China: The rise of a science superpower

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1:43Since we've been on air this morning, a bit of history has been made. An unmanned Chinese spacecraft touched down on the far side of the moon where no human or robot has ever ventured before. Amongst other things, it's carrying inspiration. China's ambitions to be a space superpower have been boosted after becoming the first nation to land a spacecraft on the far side of the moon. And so just to state the obvious, five years ago, that was on the moon. Four and a half years ago. Four and a half years ago. That was on the moon. If you want to grab the world's attention, going to the moon and getting back is back in fashion.

2:1950 years after the great powers America and the Soviet Union were demonstrating their prowess with people and robots. This year, the US made its first efforts in returning with the much-highlighted Artemis II mission, which took astronauts further beyond lunar orbit than ever achieved, and Artemis IV promises a landing in coming years. But China has had robotic explorers on the Moon's surface for over a decade, and they too are in the race to put boots there. It appears to me that China has the simpler pathway to getting astronauts onto the moon and back. China has the clearer pathway. But it's a very interesting time.

3:00Watch this space. But space missions are only one symbol of national scientific ambition. And what's become clear in recent years is that China is now a force to be reckoned with in all aspects of science, from cutting-edge biology to quantum technology to the front line in AI. and, perhaps more significantly, in the kind of pure curiosity-driven research that has no obvious immediate payback. I'm Roland Pease, and in reporting on scientific breakthroughs for the BBC World Service, I've witnessed the growing strength of Chinese research that has now brought it to the brink of global dominance.

3:39And what the rest of us are to make of it is the subject for this edition of the documentary, The Rise of a Science Superpower. It is a matter of fact that China has risen and is rising as a scientific superpower. If we start with the question of who is a scientific superpower, and you're playing the numbers game, China is certainly winning. China produces more doctoral students, more patents, more publications, more publications in Nature Index, and more of the top 1 % most highly cited papers. you look everywhere. In some fields, Chinese scientists are already in lead in some particular fields.

4:20There is a lot of excitement about this experiment in the international community. And I think it's actually been really good to see China putting a lot of support into particle physics. And I think, you know, from the international particle physics community, I think this has been very, very good for us. Thoughts from some of the international experts guiding me as I try to understand how China has so rapidly become a dominating force in the world of science and where it's heading. And when Chinese neuroscientist Qin Jianli says they're already leading in some disciplines, that matches what I've been seeing as I pick through the top scientific journals in my weekly science journalism.

5:01Increasingly, I'll spot work that originated in the major Chinese universities like Tsinghua, Peking or Fudan, or one of the many institutes of the Chinese Academy of Science. And the more public face of this change is that Chang 'e 6 mission, bringing samples back from the far side of the moon, which opened the programme. It dramatically exemplifies China's fast progress since the Mao era, which is a good place to start our exploration of the country's scientific and technological ambitions. Back then, in 1970, China launched its first satellite called the East is Red, which was a kind of crude, souped-up Sputnik broadcasting patriotic songs.

5:49This was during the depths of Chairman Mao's cultural revolution, a time of intense suspicion of intellectuals. Though even then, the scientific flame never quite went out, as cultural historian and former particle physicist Yang Yang Cheng told me. So in the Mao era, of course, China was a revolutionary power. And Mao himself, he believed in the power of science and technology, but in a very specific way, as science and technology, as this mass science, as a vehicle for revolution. and he was very sceptical of elite scientists who came from a bourgeois class background. And so there were these massive political campaigns that persecuted a lot of scientists as a way to discipline them, to make them into good communists.

6:35There were still scientists like just put their heads down and trying to do research, right? Chen Zhang Li is a world-leading neuroscientist and also former vice president at Peking University. Even during the miserable time of Cultural Revolution, don't forget Professor Yiu Yiu Tu, who won Nobel Prize. Her work was done in the most miserable time of Cultural Revolution. She found one of the treatments for malaria. Yeah. So the flame, the spark has always been there. Though the fire took time to reignite after Mao's death, as Chen Jianli saw while beginning his own scientific career. Now, the first phase was slow to rebuild, right?

7:26In 1976, among the first line of reform that Deng Xiaoping and his colleagues advocated, which received very wide support in almost all walks of the society, was re-establishing higher education for the country. So I would say right after Cultural Revolution, that work started. Though this Chinese renaissance had stumbled on the way, says cultural commentator Yang Yangcheng. In China, there is a centuries-old, millennia-old tradition of intellectuals being involved with matters of governance. And this is what we saw in the 1980s among scientists, scholars, writers, any kind of intellectuals who saw themselves re-entering the national and political dialogue.

8:16And they were having these grand narratives about democracy, freedom, how to govern. But a lot of these very honourable, but in some ways naive wishes were like, of course, forcibly crushed by the Tiananmen crackdown. It's still not clear how many people were killed when Chinese troops crushed the students' demonstration in Tiananmen Square. Just how many died when soldiers of the Chinese army moved in on the unarmed demonstrators in a 12-hour onslaught may never be known. Official newspapers in Peking... But things like the reform era, basically, for the past five decades, since the late 1970s, the Chinese government has had a consistent effort in terms of investing in science and education infrastructure, investing in scientific research and educational infrastructure, in making science and technology, in the words of Lin Xiaoping, it's a production force.

9:05It's something that the government has placed immense emphasis on as central to its political legitimacy. And also very importantly, the Chinese public have great faith in science and technology. Scientists and engineers are respected, and the people believe that science and technology is this kind of power that can uplift the nation and also uplift their personal lives. And that has contributed to the buildup of a massive science and technology workforce. So I guess the question becomes almost a little bit rhetorical, right? It's not so much whether China has risen as a scientific superpower, but how could it not with this kind of consistent investment and efforts from the state and society?

9:45As a result, Chinese science is highly competitive on the international stage, and that in turn has sharpened the way the top universities measure their own success, says former Peking University Administrator Chen Zhenli. For example, the bar has been raised for researchers progressing their own careers, as measured by which prestigious international journals they get their results into. You go to Peking University, you look around, 40 years ago, if you get a publication in not science and nature, because nobody had science and nature and cell and neural, if you get, let's say, PNAS, Proceedings of National Academy of Science USA, you pretty much can be elected to the academy, almost that level, right?

10:33It's something really proud. Today, you look around, everybody has multiple, multiple science nature cells. It's not even the question we talk about. We talk about who made the most brilliant discovery, like who has this fascinating thing. By the way, this issue of Top Journal Cell, the cover stories is from a junior colleague in my same building, Dr. Wang. Guess what? the story is about it's about the circadian clock in strawberry strawberry they do have a circadian clock it's fascinating it's pure science the biorhythms of a common fruit it's and it's internationally recognized oh yeah it's the cover story and of course i would say in the future, it may be useful.

11:29Who knows? Maybe there is a time to spray pesticides, there is time to pick, I don't know. But it's just fun. Fun, for sure. But at a deeper level, this research is about an unexpected way gene circuits can regulate plant physiology. Maybe, in years to come, this will be the seed for new ideas about genetics more generally. Probably not, but maybe, and you never know without that first experiment being tried. This is normal, exploratory, pure science, the way it's been long done in top universities around the world. But this is from a Beijing university and it's internationally competitive. That's why Chen Jianli said earlier that Chinese science is now world-leading in some fields.

12:14It's what I would hope to see as evidence that research in the country is resurgent, that the missteps of the past have been corrected, that government support is working. If that sounds like a bold claim off the back of one paper about strawberries, there have been other, much bigger developments in Chinese science that have caught my eye and told me this is the time to explore this rise of this new power. Large-scale projects costing hundreds of millions of dollars and more, employing hundreds or thousands of scientists committed to decades of effort. One of the most globally significant nuclear fusion projects currently runs in Hefei in central China, east, for experimental advanced superconducting Tokamak, which has been breaking records in performance in recent years.

13:03A successor, Best, is nearing completion to start running next year, and the follow-up to that is already substantially designed. Or there's the world's largest single-dish radio telescope, fast, 500 meters side to side, which is nestled in a hollow in the mountainous Guizhou province, mapping the matter of the universe. And still other projects still keep coming online. We are going to keep running for about 30 years. It's a major engineering effort. It costs a lot of money and we'd like to use it up to the maximum we can. 300 million US dollars is the quoted price tag on the experiment I most wanted to explore for this program.

13:48Though looking at similar efforts elsewhere in the world, I wouldn't be surprised if the real cost was considerably more. Juno, the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory, is for me a particularly interesting example of the kind of pure science the Chinese government is now supporting. It's an effort that seeks to understand the origins of the universe, which was proposed by particle physicist Yifang Wang and is possible only because of China's accelerating economy. The GDP has been going up very quickly so the total amount available for science, for pure science, is also increasing dramatically fast.

14:28So indeed we have been seeing in the last 20-30 years a lot more money for science. Of course we still need to convince our funding agencies, the government, that we are the best and you should give money to me, not somebody else. But still, I think the money is actually more than there was before. So I would say a lot easier than before. If learning more and more about less and less is the aim of much research, then the physics of neutrinos, as they're chasing at Juno, is the ideal target. These are particles that have next to no mass, no electrical charge, no impact on the world around them, barely any substance.

15:12Yet their properties are intricately involved in the theory of the stuff that makes us. There's international interest in unpicking their secrets, and particle physicist Linda Creminezi leads a US effort taking its own perspective on these elusive objects. It's fundamental science, right? So you're just doing it for the sake of understanding the universe and understanding how the universe evolved and all of this. And then along the way, we find technologies and applications, but the main aim is fundamental science, yes. And so the fact that China is putting a lot of money into an experiment like Juno seems to me to point to something about their line of thinking.

15:53Absolutely. I think, you know, Juno, I'm not on Juno, but I'm a neutrino physicist. And I think Juno is an absolutely beautiful experiment. I think what we've done, we've put a lot of money and a lot of thought into how to design this. So basically, we use neutrinos coming from nuclear reactors that were already there. And then we put the experiment, the detector at about 50 kilometers at the exact distance that they needed from the reactors. and it's quite a feat to do it under 700 metres of rock because this is not an easy thing to build on the surface. But now, you know, build a big shaft and then go down and then did a big hole and then sort of slowly put it together.

16:37And they built it in such a technology in which they can measure multiple properties of the neutrinos at the same time. And so I think we really invested a lot in this very specific problem and trying to solve it. Now, I've been to the European Particle Physics Lab CERN where they discovered the Higgs and I'm familiar with the scale of these kinds of experiments. But Juno is still mind-bogglingly bold. Built in an underground cavern, excavated beneath a mountain, filled with high-tech equipment via a long tunnel. It's all very James Bond. The tunnel is about 1.3 kilometres long, and the cave is 50 metres diameter and 70 metres high.

17:21So this is something like 25 storeys of building underground. So it's almost the exact same size of the Astrid Tower. Wow. But it's underground, under a mountain, effectively. But it's underground. Exactly. And then it's filled with this extraordinary detector. So the detector is buried in a water pool and it is made of steel structure holding acrylic tank. And inside this acrylic tank, we have a special liquid to detect neutrinos. We call it the liquid scintillator. So the total volume of the liquid scintillator is about 24 ,000 cubic metres, 20 ,000 tonnes. And then we have another 45 tonnes of water to cover this acrylic tank.

18:17So this is almost like a kind of egg, as it were, this acrylic tank, which is filled with this sensitive liquid. Yes, yes. So it's a very thin share of acrylic, transparent, and of course mechanically had to be strong enough to withstand the pressure, the weight, and also the density difference between water and the liquid scintillator. And that's before you mentioned the thousands of ultra-sensitive photo detectors that envelop this assembly, catching the scintillations, the flashes of light, each time a neutrino pings one of the atoms inside. And there's the electronics to gather and process the detections.

18:58Every neutrino signal typically has about 10 ,000 photons. And these 10 ,000 photons will be measured and detected by 20 ,000 phototubes. So each phototube on average sees less than one photon. 20 ,000? 20 ,000 detectors? And they're arranged all around, is that right? Yes, fully covered the whole sphere of the critic. and each of them is a half meter diameter. When you actually got to, I don't know if there's a real turn on moment for an experiment like this, but there must be a moment when you know that now we're actually collecting scientific data. And I imagine that felt a bit special. Yes, absolutely.

19:40That was August last year. Indeed, when we started, well, let's say there are two big moments, let's say. The first big moment is November 2024, when we finish the construction and start to fill liquid into the detector. And that's a very big moment, which means that all what we can do to touch the detector is done. I mean, you cannot touch it anymore. And then when we finish the filling of the liquid scintillator starting taking data, of course, that's another big major moment. But unfortunately, the moment that we finish the completion of the liquid scintillator filling, I was not there. I was in the United States for a conference.

20:25Indeed, I immediately announced the news that we finished our feeding and detectives at work. So that was also a very special moment that we will be able to celebrate together with our colleagues internationally. And the celebrations have continued since, with the first results announced both on the front cover of Nature, as I mentioned earlier, and simultaneously at another conference in June. But first, let's dive a little deeper into neutrinos and their ghostly physics. 100 trillion of them pass through your body every second, having next to no effect, so most of us don't care. But Juno is designed to intercept tiny handfuls of the additional flux that streams out of two nearby nuclear reactors, which is hard enough in itself.

21:12Yet these ghostly particles are also shapeshifters that become additionally invisible during their journey, behaviour which might reveal secrets of the subatomic world. Subtle differences and how they vary with the neutrino's energy between what Juno sees and what the reactors produce could confirm existing theories or point to improvements that are necessary. It sounds a challenging effort for the government to gamble hundreds of millions of dollars on, yet particle physicist Linda Kremen-Naysi told me the gamble seems to be paying off. A month ago, Yvonne gave this talk, which was basically the results from Juno, I think from 100 days of data only.

21:53And the community was very much looking forward to them. And we were all very impressed with what we managed to achieve in just 100 days of running. So they showed us that they can actually see this deficit of anti-neutrinos. And what Juno does very well is measure this deficit as a function of the neutrino energy. And it also can measure there's like a sort of like a big wiggle. And And then with very, very small wiggles in investor deficit. And what we demonstrated is that we can do this. Basically, we have 100 days. We've demonstrated we can see the big wiggle and we can also start to see this small wiggle.

22:31And, you know, honestly, I actually think we were all very impressed. From what you're saying, it sounds like it wasn't just that they were getting some kind of yes or no answer. But there was a lot of detail, it sounds like, in their first measurements that promises a lot more for the future. Yes, because basically the ultimate measurement that we want to make may take something like five years or six years. But to get to that measurement, we need to demonstrate that we have understood the technology and we can get to 3 % sort of like energy resolution. So that's very, very precise, which is very, very difficult for neutrinos.

23:07And with their first measurements, they have demonstrated they are on the way there. basically. They will be able, with enough statistics, to deliver basically this measurement in a few years. There is a lot of excitement about this experiment in the international community, and I think it's actually been really good to see China putting a lot of support into particle physics. And I think, you know, from the international particle physics community, I think this has been very, very good for us. This is an experiment that will be centre stage in unpicking the secrets of the subatomic world for decades to come.

23:41And Yifang Wang told me, if a star should explode somewhere in our galaxy while it's running, a supernova, Juno will capture neutrinos generated in its burning core and reveal mysteries of one of the most violent phenomena in the universe. This is the stuff that excites me. It takes money and commitment, but it could make headlines in the future. though with superpower comes super responsibility you know for ordinary citizens if we cannot trust a well-established institutions such as in this story then who can we turn to and who can we rely on science ambition has to be counterbalanced by ethics and in part two of the documentary china struggles to shake the image of the wild east of bioscience you're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service.

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25:35Welcome back to the documentary from the BBC World Service with me, Roland Pease, exploring the rise of China as a science superpower. As we saw in part one, China's progress in recent decades means the country is now a world leader in science. It's been a remarkable rise. In this part of the programme, I want to look further at the reasons for the success, what are the key ideas, the strategies that underpin this steady transformation, and I also want to look at what this rise might mean for global science. As you heard earlier, it's the rise in prowess across the pure sciences being conducted in China that's, for me, particularly notable, rather than the technical achievements like electric cars or high-capacity batteries, which are more commonly highlighted.

26:24But perhaps there's a historic precedent for this misconception of what Chinese scholars can achieve. There's a perception that what ancient Chinese scientists were good at was the practical, using magnets, making gunpowder, developing printing, not the conceptual. But what British biochemist-turned-historian Joseph Needham found when he was sent to establish cooperation with scientists in pre-communist China, was a much more familiar approach to research. He was asked about his experience by the BBC many years later. What did you notice about Chinese science and the differences from the West when you got there?

27:08Well, I think the central point to make there is there wasn't any difference at all. Because when you're dealing with modern science, here you have something that's absolutely ecumenical and the same everywhere, no matter where you are, under whatever sky, the processes of modern science and the theories and the experimentation and what you can succeed in doing, it's all one thing because nature is one. But in other words, if the rules of the universe are the same everywhere and human inquisitiveness is universal, then the instinct to explore is always there. It just needs to be able to express itself, which means stability and financial support.

27:48Many of the generation Chosers Needham met left China amidst the civil war and the communist takeover, some of them going on to win Nobel Prizes while based in the United States. And for decades, foreign travel remained essential for talented researchers to learn from the world's best. It's a route Yifang Wang, leader of the neutrino experiment we just heard about, took. I think international exchange, cooperation, and all kinds of collaboration are extremely important. I myself somehow benefited greatly from this kind of experience. When I was 22, I got the chance to go abroad to study physics, Italy, Geneva, and afterwards, the United States.