In September 2010, during my visit to Srinagar – the capital city of Jammu and Kashmir, I got a chance to read some volumes of Science and Civilisation in China’, authored by Joseph Needham. For beautifully elucidating the history of science in China, Needham is affectionately remembered as the ‘Erasmus of the twentieth century’ and is rightly regarded as the greatest western sinologist of his century. Needham’s works in the 1950s were encyclopaedic in nature and entail an extensive discussion of how significant innovations and techniques of China were adopted by the world without being aware of their origin during the pre-industrial revolution period.
Science and Civilisation in China was initially a one-volume book proposal submitted to the Cambridge University Press in 1950s. However, given the enormous contributions of China’s human knowledge in the domains of science, technology and inventions, the initial one volume amplified to seven volumes, with more than twenty-four sub-parts.
The inquisitiveness that motivated Needham to write so extensively about China began with a simple question: despite hosting the most genius people on earth, why had China ‘failed’ to host an industrial revolution akin to England in the 18th Century?
As an amateur researcher, I was also captivated by the same curiosity. And perhaps this fascination brought me to China. My gratitude to the School of Management, Zhejiang University and Prof Xiaobo Wu for offering me this wonderful opportunity to explore Chinese innovations.
Hangzhou is like a textbook example to demonstrate that mass flourishing of innovations can guarantee prosperity to a country and wellbeing to its people
For its grandeur, civilisational continuity, ingenuity of its people and inventive past, China has been described as the greatest of all civilisations. Travellers, religious missionaries and philosophers have vehemently and unambiguously produced powerful accounts in praise for China. Jhon of Plano Carpini in 1247, the first person to introduce China to Europeans and the first to use the word ‘Cathayans’, described Chinese as affable, kind, and hardworking people, fine craftsmen, with a language of their own.” William of Rubruquis, who was in Mongolia in 1254, was so impressed with the oddity of Chinese people that he prepared a long description to acknowledge the Chinese ingenuity and its craftsmanship. Not only the dexterity and beauty, Chinese amazed outsiders by their understanding of justice, inclusivity and equality. In 1549,Galeote Pereira, a Portuguese soldier wrote, “Chinese are better than Europeans in delivering justice and dealing with the truth.”
Marco Polo, Ibne-Batuta, Francis Quesnay, Adam Smith and Voltaire viewed China as a great civilisation and an incredible centre for knowledge, creativity and innovations. Even Prophet Mohammad (pbuh) advised his adherents to pursue knowledge in China.
It was on the 27th of September that I landed in Hangzhou, China’s innovation capital. Hangzhou was first introduced to the world by Marco Polo (1300 AD) as the “finest and most splendid city in the world. An abode of the nobles and magnates. A prosperous city with numerous and well-stocked market places.” Even today, Hangzhou has the same aroma of ingenuity as its people in the 13th century. Everything looks so picturesque, splendid and organised that minds are overawed with creativity. From being the capital city of Southern Song (1127-1279 AD), the most technologically advanced Chinese Dynasty, to being the innovation hub of the present world, Hangzhou is like a textbook example to demonstrate that mass flourishing of innovations can guarantee prosperity to a country and wellbeing to its people. Presumably, it is the same dynamism of the people here that enticed people like Morco Polo and Ibn Batutta.
Notwithstanding its glorious past, the astounding progress China has achieved in the last few decades in terms of poverty reduction and economic growth using its suigenres innovation and growth models is making China a guiding source for the rest of the developing world. No other country in history has achieved so much and so splendidly in such a short span of time.
Based on my own understanding, coupled with the insights gained from the analytical synthesis of the scholarship on China innovations, I am convinced that China is again destined to emerge as the most innovative country of the world.
This may sound exaggerated but the history of inventions is in favour of China. If one delves into annals of economic history, it tells us that countries’ prosperity directly depends on the people’s propensity to collaborate, create, and invent. Old theories with resources and technical change at their core seem superfluous today. Edmund S Phelps, 2006 Nobel Laureate in Economics and Professor at Columbia University, in his seminal 2013 book titled Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change passionately reasons that new growth models can potentially be discovered in the economic dynamism propelled by people’s desire, ability and intent to be innovative. As rightly argued by Phelps, sustained grassroots innovations can potentially bring marked levels of prosperity and dynamism to a country.
It is heartening to see that scholars like Phelps acknowledge the sprouting of grassroots dynamism in a country like China today. In his forward to a book titled The Alibaba Way: Unleashing Grassroots Entrepreneurship to build the world’s most innovative internet company, written by another top economist Ying Lowery in 2016, Phelps maintains that in the present day China “economic dynamism is alive and well and that grassroots innovation of products, processes, and markets is occurring at an increasing rate using ICT and digital innovations.” To Phelps, this dynamism reflected by individuals and individual firms can turn out to be ‘contagious’ and can accelerate the process of regional development.
However, innovation scholarship is crowded with hundreds of country cases that demonstrate the fact that innovations do not grow in isolation. They require proper nourishment and a right ecosystem to grow. The way China is engraving its innovation story by allotting it the top precedence in its policy circles corroborates the argument that China is on the right path, and ordained to spread harmony around the globe using its knowledge and innovations. No amount of paranoid politics and pity trade wars are going to deter China from achieving its innovation targets. China no longer is a hidden champion; it is essentially an undisputed innovation champion.
The writer is an innovation researcher and is affiliated with the School of Management, Zhejiang University, China. He is the co-editor of Informal Sector Innovations: Insights from the Global South, published by Routledge, Taylor and Francis, Oxford UK. He can be reached at [email protected] or wechat: sheikhfayazsom