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This report is based on a presentation by Alex DeAngelis delivered on August 24, 2000, at the Gordon Research Seminar on New Frontiers in Science Policy held at the Holderness School in Plymouth, New Hampshire. Mr. DeAngelis, currently Program Coordinator for the East Asia Pacific Region in the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Division of International Programs, served as Director of NSF's Tokyo Regional Office from 1986-89. The opinions expressed by the author are his own and do not necessarily reflect the policies of the National Science Foundation or the US Government.
Overview
In a world full of conflicting cultural values and competing needs, scientists share a powerful common culture that respects honesty, generosity, and ideas independently of their source, while rewarding merit. By working internationally, scientists can better use their knowledge to benefit humanity.
–Lu
Yong Xiang, President, Chinese Academy of Sciences
There are four major points I hope to make during this presentation:
1. We need to talk more to the Japanese and Chinese, and we need to listen more to them as well.
2. The tools of science policy analysis need to be sharpened up.
3. Innovation is as important in the discussion of policies in China and Japan as are science and technology.
4. International cooperation in science is necessary and it is good.
China and Japan are two vastly different nations with vastly different social, economic and cultural characteristics. Consequently, the challenges that face them are also vastly different. Yet both, in their own ways, are struggling to position themselves to succeed in the global, knowledge-based economy of the 21st century. Both nations regard science and technology–or, more to the point, research and innovation–as the key elements in achieving their goals.
Historically, both have faced the challenges posed by superior outside technologies. Both have struggled to maintain their identities, their essence while adopting and adapting outside techniques. The Chinese phrase for this is zhong-ti xi-yong, which translates as Chinese essence Western technique.
Both nations are now challenged, as are many other nations East and West, to adapt not only to economic globalization, but also to the waning importance of the nation state.
It will be useful to begin with some statistical data on the overall size and scope of the science and technology enterprises of the United States, Japan and China. (NB: these data are taken from the National Science Board's, Science and Engineering Indicators–2000.)
1.) Investments
· The United States is by far the world's largest single investor in research and development (R&D). Total U.S. R&D investments in 1999 were estimated at $227.2 billion in current dollars (or $201.6 billion in constant 1992 dollars) or 98 percent that of all other G-7 economies combined.
· Japan's R&D investment, $80.9 billion current dollars in 1997, is the second largest in the world.
·
China's R&D investment in 1998 was $6.57billion.
2.) R&D/GDP
· Among these three countries, Japan makes the greatest R&D investments measured in terms of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The country's R&D/GDP ratio was 2.92 percent in 1997, and is probably higher now[1].
· The R&D/GDP ratio for the United States was 2.67 percent in 1998. One could say that the United States and Japanese ratios are close enough to be comparable. The main difference, of course, is the much higher amount that goes for defense R&D in the United States vs. the relatively minuscule amount in the Japanese budget. In fact, Japan's total R&D expenditures are more than 50 percent of U.S. non-defense R&D expenditures.
· China's R&D/GDP ratio was 0.65 percent in 1998. Although a major policy goal was to increase this to 1.5 percent by this year, this has not happened.
3.) Industry/government sources as percentage of investment
· The Japanese ratio in 1997 was roughly 78 percent industry and 22 percent government. The trend is for rising government percentages.
· The U.S. ratio is roughly 69 percent industry, 29 percent government, and the remainder accounted for by universities, state governments, and private foundations. The trend has been toward increased industry percentages.
· No statistics are available for China, but given the relative smallness of the private industry sector in China, it is reasonable to assume that the industry percentage is much smaller than it is in either Japan of the United States.
4.) Science and engineering workforce
· The numbers of scientists and engineers engaged in R&D in the United States (1,1141 thousand) and Japan (625.4 thousand) are roughly equivalent relative to population and GDP.
· For China, the number of scientists and engineers engaged in R&D is disproportionately high compared to its R&D investment and GDP ratio, but low when compared to its overall population.
Japan sees its greatest barrier to success in science and technology as a lack of creativity. Japan's leading scientists and its official science policy pronouncements have repeatedly stressed this concern. To be sure, often the very same sources also defend Japan's native creativity, albeit most often outside the sphere of science–in the arts and letters, for example, and in certain areas of mathematics.
I recall a talk in the mid-80s given by a very distinguished Japanese engineer before a mixed group of Japanese and non-Japanese scientists and engineers. Several times he characterized Japanese science as being insufficiently creative.
This complaint was taken up again and again by Japanese scientists, the Japanese government and the Japanese press during the nearly four years (1986-89) I served as the head of the NSF Tokyo Office. Then and now, creativity was the desired goal.
However, I also recall a conversation I had with a career official in the Ministry of Education and Science (Monbusho) at the time when Susumu Tonegawa won the Noble Prize in Physiology and Medicine. Dr. Tonegawa gave several interviews to the international press in which he said that he had to leave Japan in order to do the creative research that he wanted to do.
I asked the Monbusho official what he thought about Dr. Tonegawa's statements. He responded that Dr. Tonegawa had failed to succeed in the Japanese system and therefore his criticism was biased. He said this straightforwardly without any trace of facetiousness or irony. This epitomizes the difficulty that Japan faces in trying to change its science culture.
Traditionally the goal of the brightest Japanese students has been to do well in the rigorous national examinations in order to be able to enter a prestigious national university, with Tokyo University heading the list. Traditionally, the brightest students have also wanted to become government bureaucrats rather than scientists. Now the complaint from the Japanese science community is that the brightest students want to go into business.
Returning to Japan's self-criticism regarding its creativity in science, I recall at the time that I was surprised when I first heard this from an eminent Japanese scientist, whereas I had grown quite accustomed to hearing it from American and European scientists and bureaucrats.
I had hoped that the Japanese themselves would not repeat this rather mushy conceptual criticism of their achievements in science. Perhaps I felt this way because, as a student in Japan in 1965, I had been most impressed by the creativity of the Japanese, who far from being mere copiers of Chinese or Western models, had fashioned a uniquely Japanese approach to nearly every aspect of society. I had also been very impressed by their great achievement of creating–or, perhaps better–maintaing a safe society.
I think there were at least two factors that made Japanese scientists accept the criticism that they were not creative enough in science.
One was the phenomenon known as gaiatsu, which means outside–that is, foreign–pressure. This is an interesting phenomenon in that, from a Japanese perspective, pressure from outside is seen both as an unwanted and unwarranted foreign intrusion and, simultaneously as a tool that one segment in Japan, such as the science elites, can use to pressure other segments, such as the Ministry of Finance, to do what it wants, such as to spend more money on science ostensibly for the purpose of refuting the foreigners' claims.
Second, it feeds into the image that Japanese have of themselves as being misunderstood and therefore as being undeserving victims. There are even books on the subject, such as Gokai sareta Nihonjin (the misunderstood Japanese). In the case of science, they feel disadvantaged, because we in the West wrote the rules of the game of science and technology. Articles in Japanese popular journals have pointed out that modern science and technology were after all Western imports and that it is unfair of the West to criticize Japan for being uncreative in something that was not native to Japan. These articles have also maintained that the paradigm of Western science is based upon premises that regard the world as a place to be conquered and manipulated while counterclaiming that the Eastern approach is more in harmony with nature.
One concrete manifestation of Japan's desire to promote creativity in science is its undertaking of major structural reforms in science and education starting with the adoption of the Basic Law on Science and Technology in 1995.
This process is nicely described and analyzed in a paper entitled, “A Radical Restructuring Of Japan's Postwar S&T Policy And Institutions: The Politics And Rationality Of The New Century,” by Yong S. Lee of Iowa State University, Koichi Kitazawa of the Department of Advanced Materials Science at the University of Tokyo, and Sigeru Nakayama, Professor Emeritus of History at Kanagawa University[2].
In 1995, the Diet passed the Science and Technology Basic Law requiring, among other things, that the government would double its R&D expenditures over the 1992 level by 2000. This has been accomplished.
What was different about this law from the traditional law-making process in Japan was that it apparently originated in the Diet and was promoted by the elected members of the Diet rather than by the professional bureaucracy in Kasumigaseki.
Lee et al regard this restructuring as a “fundamental revolution shaping in Japan.” Major elements of this reshaping involve:
1. introducing the concept of “Independent Administrative Agencies" to the national research laboratories and the national universities giving them greater autonomy.
2. increasing the government's portion of total national R&D investments to levels comparable to other advanced nations,
3. merging Monbusho and the Science and Technology Agency and
4. elevating the existing Council on Science and Technology to the level of an advisory committee empowered to provide advice on all aspects of science policy to the Prime Minister.
As Lee asks, Why change a system that has worked so well? Because the Japanese have concluded that the pervious paradigm of playing “catch-up” will not stand it well in the years to come.
The recent Asian economic crisis heightened the sense of urgency that something needed to be done to change the system. Not long ago, Japan viewed the United States as a has been nation. Our business leaders and politicians were seen as myopic and ignorant. Now we seem to have become cunningly clever and prescient as forecasters of economic growth.
Some observers of Japan, including this one, are strongly tempted to look for the real reasons behind the stated reasons for the changes taking place in Japan. After all, isn't Japan the master at the game of the power behind the power, behind the power, etc.?
In the case of the science and technology reforms, is the real goal to foster greater creativity in Japanese science and education, or is it really to reduce the number of bureaucrats, or full-time-equivalents as we would say, from the government roles in compliance with government directives?
The correct answer is, “Yes!” I agree with Lee et al that it is more realistic and accurate to acknowledge that, for political reasons, both goals or outcomes are possible.
Emptiness (kuudouka)
In my years in Japan in the second half of the 1980s, I developed a sense that something was missing from Japanese society
Despite its great achievements in material goods and wealth, I sensed that there was a spiritual vacuum in Japan.
Recently I have noted that this sense of vacuum at the center has become a matter of open discussion in Japan. The Japanese word for it is kuudouka, which means hollowing out.
In the mid 80s, the word referred to the movement of manufacturing from the home base to offshore sites, and it was thought to be primarily a problem of the United States. Japan's leaders used this as a warning against the same thing happening to Japanese manufacturing.
Nowadays the word has come to encompass much broader and deeper concerns including:
1. the growth of the older population in Japan and the diminishing of the younger population and therefore of the core of the most vital and creative component of society.
2. the supposed lack of interest among the younger people in hard work and sacrifice for the sake of the nation.
Under such psychological circumstances, science and technology have taken on a spiritual role as a saving force for the nation.
Some of this same psychology can also be seen in China where only a handful of people are still inspired by communist ideology. I suggest that one of the reasons that the Chinese government is so alarmed at the fa-lun-gong sect is because it fills a spiritual vacuum. The fear is that it would divert the Chinese people from devotion to science and technology as the motive force of economic development.
China perceives its greatest challenge as how to harness science and technology to economic goals and how to leapfrog past the intermediate stages of development experienced by more developed nations.
In the science and technology arena, one of the most important reforms that has taken place in the Chinese system is the gradual movement away from a Soviet model of central research institutes toward a mixed model of research institutes and research universities.
The establishment of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) in 1985 was an important step in this direction. However, its funds (ca. 1.3 billion yuan, or $163 million) though important, are still rather small.
Another innovation of note is the Knowledge Innovation Initiative launched at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS( in 1997 with funds of 5.4 billion yuan ($650 million). The purpose this initiative is to restructure the CAS to help China's transition to the knowledge economy of the 21st century. CAS institutes will be regrouped into new centers and private sector funding will be encouraged[3].
NSF and the NSFC
Beginning in October 1999, NSF and the NSFC inaugurated a decade of science policy dialogues intended to share insights on how we view the challenges of adapting to the knowledge-based economy of the 21st century.
On a more local scale, the purpose of these dialogues from an institutional perspective is to provide a forum for American policy-makers to gain a better understanding of the directions of science and innovation in China and thus to better plan our own interactions with China in science and technology.
We began with a broad-scale seminar in Beijng in October 1999 covering the generation and use of scientific knowledge in terms of information, education, and research[4].
We held a second dialogue in Beijing in April on technical innovation.
The next meeting, scheduled for early December on the NIH campus in Bethesda, will address the question of barriers to research cooperation in biotechnology, biomedicine and cognitive sciences, including concerns over ownership of genetic materials and the ethics of scientific collaboration.
We will probably hold a meeting next year on some aspect of engineering education.
Science, Politics and Culture in China, Japan and the West
Unfortunately, I must agree with Suttmeier when he points out that China's high tech goals were given a great boost by the lessons that China learned from the role of technology in the Gulf War and in Yugoslavia, not to mention the highly unfortunate bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade[5]. The lesson was that high technology can essentially render impotent traditional methods of warfare.
China does after all see itself as a “great nation”–meaning that the country must project power beyond its borders. This perception usually leads to investments that otherwise would seem irrational, such as vast expenditures on the military.
Chinese nationalism is growing at a time when the importance of the nation-state seems to be receding in other parts of the world. I see this as a real threat to international cooperation in science.
Unfortunately, this nationalism seems to be a two way street. The Cox report and the Wen Ho Lee scandal are disturbing signs of the reintroduction of cold-war stereotypes into the US-China relationship.
I think therefore, that the scientific community has a duty to speak up in defense of the benefits and the necessity of global scientific cooperation.
Science and technology, as we commonly think of them, are by and large products of Western culture and ways of thinking characterized by isolation of discrete entities and a rigorous logical analysis of components, that is, by breaking things down into constituent parts.
Asian thinking is more likely to focus on the whole and on the relationship of the parts to the whole, that is, the contextual relationships.
Perhaps this dichotomy helps explain why individualism is so strong in the Western consciousness and why group orientation is stronger in Japan, as well as, but to a lesser extent, in China.
A recent article in the New York Times described a psychological test done on separate groups of Japanese children and American children in which both were shown a picture of a school of fish swimming in a blue‑green sea. There was one larger fish in the pond.
The American children began describing the scene by invariably focusing in on the bigger fish and then proceeding to the other fish and the pond, while the Japanese children began by describing the overall scene, then the fish, and then the bigger fish.
Traditional Western and Eastern art demonstrates the same phenomenon. In traditional Western painting everything was done to delineate the special features of the faces of the people and their surroundings.
In the Eastern art tradition, the artists aimed at capturing a mood or overall sense through a minimal number of brush strokes done in impressionistic fashion. Often, the humans in the picture seemed to be more a part of the scenery than a focal point of interest.
The challenges facing science today appear to require more integrated understanding of complex interrelationships.
I remember sitting at lunch many years ago with a Nobel Prize winning particle physicist during which he expressed an interest in tackling biology. I naively asked if his reason was that biology was related to the mystery of life. He raised his eyebrows, as if to say “of course not,” and proceeded to explain that it was because biology is such a complex challenge. I came away from that luncheon thinking that he, as a physicist, felt sure that he could clean up the Augean Stable of biology with the same approaches as he and his colleagues had taken to unlocking the secrets of the atom.
The power of information technologies to marshall many hitherto disparate facts and to discern the patrons in them is partly what is behind the whole movement of attention to issues of complexity.
Would it be too-far-out to conjecture that we are witnessing a rebirth of a holistic view of the world and of our place in it?
Would it also be too-far-out to suggest that if this trend is true, we may learn to appreciate the traditional Eastern way of perceiving of problems, even in science and technology?
We assume, without stating so, that the path to progress in science and technology for China and Japan is to become more like us. Could it be that the real path is one of convergence from different directions?
I would like to suggest that much more needs to be done to explore our common assumptions about what science and technology are, what the are becoming and what we as very different cultures think about it.
For example, I think it would be very revealing to organize policy dialogues in which we discuss the ethics of science, the concept of ownership, the moral dimensions of science, the relationship between science and the end goals of human existence, and so on.
I would like to conclude my remarks with a quotation from the President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Professor Lu Yong Xiang, a mechanical engineer trained at the doctorate level in Germany. I end with this quotation both because it reflects my own thinking about the importance of scientific collaboration from the human perspective, and because it raises a question about the cultural foundations of science that needs to be explored together.
In a world full of conflicting cultural values and competing needs, scientists share a powerful common culture that respects honesty, generosity, and ideas independently of their source, while rewarding merit. By working internationally, scientists can better use their knowledge to benefit humanity.
Acknowledgements
In preparing this paper I relied on the work of many scholars of science and science policy in Japan and China to whom I owe a debt of gratitude, including Richard P. Suttmeier who was a participant in the Gordon Research Seminar on New Frontiers in Science Policy. I am also indebted to the organizers of the seminar for inviting me to participate in what turned out to be a highly worthwhile experience.
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[1]. Sweden, whose R&D/GDP ratio exceeds 3.8 percent, is the only country with a higher ratio than that of Japan.
[2] Accessible from the NSF Tokyo Regional Office homepage (http://www.twics.com/~nsftokyo/home.html) as Tokyo Report Memorandum #00-08.
[3]. Richard P. Suttmeier, “China Faces the New Industrial Revolution: Achievement and Uncertainty in the Search for Research and Innovation Strategies,” Tokyo Office Report Memorandum #99-11.
[4]. Proceedings of this seminar are accessible from the NSF Tokyo Regional Office homepage as Tokyo Office Report Memorandum #00-01.
[5]. op. cit, reference 3.