China Remembers. Does China Think?
If the next civilisation runs the Western model at greater scale, on the same knowledge base, under the same time-poverty, the chain has not been rescued. It has changed hands, and the new hands are just as busy.
China's claim to be the next knowledge superpower rests on numbers that are not in dispute.
More STEM graduates than any other country by a wide margin. More patents filed. More papers published, and in several fields more papers that get cited. Research and development spending closing on the United States and in some measures past it. Infrastructure built at a speed that other countries cannot match and increasingly cannot imagine.
China also, unlike the West, remembers.
It knows about Bi Sheng and movable type, about the compass and gunpowder and paper, about the centuries of technological lead documented in this book's eighth chapter. The national story has that inheritance in it, taught and referred to and understood as a return to a previous position rather than an arrival at a new one.
China remembers. The question this chapter asks is whether China thinks.
The distinction is the one this book has been drawing for twenty-five chapters: between producing things and understanding things, between technology and knowledge, between innovation and wisdom.