation” and its “citizens.” National progress replaced dynastic stability as the chief political goal.

China’s national pride nevertheless sustained further injuries in the 1910s, which propelled the New Culture Movement to mainstream prominence. In the run-up to World War I, the new, weak, and unstable republican government repeatedly made unpopular concessions to Japan. Then president and later emperor Yuan Shikai first agreed to Japan’s “Twenty-One Demands” in 1914, granting Japan control over German-held territories in the Shandong province. A few years later, Premier Duan Qirui, who succeeded Yuan after his abdication, was revealed to have accepted Japanese bribes in exchange for territorial concessions.³⁸ Following World War I’s conclusion, China’s demands for Shandong’s return were ignored in Paris as the Treaty of Versailles officially awarded the disputed holdings to Japan. In response, New Culture leaders mobilized the May Fourth Movement, a series of massive protests that intensified popular resentment over China’s “Century of Humiliation” (百年国耻). Both the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Kuomintang (KMT) appealed to this nationalistic fervor to gather support during the 1920s. Overcoming historical humiliation and achieving national rejuvenation remains the animating component of the CCP’s value proposition and historical self-justification even to this day.³⁹

As modern nationalism and anti-traditionalism eroded the old foundations of Chinese society, new values emerged to fill the void left by the decline of Confucianism. The personified notion of “Mr. Science” (赛先生) quickly became a central protagonist in the intellectual drama of this period in Chinese political society. One of two pillars of the New Culture Movement alongside “Mr. Democracy” (德先生), Mr. Science represented a positivist doctrine that all forms of truth—natural, ethical, metaphysical—could only be attained by “proving everything by fact.”⁴⁰ Hu Shih, a leading New Culture scholar and “father of the Chinese literary renaissance,”⁴¹ described science’s intellectual dominance in 1922: “Over the past thirty years, one name [science] has achieved almost supreme dignity in the country . . . since China has been talking about the reform and change of the law, no self-appointed modern man dared to openly slander science.”⁴² Many thinkers attributed China’s weakness to its lack of scientific aptitude. In his 1922 essay Why China Has No Science, philosopher Feng Youlan argued that disinterest in the external world was the foremost cause of the nation’s stagnation because it prevented the development of modern science.⁴³ Over the next century, China’s political emphasis on catching up scientifically led to a uniquely Chinese version of scientism, defined by Chinese philosopher Yao Guorong in 2009 as a political value system centered around scientific and technological progress.⁴⁴

A desire to rejuvenate national strength prompted a reappraisal of human agency in Chinese historical thought. Li Dazhao, a New Culture leader and eventual cofounder of the CCP, echoed Feng’s critique of China’s historical emphasis on internal harmony over external strength. In his 1918 theory of civilization, he contrasted “Eastern pessimism” (厌世主义), which elevated spiritual above material concerns, with “Western optimism” (乐天主义), which embodied an active, Faustian worldview that “the way of man” could “progress” society.⁴⁵ During the post-Qing period, intellectuals across the ideological spectrum—including national­ists, Marxists, democrats, anarchists, and constitutional monarchists—adopted an agentic view of history, in which the mechanisms of progress are discernable, exploitable, and accelerable. Furthermore, the theories of history introduced by Yan offered Chinese scholars an evolutionary framework for societal progression. Understanding the current “epoch” (时代) and how to advance it became a hot intellectual pursuit as every political faction justified its agenda by invoking the laws of social evolution.⁴⁶ History was no longer seen as the inevitable unfolding of events, but a staged teleology to be molded by man. These assumptions persist in the CCP’s political language today, with party documents replete with ideas like “seizing” the opportunities presented.

These intellectual foundations helped pave the way for the spread of communism. China’s humiliating treatment at the Treaty of Versailles, coupled with the unprecedented violence of World War I, prompted many intellectuals who had previously championed Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy to reevaluate their models for progress. While most still agreed China needed to catch up technologically to the West, some humanists warned of becoming a purely “material civilization.” They feared that unbridled technological progress, pursued without ethical grounding, would only culminate in “means of genocide,” as demonstrated by the mechanized slaughter of World War I.⁴⁷ Yan Fu and Liang Qichao, who had been promoters of imitating the West just a few years earlier, attempted to rescue Confucian values by advocating a “synthesis” of Chinese and Western civilizations to “make a new civilization.”⁴⁸

These efforts came to nothing—at least in the short run. The New Culture Movement had vilified Confucianism beyond any hope of restoration. China was broke, mired in famine, and eager to move on to new ideologies. Marxism, with its promises of a classless society scientifically grounded in the inevitability of staged social evolution, appealed to those disillusioned with both traditional Chinese values and Western excesses.

The Long March to Progress

Throughout the 1910s, the New Culture Movement remained primarily a cultural force, and its influence spread through magazines and books rather than formal political power. By the 1920s, however, its leaders judged that China’s values had sufficiently shifted, and their opportunity to enter politics had arrived. Yet it would take nearly sixty years—from the May Fourth Movement in 1919 to Deng Xiaoping’s ascension in 1978—before Mr. Science would become a part of China’s mode of governance. In the interregnum, civil wars, the Japanese invasion, and an ideologically devoted Mao Zedong would plunge China into a maelstrom of carnage and radical experiments.

Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, vanguards of the New Culture Movement, cofounded the CCP in 1921. Inspired by the Bolsheviks’ success, they promoted communism as the most “scientific” evolutionary theory—and thus the most practical for achieving “progress.”⁴⁹ This laid the groundwork for accelerationism with Chinese characteristics, with historical materialism becoming the intellectual framework for propelling China through stages of social development. China’s contemporary economic philosophy remains premised on the same assumption that rational state planning can accelerate technological advancement—and thus history itself.

Utopian dreams would be placed on hold for several decades as the venue for ideological disagreements moved from magazines to the battlefield. Many New Culture scholars were forced into obscurity as regional military rulers began to dictate acceptable ideas. Li Dazhao was murdered by a warlord in 1927, and Chen Duxiu was expelled from the party he founded in 1929. Over 1,300 warlords emerged as the Republic’s weak government failed to establish a monopoly on violence.⁵⁰ From 1927 to 1949, a bitter civil war raged between the CCP and KMT—only interrupted by the formation of a united front to combat the Japanese invasion (1937–45)—which killed between six to ten million Chinese.⁵¹

Stability returned in 1949 with the CCP’s victory and takeover of mainland China. By then, Mao had completely reshaped the party in his image. A staunch ideologue, he sought to apply historical materialism to governance, initiating sweeping reforms to reshape society under Maoist thought. None were more ambitious than the Great Leap Forward, which aimed to accelerate China’s transition from an agrarian to an industrialized economy by mass mobilizing citizens into state-owned communes. Initially, the Great Leap Forward garnered support from scientists such as Qian Xuesen, who thought that it would spark an agricultural and industrial revolution that would drastically improve energy, food, and textile production.⁵² Of course, the actual results were catastrophic. Unrealistic production quotas, forced collectivization, and ineffective coordination resulted in the largest famine and non-wartime death toll in human history, killing approximately thirty million from 1958 to 1962.⁵³

Although the Great Leap Forward ended disastrously, Mao’s “Two Bombs, One Satellite” program—his signature military research initiative—demonstrated the potential of focused state efforts to accelerate technological progress. Between 1964 and 1970, the program yielded China’s first atomic and hydrogen bombs, ballistic missiles, and satellites—ultimately cementing China as a nuclear state and global power, the sovereignty of which neither the United States nor the newly hostile Soviet Union could threaten. The initiative proved China’s scientific and industrial base could achieve significant breakthroughs under tightly defined military objectives. Unlike Deng’s later reforms, however, Mao did not view technology as a tool for broader economic development, but rather as a way of projecting power and strengthening China’s defense against foreign adversaries.

Yet in his final decade, Mao cast innovation as an explicit enemy of the regime during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). The Three-Body Problem, an internationally popular novel by Liu Cixin, depicts a protagonist whose father, a physics professor, is beaten to death for his bourgeois scientific beliefs. Such treatment, however, only suggests a fraction of the Cultural Revolution’s true brutality: Scientists were classified under the “Stinking Old Ninth” category, leading to the persecution, torture, and murder of thousands, including leading contributors to the “Two Bombs, One Satellite” program. Thirty employees at one nuclear center committed suicide after being unable to withstand further abuse, while another 310 were injured or permanently disabled by revolutionary comrades.⁵⁴

After Mao’s death in 1976, a power vacuum emerged that, combined with the disastrous failures of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, opened new possibilities for China’s development. Into this void stepped Deng, who decisively seized the reins and set China on its modern course of techno-industrialization. The ghosts of reformers past would, at last, finally find a statesman capable of translating their vision into policy and engraining it in China’s political culture.

Deng Xiaoping and the Techno-Industrial State

While many know Deng Xiaoping as a reformer, he was also a consummate Party man, a veteran of the Civil War steeped in decades of Maoist doctrine. He spent his entire career in the CCP, including the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), and was known to be competent and pragmatic. Early in his career, he spent an inordinate amount of time with Mao and other CCP leaders and developed an intimate understanding of the Party. Once he became the national leader, Deng used his institutional knowledge and network of trust built within the CCP bureaucracy to deeply instill new ideologies of technological progress.

After witnessing the failures of the Cultural Revolution and surviving a political purge, Deng believed strongly in the need for reform. He had an almost magical belief in the power of science and technology to drive economic growth, which he considered the CCP’s number one priority. During the final days of Mao’s rule, Deng focused his work on the governance of science and technology. Even while still on a shaky political footing in 1978, he gave the opening speech at the National Conference on Science and Technology where he reclaimed the “Four Modernizations”—Agriculture, Industry, National Defense, and Science and Technology—which the hardline Gang of Four, the faction of CCP insiders who had spearheaded the Cultural Revolution, had previously disavowed as capitalist during their ascendancy. Crucially, Deng highlighted Science and Technology as the lynchpin to realizing the other three modernizations. A few years later, the party released its sixth five-year plan (1981–85), which prominently featured technological modernization and was the first plan adopted under Deng’s paramount leadership. The document ran to more than one hundred pages, with most of them devoted to developing China’s industrial sector, expanding international trade, and advancing technology; only a single page concerned increasing income and consumption, reflecting the party’s priorities that remain to this day.⁵⁵

Driven by his overriding belief in the role of technology, Deng took three key steps to imbue the party with a techno-industrial outlook: (1) instilling the goal of technological progress into the party ideology; (2) maintaining positive relationships with more advanced economies such as the United States and Japan to promote investment and technology transfer; and (3) framing market reforms as policy experiments to overcome resistance from conservative members of the Party still wedded to the political dogmas of the Mao era.

First, Deng understood that for his reforms and convictions about progress to take root in the party, the conservatives would have to be brought on board as well. An ideological innovator, he rebranded scientists as “laborers of the mind” and brought them back into the party fold. In the 1978 national conference speech, he hailed science and technology as part of the “productive forces,” a positive concept in Marxism that is considered one of the driving forces for realizing socialism.⁵⁶ Deng also raised the status of scientists and engineers by making technical experience and degrees a credential for advancement within the Party and empowering those with the right technical background in key administrative roles as equals with party members. In this way, Deng rebranded the pursuit of science and technology as not just compatible with socialism but fundamental to its success. Deng also commissioned a series of books and articles following this theme, with major party theorists advancing the idea that science and technology were philosophical systems independent of political theory.

Deng recognized that China’s modernization would require learning from more developed nations. Early in his tenure in 1978, Deng went on a multiday tour of Japan, the first time a modern Chinese leader had set foot in Japan. Having been particularly impressed by Japanese manufacturing, Deng aimed to attract Japanese investment in China. But to avoid being labeled as promoting foreign, Western ways of doing things (which had discredited earlier reform campaigns), Deng recast Japanese manufacturing processes as “management techniques” that were part of the productive forces needed for modernization.

Deng also created other venues for Chinese elites to learn from Japan’s successes. Japan’s Economic Stabilization Board guided Japan through post–World War II reconstruction, especially as the country moved away from wartime price controls and underwent supply shortages. As Deng liberalized Chinese markets and began loosening price controls, the CCP faced similar challenges. Deng organized an annual conference between Japanese and Chinese economic officials to learn from the experiences of Japanese market liberalization as Chinese market reforms progressed, a conference that continued until 1992. “No country played a greater role . . . than Japan” in accelerating Chinese industrial policy development and industrialization; much of it was due to Deng’s diplomacy and geopolitical savvy.⁵⁷

To maintain positive foreign relations that were critical to China’s industrialization, particularly relations with the United States and Japan, Deng punted on many tense international issues, specifically ownership and claims over Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Pinnacle Islands,⁵⁸ saying they were best left to “later generations who would be wiser” (一代一代解决).⁵⁹ While a more hotheaded leader might have sought easy routes to fame through nationalistic conflict, Deng recognized that he needed positive relationships with foreign partners to continue foreign direct investment and allow Chinese students to study abroad and eventually bring their knowledge back to China. His active approach to building foreign relationships reflected his underlying theory of development that focused on technological progress as the foremost prerequisite to wielding power on an international stage. At this stage of development, Deng recognized that China still had much to learn from international partners.

Finally, in all his reforms, but particularly when it came to Special Economic Zones (SEZ), Deng even incorporated a form of scientism to avoid conservative backlash. He sidestepped conservatives’ concerns about foreign capital investments in SEZs and greater market reform in general by framing these kinds of policies as experiments that could always be rolled back. Deng enshrined the famous folk saying “cross the river by feeling stones” (摸着石头过河) as a guiding principle of Chinese development strategies, and in his early days of power consolidation following Mao’s death, he espoused a political ideology of “seeking truth from facts” (实事求是).⁶⁰ Both of these idioms suggested how paths through the uncertainties of reform can be charted by experimentation and assessing their results and outcomes.

To create a broader constituency invested in their continuation, Deng created space for his policies to take root and generate success, particularly the supercharged economic development of the SEZs. Deng’s focus on broad-based economic development and market reforms, as well as creating technical state capacity, contrasts with previous reform movements that held narrower views of technological progress, such as the Self-Strengthening Movement and the Great Leap Forward.

These broad-based policies helped plant the seedlings for China to begin catching up to Western industrial development levels following China’s industrial stagnation in the aftermath of Mao’s reign. For instance, the Daya Bay nuclear power plant was the first nuclear power plant to be built in China. It originated in 1985 with a handshake between Deng and prominent financier Lawrence Kadoorie.⁶¹ Finished in 1992, it today still provides nearly two gigawatts of capacity to meet the industrial load demand arising from the success of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone. Similarly, China’s first modern integrated steel mill began construction in 1979 after Deng Xiaoping’s Japan tour. In Japan, he saw the modern Kimitsu steel factory, which produced about half as much steel as all of China combined at the time.⁶² Deng also revived project development for the Three Gorges Dam project in 1982, which had long been a dream of Chinese nationalists starting from Sun Yat-sen but had been on pause since 1958 when Mao launched the Great Leap Forward.⁶³ While none of these industrial projects were groundbreaking, they represent the first fruits of Deng’s industrial policies that laid the foundation for China’s techno-industrial progress today.

Deng’s “opening up” not only allowed for the infusion of capital and development but also brought fresh ideological perspectives on progress among elites. American writer Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave, already a bestseller in the West, circulated broadly within the party.⁶⁴ Toffler was even invited to brief top CCP officials in 1982. His technology-centric theory of history supported Deng and his successors’ convictions that the party should direct technological development.

Toffler’s influence translated into Deng launching his hallmark techno-industrial “863 Program” in 1986, which sought to enable China to seize the “New Technological Revolution.” Unlike Mao’s “Two Bombs, One Satellite” program, which narrowly focused on prestige defense projects, the “863 Program” focused on scaling the R&D of technologies identified as the future foundation for critical industries.⁶⁵ Importantly, the program was given a broad mandate and billions of renminbi, and it was executed and led by a small group of scientists, not driven by party prestige or politics. This aggressive spending on technological development, even at a time when China faced fiscal constraints, soon became an intrinsic trait of China’s orientation toward technology. The program lasted for over twenty years.⁶⁶

The durability of these ideas can be attributed to the following factors: Deng’s success in stimulating economic growth; his extended power base that gave such policies time to come to fruition; and his use of ideological arguments and the propaganda apparatus to bake them into Chinese socialist thought. While the republican reformers who preceded him were imperial advisers or revolutionaries with strikingly similar ideas to Deng, they were ultimately on the outside looking in due to their shallow ideas about scientific development. Deng, the ultimate CCP insider, was the statesman and implementer who was able to bring about the reforms through concrete programs and create an ideological foundation for them to meld into Chinese society.

The Uncertain Future

Deng’s policy orientation—which elevated scientists and technological development as drivers of economic growth, mediated through dynamic and experimental policymaking—brings us to modern China, where “scientism” dominates the political culture.⁶⁷ Today, the success and durability of Deng’s reforms is evident, as is the party’s continuation of Deng’s methods and outlook. For instance, Xi’s Made in China 2025 document presents a theory of the rise and fall of nations as determined by the state of their manufacturing industry, and it outlines manufacturing key performance indicators (KPI) as metrics of progress.⁶⁸ Intelligence documents outlining national strategy strikingly focus on techno-industrial development far more than diplomacy, alliances, or spy craft.⁶⁹ Xi’s political report to the Twentieth Party Congress in 2022 showed the enduring impact Deng’s scientism has on the Party’s outlook on science and technology: “We must uphold the principles that science and technology are the primary productive forces, talent is the primary resource, and innovation is the primary driving force.”⁷⁰

Partially due to disciplined state focus after “a century of struggle,”⁷¹ China today has seized global leadership in many strategic industries and is catching up fast in others. It dominates global markets for drones,⁷² electric vehicles, high-speed rail, rare earth refining,⁷³ 5G networks,⁷⁴ and lithium-ion batteries,⁷⁵ just to name a few key techno-industrial sectors. China builds almost half of the world’s ship tonnage, while the United States builds less than 0.2 percent.⁷⁶ As Bloomberg reported in 2024, “The world outside the U.S. is increasingly driving Chinese electric vehicles, scrolling the web on Chinese smartphones and powering their homes with Chinese solar panels.”⁷⁷ It is clear from Xi-era Party documents that China views itself as having reached a critical juncture where it is finally in a position to seize control and dominate technological inflection points. And who will lead the development of those technologies? It is for the state, for the Party, to “seize the opportunities” to embrace the future.⁷⁸

It took China 150 years of reform, interrupted by catastrophes and ideological detours, to arrive at the current techno-industrialist outlook the party carries today. Much of American discourse today echoes the debates between early Chinese reformers and the sclerotic establishment regarding the importance of technological development in strategic competition, a technically competent government bureaucracy, and ensuring market structures align with national development goals. With our own entrenched bureaucracy, we should not expect reform in America to be easy or quick.

Several key lessons can be gleaned from China’s journey. First, a technocratic state bureaucracy, equipped with a strong understanding of technology and its role in the world, is critical to success. One of Deng’s reforms was to reshape the civil service to focus on scientific and engineering degrees and deemphasize the traditional Confucian civil service exams which emphasized rote memorization of traditional passages. Today, nearly 40 percent of the members of China’s Central Committee have a technical background.⁷⁹ In contrast, there are only a handful of members in the U.S. Congress with doctorates, and only three with doctorates in STEM fields.

Achieving technocratic progress will not only require the right people but also an attitude of humility to learn from others. China’s grueling “century of humiliation” forced it to recognize its technological “backwardness” compared to other countries. America’s struggle to be cost-competitive in many critical industries today, from shipbuilding to battery manufacturing, parallels the Qing dynasty’s inability to domestically manufacture rifles competitively. This common recognition motivated Deng to visit Japan early in his tenure, bring back Japanese “management techniques” for manufacturing, and push off potential territorial conflicts in favor of foreign investment. The earnest desire to compete in technological progress requires a clear-eyed assessment of where a country stands and a willingness to learn and borrow from others.

Finally, as the early Qing reformers showed, it takes more than good ideas to achieve substantive change. It requires bringing techno-industrialism into the current political discourse—and even new language and terminology to describe shifting conceptions of progress. A country’s technological progress is inextricably linked to deeper issues, such as its perception of its place in history. Shaping new theories of history and state development creates the space for political adoption and the will to support new technologies only if their development is tied to national identity and a sense of existential need. At the same time, creating new cultures of progress will also necessarily shift conceptions of national identity. Deng charted a path toward aligning economic development models within Communist Party governance and adopting it within a distinctly Chinese framework, e.g., “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” China’s remarkable path toward fulfilling the promise of technology-oriented policies underscores that ambitious reforms require more than policy shifts—they demand an intellectual foundation and political culture that unite technological progress with national purpose.

Over decades of upheaval and recalibration, China has placed “progress” at the center of its value proposition, tying techno-industrial goals to a vision of national strength. If the United States is to lead the future, its political elites must share China’s commitment to technological development—not in content or method—but rather in Chinese elites’ degree of seriousness. America cannot imitate China since it lacks the centralized authority to implement Chinese-style industrial policy. Nor should it want to—our system of free markets and private property has incredible advantages for innovators. These benefits on their own, however, are not reasons to embrace techno-utopianism or laissez-faire capitalism, nor to believe that our current system will be sufficient to stay ahead of China for long. Instead, the challenge for America’s philosopher-statesmen is to develop better theories of history, economics, and politics that are rooted in the distinctive heritage of America’s past, harness the potential of technological advancement, and discard our equivalents of Confucian orthodoxy.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume IX, Number 1 (Spring 2025): 80–99.

Notes