Xi Believes China Can Win a Scientific Revolution

In early March, global investors turned their eyes toward Beijing, where 2,977 delegates from across China had gathered for the annual session of the National People’s Congress. Here, Chinese Premier Li Qiang would deliver the annual “Report on the Work of the Government.” Here, the priorities that must guide the activities of the Chinese state over the coming year would be proclaimed. Here—or so financiers at home and abroad badly hoped—the Chinese government would declare its plan to rescue China’s economy.

But there were few comforting signs. The 2023 report had placed “expanding domestic demand” as the top priority for that year, responding to the damage done by zero-COVID policies, a bureaucracy paralyzed by purges and confused by an unfavorable economic environment, and a property bubble too large to pop. The 2024 report did not follow suit. Instead, it laid out a road map not for economic recovery but for wider, and more aggressive, targets.

Ahead of “expanding domestic demand,” the new report prioritizes two other goals. First, the Chinese government must “[strive] to modernize the industrial system and [develop] new quality productive forces at a faster pace.” Second, it must “[invigorate] China through science and education and [consolidate] the foundations for high-quality development.”

Put in blunter language: The central task of the Chinese state is to build an industrial and scientific system capable of pushing humanity to new technological frontiers.

This strategy has left Western observers incredulous, struggling to understand how any techno-nationalist industrial policy could engage with any of the economic problems they identify. To understand the Politburo’s plans, one must first understand the historical narrative that informs them. This narrative is downstream from several sources: the historical materialism of Karl Marx; attempts by early 20th-century “New Culture” intellectuals to explain why China had fallen victim to imperialism; triumphal propaganda accounts of China’s modern rise; and a close study of Western scholarship on the rise and fall of great powers.

Endorsed by President Xi Jinping and popular among Chinese policy elites, this set of ideas argues that there are hinge points to human history. In these rare moments, the Chinese leadership believes, emerging technologies can topple an existing economic order. Grand changes mean grand opportunities: The British Empire and the United States rose to global hegemony because each pioneered a global techno-economic revolution. Now the past repeats. Humanity again finds itself on the precipice of scientific upheaval. The foundations of global economic growth are about to be transformed—and Xi is determined that China will lead this transformation.

Since the 1920s, Chinese Communists have hoped to “save the nation” with science. For most of China’s modern history, this meant playing catch-up. In recent years, ambitions have grown larger. In the words of a 2016 top-level planning document, China now aims to be the “leading scientific power in the world.” Xi explained the logic behind this goal to a gathering of Chinese scientists held that year. He presented technological strength as a choice that begins with a moment of historical recognition. There are points in history when “major technological breakthroughs” promise to “greatly enhance humanity’s ability to understand and utilize nature” as well as to increase “societal productivity.” Xi argued that “historical experience shows that [these] technological revolutions profoundly change the global development pattern.” Some states “seize” this “rare opportunity.” Others do not. Those who recognize the revolution before them and actively take advantage of it “rapidly increase their economic strength, scientific and technological strength, and defense capabilities, thereby quickly enhancing their composite national strength.”

For Xi, as for most Chinese, the Qing dynasty is the paradigmatic example of a great power that refused to see the revolution unfolding before it. “Due to various domestic and foreign reasons, our country has missed technological revolution time and again,” Xi said in 2016. The result was what Chinese nationalists call the “century of national humiliation,” a period when China was victimized by imperial powers and fractured by contesting warlords. By failing to seize the opportunities presented by emerging technologies, China was “transformed from a world power into a semi-colonial, semi-feudal country subject to bullying.”

If the Qing dynasty stands in for any powerful state that falls behind in the technological race, the United States is a living symbol of technological potential. Ever since Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping formally identified the United States as the benchmark for China’s modernization, Chinese thinkers have seen it as the embodiment of scientific strength. Wang Huning, the fourth-ranking member of the Politburo Standing Committee and Xi’s favored court intellectual, made this point repeatedly in his 1991 book, America Against America. Shocked by the “awe-inspiring material civilization” he found in the United States, Wang insists that “if the Americans are to be overtaken, one thing must be done: surpass them in science and technology.”

These ideas are explored in some depth in a recent textbook written by analysts from the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR). CICIR is staffed and run by China’s premier intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security. The book, titled National Security and the Rise and Fall of Great Powers, is one in a series of titles intended to distill the consensus views of China’s civilian security analysts into a curriculum for Chinese undergraduates who aspire to a career in state security. Rise and Fall promises to reveal to these students the “general laws” that determine the destiny of nations. In this account, the most important factor in the rise of a superpower is science and technology.

How did Britain and the United States secure “their status as unprecedented global superpowers”? The CICIR analysts insist that it is neither strategic genius nor diplomatic acumen that leads to hegemony. Instead, they point to London’s and Washington’s “outstanding advantages … [in] scientific innovation” and “their respective leadership of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions.”

Favorable demographics, natural resource stocks, and geographic locale are all foundational to national strength, but under modern conditions, power comes from holding “the dominant position in economics, science, and technology.” Under this schema, “scientific and technological innovation … serves as a crucial indicator of the actual strength of a great power.” Thus, the rising great power must first integrate itself with the “center of global markets and core technologies,” then become a “major manufacturing power,” and finally “take the initiative in innovation” and “lead in high-technology industries” if it wishes to rise to the top.

On this count, the authors concede that “China still has a not insignificant gap to close with the United States in the fields of science and technology.” They are confident, however, that China has an “opportunity to become the center of global science and technology and the world leader in techno-scientific development.” This is because “a new round of techno-scientific revolution and industrial transformation is currently fermenting.” Leadership of the coming industrial revolution will allow the Chinese economy to play the same role in the economic order of the 21st century that the U.S. economy played in the 20th century.

The phrase “new round of techno-scientific revolution and industrial transformation” is a stock slogan in Chinese Communist Party (CCP) speak. It is tied closely to another of Xi’s favored phrases: “great changes unseen in a century.” When Chinese leaders and propagandists speak about once-in-a-century changes, they are suggesting that the world has entered a historical period similar to that of the early 20th century, when the Soviet Union and the United States came to displace the European colonial empires as the most important world powers.

These “changes” are often associated with populist disruptions in the West and the growing prosperity of the “rest.” But for many Chinese analysts, they also include the revolutionary potential of emerging technologies. These analysts point to three previous waves of industrial transformation—steam-powered mechanization in the 18th century, electrification in the 19th, and digitalization in the 20th—as forming a pattern that the future will follow. The difference this time, Renmin University professor Jin Canrong notes, is that “the competition for the Fourth Industrial Revolution will be held between China and the United States.” As previous contests for industrial supremacy occurred only between Western powers, “this is a great change unseen in five centuries.”

In Xi’s eyes, this new industrial revolution is “rapidly progressing.” As he declared in a 2021 address to Chinese scientists and engineers, “scientific and technological innovation has accelerated exponentially, with emerging technologies represented by information technology and artificial intelligence at the forefront.” This has caused “paradigm shifts in humanity’s understanding of nature.” These revolutionary advances are “rapidly being translated into social and economic life.”

In addition to artificial intelligence, the CCP identifies the fields of materials science, genetics, neuroscience, quantum computing, green energy, and aerospace engineering as pillars of this revolution. Xi argued in 2021 that China “has the foundation, the confidence, the belief, and the capability to seize the opportunities presented by the new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation” in each of these fields. “We are poised to rise with this tide and achieve great ambitions.”

For Xi, this revolution occurs at a critical moment. In 2018, he told party cadres that the “the new round of techno-scientific revolution and industrial transformation coincides with the transformation of China’s development model.” Xi has long urged the CCP to orient itself around a “new development concept” that emphasizes higher-quality growth over the infrastructure spending that powered the Chinese economy in the years after the Great Recession. High-tech manufacturing promises an alternative engine of growth. These are the “new quality productive forces” referenced in the 2024 work report.

As a recent essay in the CCP’s flagship theory journal explains, “new quality productive forces represent the [direction of] the new round of techno-scientific revolution and industrial transformation. Accelerating the formation of new quality productive forces means obtaining a leading position in the progress of these productive forces … and gaining the initiative in a fierce international competition” over the “commanding heights” of the emerging global economy.

Much of Chinese policy over the last few years—from the decision to elevate industrial technocrats to positions of high leadership in the party to the 14th Five-Year Plan’s commitment to construct a “whole-of-nation system” for technological innovation—only makes sense in light of this larger narrative. Already, these efforts have borne some fruit: China is now the world leader in electric vehicle sales. Huawei’s industrial chain is building advanced chips. Bloomberg Economics estimates that by 2026, the high-tech sector’s contribution to the Chinese economy could outpace real estate’s. If forecasts about the explosive growth potential of AI are remotely accurate, it is plausible that advancing technology might just provide China with the alternate growth engine it needs.

Yet this is a risky gamble. The Chinese strategy rests on two bets: first, that the world truly is on the cusp of an economic transition comparable to the Industrial Revolution in scale, and second, that if this new technological revolution occurs, China will lead it. Neither bet is certain.

Here, the fate of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc should stand as a warning to Beijing. This is not the first time a communist regime hoped that investments in new technologies and industrial processes might reverse slowing growth. The communist parties of Europe made a similar set of bets in the mid-20th century. The Soviet Union hoped to lead the computer revolution; the Eastern Bloc as a whole aimed to become the world’s greatest high-end manufacturing hub. These bets did not pay off. New industries were not successfully developed, new technologies did not successfully diffuse, and new products were not price competitive with their counterparts in East Asia or the West. Soon, the bills came due. By the 1980s, one communist regime after another was forced first into austerity and then to outright collapse.

In the CCP’s telling, the fall of the Soviet Union is part of a very different narrative—a story about the perilous threat posed by internal corruption, liberal ideology, and foreign subversion. Chinese propagandists have little to say about economies that floundered because their leaders put too much hope in technology’s latest wave. The story of the “new round of techno-scientific revolution” is not a story about those who floundered. It is a story about those who won. Time will tell which story the Chinese leadership should have been paying most attention to.