In that earlier interview transcript, what I posted as the “original draft” was in fact not the original draft either; the part about “basic theoretical research” was added only at the reporter’s prompting. As for the proposition that “the reason for the bottleneck is weak basic research,” I myself actually have reservations about it.
Of course, I am willing to partly support this view, first because the official wording that “encourages free exploration and full exchange and debate” is indeed rare and valuable. Second, in a certain sense, this formulation is correct.
But we have seen many completely wrong tendencies. For example, some people think that in order to break free of the current predicament represented by “chips,” one should vigorously develop “basic science.” That is of course entirely beside the point.
What if we still can’t catch up?
I have always thought that China’s entire modernization process, because “saving the nation from extinction has overridden enlightenment,” has therefore fallen too much into “seeking quick success and instant benefit.” This attitude of hastily pursuing productive forces is what has caused the entire R&D industry chain, from basic science to consumer markets, to develop in a distorted way, with an unsteady foundation.
In this sense, weak basic research is not the cause of backward high-end technology; rather, the two are both “results.”
Take my own inability to run as an example. We can say that it’s because I’m too fat, with too much flab, that I can’t run. But if you focus only on “too much flesh” as the problem—say, chopping off a few chunks of flesh from my body and then telling me to go run again—I might become even less able to run, or even collapse on the spot. More precisely, “too much flesh” and “being unable to run” are both “results”; the root cause is “lack of exercise.” “Lack of exercise” led to “too much flesh,” which in turn worsened the “inability to run.”
Similarly, “basic research” is indeed somewhat more basic than “high-end technology,” just as running is the use of the body and technology is indeed the use of basic research. When something is used badly, tracing it back to the former is correct. But if one merely takes the former as the breakthrough point for getting out of a predicament, that is mistaken.
Furthermore, even if one has identified the “root cause,” one still has to consider the urgency of the predicament. For instance, I am halfway up a mountain, discover that I can no longer run, and conclude that the reason is “lack of exercise.” But in order to catch up with the tour group as quickly as possible, the right thing for me to do is obviously to sit down and catch my breath for a while, drink some water, perhaps even drink some sports drink, gather my strength, and then continue climbing. Obviously I should not look for a treadmill on the spot and begin “training.” Doing the latter would be nothing short of a sign that my brain had gone wrong.
So when facing a very concrete technical difficulty now—say, falling behind in chips and needing to catch up quickly—the right strategy may be many things: taking a shortcut, using stimulants, drinking tonics, free-riding, shouting slogans, or simply giving up, and so on. These strategies each have their pros and cons, but the one thing that cannot be chosen is to expect to make up the gap by retraining from the ground up.
So when I say that the phenomenon of being “bottlenecked” in a specific technical field “has stirred our reflections and reminded us of the lesson of mending the pen after the sheep is lost,” that is reasonable. But mending the pen is for the sake of not losing sheep in the future; it cannot bring the already-lost sheep back to life. If that sheep has not run too far yet and can still be chased down with a bit more effort, then instead of rushing to pursue it, if one turns back to mend the fence, that too is unwise. In order to catch back the sheep that has just been lost, we may instead need to tear down two more fence panels and take a fiercer dose of medicine to catch up.
More often than not, mending the pen and chasing the sheep are not in conflict; one can certainly encourage mending the pen while also trying to recover the current losses. But this requires a proper awareness of boundaries between different levels of problems. If one cannot make a clear distinction between “the immediate plan” and “the long-term plan,” then it becomes all too easy to do something that suggests one’s “brain has gone bad.”
Free and beneficial
What I mean by “seeking quick success and instant benefit” is also a phrase that is easy to misunderstand. The crux of “seeking quick success and instant benefit” or “utilitarianism” is “success,” the urgent demand for achievement and effectiveness. It does not mean advocating “profit.” The definition of “seeking quick success and instant benefit” in Chinese dictionaries is “being eager for immediate results and coveting the effectiveness and benefits before one’s eyes.”
“Seeking quick success and instant benefit” contains two layers of meaning: one is utility, that is, pursuing practical results; the other is urgency and nearness, that is, pursuing immediate results. Its antonyms can also be unfolded along two dimensions: first, “having a long-term view,” meaning that one is still pursuing practical results, but without urgency. Second, “free and spontaneous,” meaning that one does not pursue practical results at all, but motivates oneself through internal drive rather than caring about external effects.
These two dimensions may also intersect, which is to foster free and spontaneous activity in order to benefit long-term effectiveness.
For example, when children play games and explore all kinds of new things, they do so spontaneously. They are not acting for any short-term or long-term utilitarian purpose, but out of their own “interest.” Yet parents look at the issue from another angle: they hope their children can grow better, and therefore they have utilitarian considerations about which activities should be used to motivate them. But their choice may overlap with the child’s choice: that is, to teach through fun, still allowing children to play and explore freely and spontaneously.
Some fields of basic science and the humanities are just like this. For researchers, they are driven by interest and are free and spontaneous. For governments and enterprises, however, they discover that researchers’ free activity may produce long-term benefits, and so they are willing to support researchers and provide them with a relatively free research environment.
The history of science since the Industrial Revolution tells us that free basic research can indeed ultimately drive industrial revolutions. But between free research and industrial results, there is neither a sufficient condition nor a necessary condition. Free research does not always produce actual results, and the driving force of an industrial revolution does not always depend on the driving force of basic science.
It is much like how free play and exploration are often beneficial to a child’s all-around development and healthy growth. But not every game is always beneficial, nor does it mean that no other activities are needed besides play. Good parents certainly should have a long-term view, but they also cannot absolutize it. Many times, those “homework” assignments that are short-sighted and demand visible results the very same day are also beneficial.
Free and dignified
On the other hand, if you tell a parent that “free, spontaneous, non-utilitarian play activities are beneficial to a child’s growth,” but the child hears it as “an indifferent attitude toward a life of hardship and material poverty is beneficial to children,” then that is a misunderstanding off by a hundred and eight thousand miles. But many of us really do interpret “non-utilitarian” as “indifferent to fame and gain, hardworking and self-disciplined.” When they hear “benefit,” they think of “chasing fame and profit,” and then in turn they think of “being indifferent to fame and gain.”
Thus, many people go around praising the spirit of scientists who keep their names hidden, give up their share of benefits, live in utter poverty, and do scholarly work without seeking anything at all, just burying their heads in their studies. This spirit of course has something grand about it, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the scientific spirit we are discussing.
In ancient times, free scientists were often pampered aristocrats, or idle people supported by aristocrats. “Being well fed and having nothing to do” was the precondition for free exploration. Of course, modern educational systems strive to uphold equality, and scholars are no longer the preserve of aristocrats, but that means that people from poor families can also enjoy a more carefree research environment; it does not mean that modern scholars ought instead to do research under even harsher living conditions.
On the other hand, in modern times, scientists’ “toys” have become more and more expensive. In many research fields, to conduct free and spontaneous research, the required instruments and consumables are increasingly costly. In this sense, modern scientists need material conditions even more abundant than those of ancient aristocrats.
Of course, we should distinguish between public and private matters; research consumables belong to public goods, not to scientists’ personal interests. But the gap between them also cannot be too stark. To let someone who earns just a few thousand yuan a month manage assets worth hundreds of millions and cash flows in the tens of millions—can that really be balanced?
Take a child, for instance: because of curiosity and exploration, he may forget to eat and sleep, because he feels that games are more important than meals. But if the parents deliberately deprive him of food and drink, so that once he starts playing games he can only eat bran and thin gruel, while having to watch the parents and siblings on the side enjoying delicacies and fine wine, would his spontaneity not be dealt a blow?
When a person is immersed in the inner pleasure of play or the inner meaning of research and exploration, he will spontaneously “forget to eat and sleep,” and will take a dim view of other living conditions. But if “forgetting to eat and sleep” is turned into an externally imposed requirement, it becomes a form of oppression, even humiliation.
Advocating non-utilitarian free research does not mean advocating ascetic indifference to fame and gain. The desire for truth and the desire for good food and good dreams are not contradictory. A person who freely and spontaneously devotes himself to scientific research does not necessarily have to regard research as the sole thing in life. He can perfectly well pursue higher enjoyment in other areas of life. Freedom is not a cage: as though once you are free in one kind of activity, you are no longer qualified to step outside that activity and consider other matters; nor can one, because someone has enjoyed freedom in one activity, belittle his dignity in other fields, as if he were somehow second-rate.
Many people are often saying reverence and greatness with their mouths, while actually carrying out acts of humiliation and contempt. For example, when I hear someone say that scientists and teachers are a great profession, they often mean that these people cannot talk about money, cannot talk about reputation, cannot talk about enjoying life, and must live like ascetics in order to maintain their so-called “nobility.”
What exactly is “basic science”?
My wording includes both “basic science” and “basic research,” but the two are not entirely synonymous. “Science” refers to the sciences as divided disciplines, to one academic subject after another that has already been established, among which several can be called “basic sciences.” But “research” does not necessarily come divided into ready-made subjects, so “basic research” is a relative concept, relative to “applied research.”
On Wikipedia, the entry for basic science is automatically redirected to basic research. In the General Secretary’s official report, what was discussed was also “basic research.” Indeed, this term is more suited to the modern technological environment.
But many people still interpret it in the sense of established disciplines, specifically mathematics, physics, and other foundational theoretical sciences. In many people’s minds, basic science even does not include disciplines such as chemistry and biology. Once, when I participated in a forum, the moderator used Yang Zhenning’s remark that “the feast is already over” to argue the question of whether basic science is stagnating. I said that even if the “feast is already over,” that would still refer specifically to elementary particle physics. Leaving aside biology, chemistry, information, and the other disciplines, even within physics itself there is more than just this one path of basic research.
The reason many people understand “basic science” in such a narrow way is that they are influenced by a reductionist way of thinking. What they consider “basic” is, in essence, “basic” in an ontological sense: they measure what counts as basic from the standpoint of material structure. Just as physical structure is the basis of chemical phenomena, chemical reactions are the basis of biological phenomena… and ultimately pure mathematics is the basis of all things.
Speaking of basic science in this sense is of course very narrow-minded; it basically amounts to theoretical physics, at most adding mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology to the list.
But “basic science” in this sense has nothing to do with the “bottleneck” phenomenon we are discussing. Of course, chip technology is ultimately grounded in the development of quantum mechanics. But the connection is simply too indirect. If, upon discovering that chips are lagging behind, one turns around and vigorously grasps quantum mechanics, that would be like redoing prenatal education because one can’t climb a mountain anymore—the relation is just too remote.
The key point is that the “basic research” we are discussing is by no means the “basic science” of a reductionist worldview, but rather a research direction opposed to “applied” work.
Every specific research field can have different lines of inquiry. For example, in mathematics there is “applied mathematics,” and in mechanics there is “applied mechanics.” Within the same technical field, there are also different links, some leaning toward the foundational and some toward the applied. In chip manufacturing, for instance, the lithography machine belongs to the foundational link, while chip design belongs to the applied link.
As far as chip manufacturing is concerned, what we lack in so-called “basic research” is not quantum mechanics or anything of the sort, but rather very concrete technological research in the field of the “lithography machine.” Of course, within the field of the “lithography machine,” this can be further broken down, and it really does involve questions from foundational scientific fields such as quantum mechanics. For example, to control extremely fine optical precision, one must take quantum effects into account.
But the “quantum mechanics” inside a lithography machine is not quantum mechanics as a foundational science; it is how quantum mechanics is “applied” technologically. The applied research of quantum mechanics constitutes the basic research of the lithography machine, while the application of the lithography machine gives rise to the chip industry.
A Complete Innovation System
Looked at this way, the “basic research” called for by frontier technologies is precisely not free and spontaneous basic scientific research undertaken without utilitarian purpose, but rather an entire mechanism of transmission from the foundational to the applied.
This transmission mechanism did not come into being out of thin air. Since the Industrial Revolution, it has spontaneously formed in the market environment of the West. The core of this mechanism is neither the government nor the university, but the enterprise. Enterprises, on the one hand, establish their own R&D centers; on the other hand, they constantly put forward demands to universities and research institutions. Research institutions, meanwhile, maintain a free and spontaneous research atmosphere, but are also open to the market at any time.
In China, this transmission mechanism has been gradually established since the reform and opening up, but there are many problems too. First, the government often stands in the position of God rather than that of a servant. Second, there is the polarized prejudice of social culture: on the surface, it is taboo to speak of fame and profit, yet in practice it is extremely profit-driven.
In a previous interview draft of mine, I also said that we should “enable innovators to enjoy appropriate incentives of reputation and benefit,” but I knew that something like that would not be published, because as a rule we taboo speaking of fame and profit. The line “Watt became a great rich man” is also something people are by no means willing to pass along. What, exactly, is this concealment afraid of? Is it really the case that if the masses are made to know that inventors can gain both fame and profit, then the enthusiasm for innovation among the whole people will be dampened?
If innovators were always only a tiny handful of people, then it would still be imaginable to rely on their inner drive, or even on ascetic, monk-like burying of oneself in research. But now that we are proposing “mass entrepreneurship and mass innovation,” can we still not speak of fame or profit? Without fame or profit, what exactly are we relying on to attract the whole people to devote themselves to innovation?
In the fields of basic science and the humanities, we advocate a free and spontaneous spirit of play (the Greek spirit). But within the entire modern innovation system centered on enterprises, spontaneity alone is not enough. Even if “the masses” really can spontaneously投入 themselves in research without regard for fame or profit, these studies would still find it very hard to identify the right direction of transmission. Merely inventing lots of novel gadgets, only for them ultimately not to transmit into the market and form an incentive cycle, would still be for nothing.
To stop tabooing fame and profit does not mean to exalt profit-seeking to an extreme. On the contrary, only by first ceasing to taboo it can one carry out discussion effectively and comprehensively, and thus constrain the boundaries and position of fame and profit.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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