Aug 18, 2022, 13:37
China aims to achieve scientific literacy among at least 15 percent of its population by 2025, according to a new national plan for sci-tech popularization released on Tuesday.
Scientific literacy refers to the spirit of scientific aspiration, the knowledge of basic science and scientific methods, and the ability to apply them to analysis and problem-solving.
The plan sets the 2025 goal at 5 percentage points above the 2020 figure. The proportion of scientifically literate Chinese citizens was 10.56 percent in 2020, exceeding the target of 10 percent set in the country's 13th Five-Year-Plan (FYP) period (2016-2020).
The new plan is jointly compiled by the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the China Association for Science and Technology.
In the next few years, China will further enhance efforts to develop a diversified investment mechanism and more education bases for science popularization, according to the plan.
source: CGTN
..." like Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, Sean Carroll and Michio Kaku..".
And popularists like Martin Gardner.
China needs another generation to develop a STEM-popularized society.
Today, US graduates majoring in liberal arts regret they chose those subjects. The least affected are those who have chosen engineering. In the coming years, that may mean the US will increase its pool of STEM graduates, in many cases by attracting more like-minded brains from all over the world despite its societal ills.
The basic element of STEM remains maths. China has a slight advantage there. She should continue to sharpen and expand her pool of math experts, especially in applied maths. Until even her society becomes acutely maths-literate to a higher extent.
The biggest challenge for China is how to become more competitive in relevant sectors in the face of hostile sanctions, exclusions and marginalization by the west. Come one worst case scenario, all the major tech advances elsewhere will be denied her. This is gut-wrenching. It consumes me everyday.
My memory, gut and eyesight are now failing me. Sigh.
The english-literate west has scientists like Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, Sean Carroll and Michio Kaku to popularize science to the layman.
The west also produces well-illustrated magazines like Scientific American, New Scientist, Discover, BBC Science Focus etc as well as science and math online articles in databases like Infobase learning, and Nova, TED etc lectures in youtube.
New discoveries are highlighted and their importance discussed in ways that are sufficiently easy to understand and appreciate by the general public. Popularizing science is in fact an entire industry in itself in the west until even what is imagined in movies become the targets for actual development.
Keeping up with STEM is thus of paramount importance to the future of a China which wants to remain engaged with the west.
History has shown that although throughout the millennia she has maintained some ingenuity in applications which may be called scientific, her scientific methodology has not been systematized in the way the west had done so much so her scientific development if measured from the western perspective had ossified for over eighty years which means she has had to 'catch up' beyond Needham's records of her past achievements in earlier centuries.
A scientifically literate society is needed as foundation for more people to appreciate and gravitate towards scientific study not just for economic progress but also for national defense.
China's two biggest nemeses were England and Japan which both tried to weaken and conquer her by starting earlier in science and thus systematically developing better scientific weaponry and methods.
Today, both are under the geopolitical wings of the US which has started a total technology decoupling of the west from China just by brewing policies out of the blue based on the personalized concoctions of a few like Bannon, Barr, Kaplan, Friedberg, McMaster, Campbell, Colby and so on.
In fact, Bannon under Trump had boasted he and Barr had concocted the excuse of 'national security threat' against many of China's tech companies and slapped that term on everything China until the US not only denied China 'its' tech, it also threatens sanctions on any other sovereign state from selling their tech or investing in China if they so much as use any piece of US equipment or grant to make their tech.
The latest is the US' CHIP and Science Act 2022 which is being weaponized further with the CHIP 4 Alliance to include Japan, South Korea and 'Taiwan' specifically to bar China from getting any technology that will enable her to make high-end microchips which are the basis of sharper digitization towards AI, robotics, IoT and advanced computing/telecommunications.
Under such strangulations, China has no choice but to build her own autonomous scientific and technological capabilities whether it be in miniaturization, computer-assisted circuit design, precision tooling, gene-pharma therapies and advanced materials science.
The US has one advantage - it can attract talents from all over the world and pick their brains for its own interest either by employing them in its universities or in its multinationals.
As China reforms and opens up more post-quarantine, she can also create such a catalyst for her progress by providing a similarly fertile environment for entrepreneurial research and innovation. However, it won't be easy because the US in particular has weaponized its mainstream media to distortively demonize her.
The popularization of science may yet turn out to be the first steps towards that second re-opening of China after Deng's first and it should also replace the memory of the past cultural revolution with a new economic revolution of China.
Whatever may be said, STEM is critical for China to achieve the biggest market share in GMVA which is global manufacturing value-add, especially when her size and scale enable her to maintain her competitive best-value-for-money pricing in an inflationary world.
The US wants to maintain its scientific and technical supremacy but after making discoveries, it finds it has to farm out their commercialization because it has lost its domestic application development and manufacturing capabilities.
Its recent policies are however to inshore those capabilities but that will mean others which have them will lose them, either from losing their China markets or losing their company secrets, and both to the US. In short, if they accept US supremacy, they will lose their own competitiveness and market shares.
Moreover, for microchips, Moore's Law has a limit based on the material and process used. If China can find other materials (not necessarily graphene) and/or processes, then she may leapfrog by a different path to achieve similar performances. For instance, China-born MIT-resident Chen Gang has identified cubic boron arsenide as having superior properties to silicon, and just waiting for a way to mass-produce.
Meanwhile, and because of its geopolitics, the US may have a hard time making more lasers owing to their need for neon whose primary source is Russia.
As for China, the most cited scientific papers in the world have Chinese academic researchers as primary authors. They are found all over the world which goes to show if the world doesn't come to China, she has gone to the world. Because of her inherent practical intelligence about how to achieve and to sustain achievements.
But she will need to scale up quickly in one aspect. In science, the first thing to do is to identify the right question to ask. And to identify that right question to ask, freedom to think across all disciplines and to exchange ideas are the catalysts. The more productive scientists are after all well-rounded and well-read peoples interested in more than just their narrow fields of study.
Please do not impress your lack of knowledge in public!
Chinese has too much information on science and technology. Time to present it in professional form for public to understand.
In US, it is not science but rather information skewed to make science more than difficult to listen. Majority of US citizens do not know science but talk a lot about it with assumptions for this and that.
Chinese language has a strong advantage because it uses the same characters for science and technology only their meanings are different.
Chinese do not need to learn special terminologies like other languages do. English is an example.
This aim will definitely realistic and could be achieved!
With the smart phone and television, China should consider a program to disseminate scientific and technological informatioon with some backgrounds to excit the young and interest them to study science and technology.
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