 Okay, good evening, everyone, depending on where you are, of course, because I could see from the attendee leaf that we do have people from different regions and different areas. So do welcome everyone today for our regular webinar from SOAS China Institute. My name is Huan Zao, reader in international management at School of Finance and Management at SOAS. I'm very delighted that, as you can see that today we will have a very fantastic webinar and which will be given by Professor Yaxuan, who is definitely the expert in the area of economy and political economy and also in the China's context. Now before I introduce him briefly and a subject, let me remind you that for the webinar, you're welcome to raise questions or comments through the Q&A box at the bottom right hand corner of the screen. If you would like to raise the question anonymously, you're welcome to do so. But if you would like to do so, it will be also helpful for us to know certain kinds of background information about who you are, and that will give me a better sense of your question so that Professor Huan will be able to address it accordingly. But your wish will be respected, neither your name or other things will be identified and be disclosed at all. So a very quick brief about Professor Yaxuan because I think I could spend quite a long time to tell you guys about how much research that he has been doing. So currently he's the APOC Foundation Professor of International Management based in Sloan School of Management in MIT. He has been involving lots of research projects over the past decades, but now he's researched particularly interested in political economy of contemporary China and also to understand historical, technological and political developments in China, which exactly the key topic that he's going to talk about in the next one and a half hour. So I'll stop here because I think the time is precious and we definitely would like Professor Huan to talk about his opinion and his insight and we would like to come back to the Q&A session afterwards. So now Flo is yours Professor Huan, here you go. Thank you very much Huan, thank you for inviting me to give this webinar. And the title as you can see is the rise and fall of technology in Chinese history It is part of a larger project of a book project. Let me say a little bit about the book. The presentation is going to be based on chapter eight of my book and the book has a very long name. It is the rise and fall of the east. And east here stands for examination, autocracy, stability and technology, both in Chinese history and in contemporary China. It is forthcoming from Yale University Press early next year. So let me just say a little bit about the outline of the book to situate today's presentation against this broader coverage in the book. So chapter one is introduce the yeast model, examination, autocracy, stability and technology. And the first part is about examination. Going back to history, specifically examination is the imperial civil service exam, the rise of meritocracy in China. And then chapter three is about contemporary Chinese Communist Party as an organization. And then part two is on autocracy. Chapter four is about history. Chapter five is about contemporary China. And then my chapters alternate between history and contemporary China. And then stability here, I'm mainly talking about political stability. Chapter six is about history. Chapter seven is about contemporary China. And there's one particular aspect of stability that I analyzed. And that has very current implication, which has to do with how the system transitions from one leader to another. And this is known as a two-lock problem in autocracies. Autocracies struggle with leadership succession transitions. And then part four is on technology. And here I have two chapters. Chapter eight is about history, the main focus of today's presentation. And chapter nine is about current China, artificial intelligence and 5G and other areas of technology. I would mention a little bit about contemporary period. My focus is on history in today's webinar. And then chapter five is looking forward, debating the model. And chapter 10 is mostly about Xi Jinping era. And chapter 11 is about the broader implications of China under Xi Jinping. OK, so we are also doing other projects that are related to my webinar and, in fact, my book draws from this research. I have a paper together with Claire Young in Journal of Politics on Longivity, Mechanism of Chinese Absolutism, another paper with Claire on Great Divergence. And there it is about political divergence rather than about economic divergence. And then another paper with Claire Wei Hong and Dan Zileo on the Great Tang Song Transition. And then a book-length project on historical technology. So basically, the webinar is based on one chapter of my current book. But this separate book, the whole book is devoted to this one question, the need-time question. So my chapter doesn't do full justice to the complexity of this question. We really need to write a whole book on the topic. So then we gave the outline of the webinar. What I'm going to do is to first preview the results and the main contributions. And then I'm going to introduce the database, what I call Chinese Historical Invention dataset and measures of Chinese inventiveness. And then present the patterns of historical technology and then get to the explanation. And as I'm going to explain in a little bit more detail in the next maybe 10 to 15 minutes, there are basically two variables that were used to explain the patterns of historical technology. One is state capacity, the scale, the ability of the government to support technological development by funding the science, by funding the technology. And the other is what I call scope. Essentially, scope means diversity of conditions, freedom of inquiry, freedom of explorations, and multiple sources of funding rather than just from the government. It could also come from private sector. Essentially, the way that I explain historical technology is that when China got these two conditions right, that's when China achieved a technological success. When they don't get these two conditions right, they don't have the success. So that's the basic argument for this chapter. And in fact, that's the basic argument for the entire book. And then, toward the end, I'll draw some broader implications and maybe apply these implications from history to China today. So let me go to the first bullet point, a review of results and the main contributions. So just because often I cannot finish all my slides, so what I want to do is to make sure that I talk about the main findings at the very beginning, so at least I finish introducing the main findings and main ideas. If you look at the data that we have constructed, there are three areas of Chinese technology. The first era, what I call the peak era, is from the 4th century BCE to 6th century CE, so roughly about 1,000 years. And then there was the decline, and so that's the second period. The first decline can be dated to the 6th century to the 13th century, roughly about 700 years. And then there was another decline, 13th century to 20th century, about 700 years. So if you think about Chinese history in the last two millennia, you can think about it as the first period, technological achievements and technological success. And then ever after that, it is a period of decline. What's important is that this dating of Chinese technology is quite different from, I think it's quite different from the dating by many scholars. Most scholars believe that Chinese technology began to decline much later, kind of a main dynasty, 14th century to 17th century, whereas our work shows that the decline happened much, much earlier. So I'm not going to say that we are right and they are wrong, but I'm just saying that if we believe in our data, our data provide a very, very different timing of the decline. And that has some substantial implications of how we interpret the decline, which is something I'm going to go through in the rest of the presentation. So why does it matter to get the timeline right? One reason why it matters is to get the causation right. So if you believe that the decline happened in the 15th century, then typically you would argue maybe it is because of the trade closures and voyage bans. A lot of economists have that view because China famously closed itself to the rest of the world in the 15th century after 1433, I think. And for almost 400 years China closed itself. You couldn't launch a voyage, a voyage and they burned the ships. They even burned the records and documents related to the voyage. So if you believe that the decline happened in the 15th century, then you say it is because of that action that closed China itself to trade and to technology. If you believe that the decline happened in the 17th century, then you can argue it is because China failed to develop signs. And this is a famous view put forward by Joseph Neatham in his 1969 book. He basically blamed the Chinese failure to launch Industrial Revolution on Chinese failure to develop signs. So if you look at Europe, Europe began to develop signs in the 16th and 17th century, but China failed to do that. And then if you believe that the decline happened in the Ming and Qing dynasties, another factor you could come up with is suppression of commerce. Although that view is debated because recently historians have documented that the Ming dynasty and Qing dynasty didn't suppress business and didn't suppress commerce as much as previous scholars believed. They suppressed overseas commerce. They suppressed foreign trade, but they didn't suppress domestic trade. There's another view which is that Tang dynasty and Song dynasty mark the peak of Chinese technology. And this is a view that I would say that a lot of official historians in China have. They tend to believe that the big country, big empire, is powerful and militarily politically but also technologically. And then they cite Tang and Song as examples of big powerful empires being very technologically advanced. But if our data are correct, if Chinese technology began to decline in the 6th century, these explanations are problematic. I'm not saying they are wrong, but they at least do not explain the first wave of decline. They may add to additional decline, but they don't cause the initial decline. So we need to locate other variables to explain the initial decline. And I believe that to locate the initial decline, the reason for the initial decline is actually more meaningful than locating these additional factors that added to the decline. Those initial declines, I would argue, are caused mostly by politics and ideology. I think economics is not as important. I'm going to focus on politics and ideology. Economics is kind of a result of the politics and ideology rather than a reason for it. So then we need to look at the politics before 6th century, the ideology before 6th century, and politics after 6th century, and ideology after 6th century. That's kind of the way that I explained the decline. I don't know if people in the audience are familiar with the work by Joe Mopier, who is an economic historian at Northwestern University. My explanation of the rise and fall of Chinese technology comes closest to Joe Mopier's explanation of Europe. He does write about China, but his main focus is Europe. His explanation is not a very surprising explanation. His explanation is that Europe was able to develop technology basically because of democracy and freedom and because of the scope, because of the diversity, because of the competition. I think my explanation comes closest to that. So let me introduce kind of the general theoretical framework of my work. And I use two factors to explain the technological development, what I call scale and scope. The basic idea is that technological development depends on getting both scale and scope right. So what is a scale? A scale is government support. For example, R&D spending, public sector employment, and the government's ability to coordinate and to implement big projects. Think about highway, high-speed rail system in China. So that will be an example of the ability of the government to coordinate and implement big projects. But you also need to get a scope right. Scope here means risk-taking, freedom of explorations and inquiries, questioning authority, taking individual initiatives. So here's the tricky thing. You need to get both right. But to some extent, these two things work often against each other. Sometimes you can get too much scale and too little scope. Sometimes you can get too much scope and a little scale. Right? The second situation, for example, is happening in the West now against COVID-19. Right? In the United States, we cannot get a significant portion of the population to acknowledge signs of wearing masks and receiving a vaccine. Right? So there's a lot of scope. There's a lot of a freedom of opinion. And that's actually very bad for economy and for society. So you need to get both right. And there's a sweet spot where you can get both right conceptually, although it is very hard to say exactly where that sweet spot is. But conceptually, you need to get both. And that's a little bit different from, I would say, this is different from, say, the Chinese government's point of view. The Chinese government point of view is a scale is the only thing that matters. Government support and coordination. And then there's kind of a laissez-faire economics that emphasizes scope. My view comes in between. You need to get both right. And I use this framework to apply both to history and to contemporary China. Right? I have two chapters, one on history and one on contemporary China. So let me talk a little bit about a contemporary period. So scale in the United States, you can argue, it is a National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health. In Britain, there are similar agencies, the Manhattan Project, in China, Ministry of Science and Technology, made in China 2025. Scope in the US is Academic Freedom, Open Science, Autonomy. In China, in the contemporary period, I would argue that collaborations with the West, autonomy of Hong Kong, private entrepreneurship, these are the scope conditions of China, enabling the technological success. So then the implication of that way of looking at China today is decoupling with the West undermines Chinese competitiveness, undermines Chinese technological advance. Scale is simply not enough. You need both. So that's the argument that I laid out in chapter nine. Okay, so let's go back to history and present more details. So the peak era before sixth century is associated with scope conditions, political fragmentation, and I'm going to present some data, ideological diversity, ideological heterogeneity, but also state capacity. And we have some measure of state capacity. So go back to more clear is kind of a contestability conditions. The declining areas are associated with political unification, weakening of ideological diversity during the first decline, basically between sixth century and 10th century, and then the complete ideological collapse during the second decline, sort of since 10th century. But interestingly, state capacity remain more or less constant. Throughout 2000 years of Chinese history. So if you have two factors, scale and scope, scale didn't really change. A scope changed dramatically, and then you observe change in technological development, then you say it is because of the change of the scope that led to the technological decline. What are the main contributions? So if you look at the two pictures on the right side of the screen, the top picture is Zheng He's voyage. He commanded like hundreds of ships. The picture below is the ship by Christopher Columbus, much smaller fleet. China in the Ming dynasty was much more advanced. In, at least in navigational technology, as compared with the West. So there's a theory which says that the way that the world is today, first British empire and then American empire. The reason why we have this is because the Ming dynasty ended Zheng He's voyages in the 15th century. So this is kind of the counterfactual scenario that historians debate. So what if Zheng He's voyages were allowed to continue, then maybe we would have what is known as the Paxx Seneca, the Chinese empire, rather than British empire. The problem with that view is that if the technological decline began in sixth century, rather than in the 15th century, that counterfactual scenario is much less plausible than it is. Because it's so far away from industrial revolution. So China was nowhere near industrialization. If Chinese decline began in the sixth century, rather than in the 14th century or 15th century. So the lessons from history are autocracy is absolute autocracy. Without any scope is detrimental to autocracy technology. And my chapter nine uses that framework to analyze China today. And there's really no kind of unique Chinese model. So to get scale and scope right, that's true in the United States, that's true in Europe, as well as true in China historically and contemporary periods. So I don't really see any evidence on this kind of a unique different China model. So let me get to the data from which we draw the analysis, Chinese historical invention dataset, and the measures of Chinese inventiveness. So this is something that I think, especially people in Britain are familiar with, because it is based on Professor Joseph Neatham. Joseph Neatham was a British academic. And he is known for compiling 27 volumes of science and civilization in China. And I think at Cambridge University, there's a Joseph Neatham center. I'm not sure if the center is still there, but they used to be a center of Joseph Neatham. It is incredibly rich and impressive work by Joseph Neatham, his students and his colleagues, 27 volumes of science and civilization in China. In this 1969 book, Joseph Neatham asked, why did China fail to develop science? Why did China fail to launch its own industrial revolution despite its lead in technology? So he provided the materials, he motivated the research, and ever since then historians and academics have debated this question for a long, long, long period of time. So my effort is part of that larger scholarship, try to understand and tackle Neatham's question. So we use two source materials to construct our database. One is Joseph Neatham's science and civilization of China volume. We supplement Joseph Neatham's volumes with the volumes by Chinese Academy of Sciences, the history of Chinese science and technology. And this is a pretty big project in collaboration with Professor Wei Hong of Tsinghua University. The challenge here is that the information consists of free form text without any format. So I'd love to tell you we use some ametic technology to do this. No, it was all just manual labor. So we got the money to hire 44 researchers at Tsinghua University and we manually digitized the information. And then we had over 10 researchers at MIT coding, matching, and assigning the inventions to dynasties. So mostly manual work, it took us more than six years. It is still ongoing, actually. So let me show you an example of what it looks like. So this is the volume on physics by Joseph Neatham in this, in this book. He listed the discovery of the magnet and then he dated the magnet to the third and the sixth century. Is it BCE? Okay, it's a third and sixth century. So then we will write down the discovery of magnet between third and sixth century. And this is an invention of transparent glass beads. And then Joseph Neatham dated the invention to hand or chain dynasties. As you can see, there's a lot of uncertainty between third century and sixth century hand or chain dynasties. So we have developed procedures to deal with these ambiguities. We follow Joseph Neatham's broad definition of inventions. So we don't really kind of make distinctions between discovery, technical gadget, scientific theory, and production method because we really have no way of making those distinctions. We just call them the inventions. All of them, we call them inventions. And in our work, we use science and technology inventions and innovations interchangeably, right? So innovation scholars will tell you, oh, there's a big difference between science and technology. There's a big difference between inventions and innovations. I agree with all of that. It's just that we have no detailed information to really differentiate between a discovery and the application invention and innovation. So we just don't bother to make those distinctions. And this dataset is appropriate for comparing different Chinese dynasties and different Chinese historical eras, rather than for comparison between China and Europe, right? So because definitions are different and things like that. So it is useful to look at Chinese history, but it is not terribly useful to look at difference between China and Europe. So let me give you our measure. And so after this long introduction, you may be disappointed with how primitive and simple our measure is. Our measure is basically given by the dynasty count of inventions divided by the population measured in million persons of that dynasty, right? So for Qing dynasty, we get 2.85. It just means that there were 2.85 inventions per million people in that dynasty. For Tang dynasty, it is 17.6. So this is basically what is known as a density measure. And we use the historical population estimate by Professor Ge Jianxiong. He is a very famous professor at Fudan University. He has produced the most complete population estimates. But we also use other population estimates to see if using different estimates will produce very different results and they don't produce different results. So that is good. So I'm sure there will be criticisms and pushback on the way that we devise this measure. Let me just say that I won't go into the details. Let me just say that I have thought about the complications and the measurement issues for example, we gave all the inventions the same weighting, right? We assume that they are all economically the same in terms of their impact. You may say that's not true. And different dynasty have different lengths, right? And then you may also say that dividing the inventions by population kind of artificially makes larger dynasties look bad, right? Because the population is in the denominator. The inventions are in the numerator. I'll be happy to go into that. And then you may say, oh, why not just use a simple count of the inventions rather than a ratio? Let me just say that I have thought about all these objections and criticisms. I'll be very happy to answer questions if you have questions about measurement issues. It's just that let me get to the findings and then I'll be happy to come back to the measurement issues. We have political measures. We use the good thing about doing Chinese history is that there are a lot of written materials. So we use four biographical volumes of almost 10,000 sort of famous historical figures in China. And these four volumes organize these people by disciplines such as science and technology, literature, and religion. And they have this very important information, which is whether or not the people that they record are hired by the government. So we use that measure as a measure of state capacity, right? And then they also have information about the religious beliefs of some of these people, whether they are Taoists, whether they are Buddhists. They don't really give a specific category of Confucianism, which is assumed that everybody else is a Confucianist. Those that they singled out are of different religions. Okay. So let me present the pattern now. I mean, after all this introduction, let me make sure that I am on track. Okay. Let me try to finish maybe in 15 minutes. I do like to have more conversations with the audience. Let me present the patterns. So as I said before, there are three eras of Chinese technology. The first era from the warring states to what I call Han Sui Interregnum, and that's the name I gave. Basically it's the period right before Sui Dynasty, right? Sui Dynasty. As you can see, the average inventiveness score, CDI score, is the highest during this period, 24.5. And then there's a decline, right? So this is the second period from Sui to the Song period, about 700 years. That decline, a decline to 9.4, right? And then there's another decline, right? To 5.3, right? So the three technology periods, period one, period two, period three, right? As I said before, a lot of scholars believe that the decline happened around here, or around here, right? Whereas my dating is much, much earlier in the sixth century, the Sui Dynasty, sixth century. So this is just another representation of the graph, right? The first period, the second period, the third period. So let me explain the pattern, right? I presented the pattern, let me explain the pattern. The first explanation has to do with the scale, right? So again, remember, my argument is that you need to get both scale and scope, right? So let me, let's look at some of the scale conditions, right? To get the scale right, it is really interesting, actually, if you go and read the literature. Much of the literature about the Neatham question is about the Chinese decline. It's actually not about why China initially was so advanced. And then much of the literature, especially produced by economists, is very negative on the role of the state, right? So this is a very famous economic historian, David Lantus. He's very categorical. It is the state that kills technological progress in China. Joseph Neatham, oh, sorry, I spelled his name wrong. Joseph Neatham was also very negative. He said something like there is a Parkinson's law. Chinese official science is following Parkinson's law. Parkinson's law says that you kind of craze work to do, even though the work is not productive. So he's basically saying all the government work in science and technology is no good. Very negative on the role of the government. I disagree. And so the view is that Chinese was ahead because Chinese were very smart, were very ingenious. That kind of explanation until the government stopped it, right? So that's kind of the explanation. It is, you know, I have to say it's kind of an uncomfortable explanation because it's sort of about the intrinsic nature of the people, rather than the environmental conditions. And, you know, I'm not saying that these scholars meant it that way. But if you look at how some people have explained western science and technology, they explain it on the basis of kind of western superiority, western ingenious. It's kind of similar to that, rather than looking at the environmental conditions. I have an environmental view, which is the role of the state. So it's not because Chinese were more ingenious. It is because the role of the state was advantageous to development of technology. And specifically, I singled out this role of the state, the payroll of the state. What do I mean by payroll of the state? Government hired and employed a lot of intellectuals. Government employment. Massive government employment, right? So if you think about this, in the ancient times, when you had struggled for daily life, so basically subsistence living, subsistence living is defined as roughly 2,000 calories a day. And we often exceed that now. But in the ancient times, if you're lucky, you got 2,000 calories a day. Government employment basically frees you from the daily struggle with subsistence. So that means you are free to pursue other things that don't have an immediate payoff. Just think about being in that situation. This is extremely advantageous to people who are creative and who have ideas, right? Because they can use the time and energy to think of ideas, to think about technology, and to write poetry, to write essays, rather than using their energy and time to get the rise and gain, right? So that's the idea. It's a simple idea, but that's the idea why state capacity during the ancient times was actually very important for technology. And what is also interesting is that the government acquisition of talents were across the board. A lot of the humanists were employed by the government as well, not just technologies, but humanists as well. So let me show you some data. The red line represents the proportion of humanists on the government payroll. The blue line represents proportion of technologists on government payroll. And this is Chinese history, right? 2,000 years of Chinese history. It is consistently at a very high level. Humanists, above 80%, technologists, sometimes it's high, sometimes it's low, sometimes it's high, sometimes it's low, but almost always above 50%. A little bit lower toward the end of the Chinese domestic history, but before that easily over 60%. So let me talk about the scope. The main part of the chapter is on the scope. The scope, one is measured by the political scope. It is basically lack of political unification, political disintegration. What is very interesting there is that there's a very interesting divergence between China and the Europe. And it always happened around the same period of time. So China became unified during the Soviet dynasty in 580. Europe became disintegrated in 476 when the Roman Empire collapsed, Western Roman Empire collapsed. Before that, Europe was actually united. Before 580, for a long period of time, for about 360 years, China was actually disunited. So what's interesting is that Europe and China switched places. In 476, Europe became China before 580. And after 580, China became Europe before 476. So the two continents switched places in terms of politics. And as I said before, this is how Joe McHeer and other scholars explain the rise of Europe. And there's another scholar which I'm going to cite later on from Stanford University, Professor Shadell, their argument basically says that it is the divided Europe that gave the world technology, democracy, and rule of law, and religious freedom. And because of the competition, political competition, economic competition. So that's kind of the basic idea. If you look at China, the way that I explain China is that after the sixth century, China got rid of those European conditions, the collapse of the European conditions in China starting in the sixth century. The first shock was the political shock, territorial unification. China became one huge empire in the sixth century. And then the second shock was the ideological shock, became one ideology starting in the 10th century. So sixth century political shock, 10th century ideological shock, and then 14th and 15th century kind of even bigger ideological shock, even bigger ideological collapse of diversity. The instating cause is the political shock, is the sixth century political shock. So let's look at the political development on the one hand and technological development on the other hand. This is the technological development, the CDI score, the highest during the first period. You saw this graph before. So what happened in the second period? The end of the political fragmentation, right? Sui reunited China in 580. What happened in the second shock? Political unification that continues, right? And then there was an absolute dominance of Confucianism at the expense of Buddhism and Taoism, right? So essentially, this is kind of the main argument. China got rid of the European conditions on politics, ideology starting in the sixth century. So if that idea is correct, it must mean to say that during this period, there were European conditions, right? Politics was divided, ideology was divided. So this is the next part of the presentation. I'm going to show you the presence of the European conditions before the sixth century. Oh, okay. Before I get to that, let me show you that the size of the empire is negatively correlated with the technological inventiveness. This is the CDI score, the higher the score, the more inventive. This is the size of the empire, and the bubble is scaled to the size of the empire, right? So as you can see, there's a clear negative correlations between the size of the empire and the inventiveness of the dynasty. What's very interesting is that they're actually, if you look at this graph closely, there are kind of two groups of Chinese dynasties. They are kind of these empire size of dynasties. These are kind of really, really big empires. And they are also kind of a kingdom size of the Chinese dynasty. They are not really quite big empires, but they are kingdom size, right? In both categories of Chinese dynasties, you observe this negative relationship, right? The bigger empires, the bigger they are, the less inventive they are. The bigger kingdoms are the less inventive they are, right? But the slope is different. One is more steep than the other slope. Let's look at the period for 580 and try to understand what happened in China during that period of time. This is the period after the Han dynasty and before the Sui dynasty. So after 220 and before 580. And so this is a really excellent book by Walter Shadell on Europe after Roman Empire. The title is Escape from Rome. So if you sort of use this way of looking at Chinese history, the China during this period between 220 and 580 is similar to Europe after Roman Empire. So I have a phrase in my book. China was Europe before Europe was Europe. Because Europe became Europe. The way that we know it is after 476. But China before Europe was Europe, was already Europe. There was a political fragmentation. There were some 31 governments, concurrent governments, rapidly consecutive governments. There were a lot of ideas, contestation of ideas. There was kind of discussion, democracy, and that was the kind of abstract thinking in Chinese philosophy. Two of the pure mathematicians in Chinese history lived in this era, Liu Hui and Zhu Chongzhi. Intellectuals were, obviously many of them were employed by the government, but they had more independence from the government. There was a flourishing of humanities and creativity. So this is a European moment in China, kind of a Renaissance Europe. Renaissance Europe had both technology and humanistic flourishing. Same thing during this period. There was a flourishing of humanities and we have a measure of that. And there was a flourishing of technology. As the humanities began to decline, you also see the decline of technology. So basically, this is a long way of saying something I think many of you probably agree with, which is that political freedom goes with technological freedom. And freedom of ideas goes with innovations and technological innovativeness. So let me skip this except to say that the second highest era is the Warring States era. It has a CDI score of 20, 21.8. That was also very similar to Han Sui period, right? A lot of political computation, a lot of ideological computation, kind of a European moment in Chinese history. So what happened in 580? There was a political reunification. And much of my book, so this is not in this chapter, but it is in the separate chapter, is about imperial civil service. So it's not just Sui Dynasty unifying China. More importantly, it is about Sui Dynasty having invented imperial service exam, imperial civil service exam. It is really that institution that perpetuated the unity of China and the ideological dominance of Confucianism. So it is not a military conquest. It is really ideological conquest and institutional conquest. So the first shock is political reunification. And let's look at the ideological shock. So we have a measure of shares of Confucianist documents, of total official documents. This is not my measure. This is actually by Chinese historians. This is my measure, presented shares of Taoists and Buddhists of all notable historical figures. Both measures show ideological diversity declined and then collapsed during 10th and 13th century. So let's look at the Buddhist measure. So this is the the Strait and Tang Dynasty reached the peak in Chinese history during this period. So the political shock happened first. Ideological shock happened second. And then by Yuan, beginning in the Song Dynasty, the Buddhism began to decline in the Song Dynasty and then it almost kind of totally disappeared afterwards. If you look at Taoism, Taoism persisted until the Yuan Dynasty and then it began to decline. So if you look at sort of the last kind of 700 years of Chinese dynasties, the last 700 years wore a complete dominance of Confucianism. Let me show you another measure and this is one by Chinese academics. And this is the share of Confucianist documents, of the total official documents. And as you can see, before the 10th century, the Confucian share of the total documents was only 40 percent. After the 10th century, it rose to 76 percent. So this is actually interesting. The dominance of Confucianism happened much later than some people believe. It happened actually after the 10th century, rather than in the Han Dynasty. And that has some important implications for how we think about Chinese history. So let me conclude by joining some broader implications from history. One is to say that state capacity matters. So R&D spending, big data infrastructure in China today, they really matter. I mean, I'm not taking away from the power of the Chinese government to spend money on R&D, to spend money on infrastructure. But contestability conditions also matter as well. And in the contemporary China, those contestability conditions, scope conditions are manifested in unconventional formats. Hong Kong rule of law is actually one form of contestability condition. Research collaborations with the West is another form of contestability condition. A private sector development is another source of contestability condition. The problem is that under the current leadership, the Chinese government is actually undermining these contestability conditions. They pursue state capacity. So they are still getting the scale right by emphasizing government spending. But they are decreasing the scope conditions for Chinese technology, for Chinese economy. My prediction is that we are kind of going back a little bit to the 6th century situation, where the only thing that's left is the scale. And the scope conditions are being weakened and even destroyed to some extent. And so I'm not optimistic in terms of projecting about the future in terms of how Chinese technology and science are going to develop. Okay, so let me finish there. And I'm very happy to answer questions. Thank you. Thank you so much for Professor Huang's talk, which is very, very comprehensive today. So definitely, we would like to read about him in more detail after the webinar. So there are some questions coming out. I may not actually follow order because I think one question particular, you know, pinpoint what your broad implications are about, you know, how your research can be throwing certain kinds of perspective in your current picture. Ryan so raised two questions and saying, you know, unlike back then, it's entirely ironic that Confucianism today might offer very competing ideology versus other Western ideologies, especially when we're looking to the COVID-19, you know, the different way how not just the government, but also the civilian society, how they do it. So is it offering diversity rather than deploying innovation from your perspective? And the second question actually pretty much is about, you know, in financial markets, how do you reconcile the need for the Chinese market to play an increasingly and decisively role where it benefits most from the freedom of exchange of information and opinion with a very clear political trend that is heading in the opposite way. And then we have seen that, you know, how those kinds of big tech joins really, you know, sorter and have experienced the policy development over the past decade because of the infrastructure, because of the sophistication of the market, right? But then here we also see certain kinds of polls, especially in groups case. So what's your thought about these two particular aspects? Well, so these are good questions on the role of the finance. If you look at Alibaba, if you look at Tencent, not so much Huawei, but if you look at Pinduozuo and JD and these sort of internet players, big players in China and DD, right? They were all initially funded by western, at least foreign venture capital funds. At the time, either China didn't have its own VC industry or the Chinese VC people didn't recognize their value. And Alibaba famously, Jack Ma actually famously went to Shanghai when he started his company. And Shanghai official looked at his business plan and said, what is this? Why do we need something like this? And the reason why he located his business in Hangzhou, and he was born there, obviously there's that. But his first location was actually Shanghai, rather than Hangzhou and Shanghai government didn't see any value. And what's very interesting about that is, let's just suppose that China didn't have that diversity. Let's just suppose that Hangzhou government was exactly the same as Shanghai government. Would you have witnessed the rise of Alibaba? Probably not, right? So in many ways. So Joe Mokir actually pointed out this difference between China and Europe historically. So if you look at Christopher Columbus, he tried to get funding for his voyage. He tried the Portuguese kings, he tried the British ones. And eventually he got funded by the Spanish king and Spanish queen. He also got private funding. Had Europe been united with one government, right? Christopher Columbus might not have been funded. We actually have this contemporary example of Alibaba taking advantage of the diversity of Chinese local political system, maybe not at the national level by the local political system. But look at what's happening in China today, right? The national government is now imposing centralization. It's decreasing local autonomy. And in my book, I actually traced that all the way to 1989. There was a gradual kind of centralization since 1989. But under Xi Jinping, that has gone to almost another level, right? Even though under trade war, China opened up its financial market to foreign investors. But we also know that they are investigating Alibaba. They are looking at the Chinese investment, the Chinese investors who are connected to N group. So they could be a political implication of what the investigation is going to reveal, right? So I think that I'm not sure if the person who asked that question has that point of view. What I'm trying to say is that historically and in contemporary China, you can actually have the same framework to explain how important it is, diversity of funding, diversity of government support, is actually important for entrepreneurship, is important for for technology. The first question, I didn't quite get the, I mean, I just, what do you mean by diversity of vaccination? No, I think, yeah, I think the question is about Confucianism. So because when we're talking about Confucianism today, it might offer, you know, because it's quite different ideology, right, in the West and in the East. And then this might quite competing ideology to to offer diversity rather than stuff like innovation. What do you think? Okay, got it. Well, I think the competition is good, right? So the competition, the logic of my argument is the more competition, the better in terms of ideas. But in China today, is there really competition, right? And, you know, even, even, I'm not even sure there's competition between communism and Confucianism. And let alone competition between communism, Confucianism, and Western liberalism, right? Look at the NGOs, look at the professors in China who advocated Western, Western ideas. And compared with 10 years ago, compared with 12 years ago, there was far fewer kind of representation of Western ideas in Chinese, on Chinese internet, in Chinese official media. And, you know, I guess I would advocate Western ideas, but I actually don't advocate the dominance of Western ideas. I would actually like to see, you know, both communism and Confucianism side by side with Western ideas. In the concluding chapter of my book, I said that it is kind of stupid for the US government, I'm not sure it happened in Britain. It's kind of stupid for the US government to close down Confucius institutes in America. I mean, what's wrong with having Confucius institutes? Are we so, do we lack confidence in our own ideas that we don't want to hear from Confucius scholars? I just don't see why we close down Confucius idea. What I would advocate is for each Confucius institute established in America. Let's have a Western institute established in China, right? As an exchange, as a condition. And that's only fair, right? So we're not doing anything more than what you're doing in the United States. But I just think it's kind of, it doesn't make any sense to close down Confucius institutes. That's very interesting. I totally agree about diversity is so important about being inclusive, being open to the different people and different ideas. Because that's what information exchange and knowledge learning coming from. Let's go back to some specific questions about when you talk about decline in this kind of technology and scientific discovery much earlier than the mainstream in history in Chinese economy. So there are a couple of questions particularly looking into those kinds of specific aspects. So Eric, talking about, you know, when you refer to the decline in scientific discovery, it could be, you know, the phenomenon of diminishing returns rather than a result of a government and the societal changes. So for example, the magnets, and which was referred in, and Joseph Neatham spoke, right, can only be discovered once. So it is quite likely that in your future, there might be fewer inventions, all this kind of thing. So inventors in later dynasties will have a few possible inventions to discover. So what's your explanation in this regard? Well, but that's not true. I mean, the worldwide stock of knowledge today is much bigger than the stock of knowledge two centuries ago, three centuries ago, right? If you look at the Western discovery, Western technology exploded after 18th century. And also, I'm not just talking about discovery. I'm also talking about inventions, right, inventing new things. And there's almost no limit to those inventions, at least from from from the Western data. And in fact, from the Western data, you have this explosion of inventions, exponential growth of knowledge, exponential growth of technologies. It's not just linear growth. It's it's exponential. The reason is that inventions and discovery of knowledge and technological development reinforce each other. When you have three pieces of knowledge, it's not like you just invent the fourth, you may invent the fifth, you may invent the sixth, you may invent the seventh, right? So the relationship is actually exponential rather than linear. I mean, arguably today, you can argue that maybe we are sort of a close to the to the to the frontier and to the to the end of that. And there's some research to show, for example, the Moore's law is slowing down, right? It's not doubling every 18 months. And also the number of researchers that you need to double the double the conductivity of the the chip is is is much, much more than in the 1970s. So you can argue that today, you may we may reach some sort of limit, although I talked to my MIT colleagues that they were violently disagree with me on this. They see infinite scenario for science and technology, not in sixth century. I just I don't I don't I I can't see that as an explanation. And also, also it is so sudden, right? Rather than kind of gradually coming down, it's it's it's dropped like a stone. So that that cannot be explained by that. I think it's related to what your explanations and just sort of different. And there are also some questions, but do you talk about because in your research, you didn't really specify the different types of innovation, like, you know, what you mentioned about invention. And then because there are some concerns from from the audience and talking about how to control the fact, especially when we're looking at, you know, not all the inventions can be commercialized, right? Not all the inventions will have the big impact. So how this kinds of for, you know, the impact related measurement or control and in your research and how and, you know, how how we can really use those kinds of data or invention to to be related to the measurement of a country's scientific and technological progress and capacity. So this is a particular question from Ron Hutchings from Oxford University, China Center. And quite similarly, I put these two questions together because King and C King, I'm not quite sure about your first name, but you also mentioned about data. And there are two particular questions about data is that how on Professor Juan and your team picked technologies were actually used in production. So again, it's such a kind of impact and application. And other than that technology. And the second one is how your team measures changes in technological frontier. So I put these two questions together for you to respond to. Yeah, so these are very good questions. I let me just let me just acknowledge that we are not measuring applications. And there's a good excuse. There's a bad excuse. Let me give the bad excuse first. The bad excuse is we have no way of doing it. And we don't have GDP data. We don't have economic activity data. And you can't really observe the applications of technologies in the production process. And even for modern technologies, it is actually tricky. It is actually, it is actually tricky to estimate the economic impact of a particular technology. So if you look at some modern research on this topic, one way is to use the patent citations and essentially counter citations of a patent and then use that as a measure, especially by commercial citations, right? And maybe the royalties paid to the companies. We have no way of doing that. So that's just, if you're not convinced by anything else I say, then I just have to default to that excuse. The better excuse is we actually don't need to do it. The reason is actually straightforward. The reason why we are discussing this issue at all is because the applications are almost zero, right? Suppose there were applications, then China will be the first country to launch industrial revolution. What is industrial revolution? Industrial revolution is essentially using technology for economic development, for industrial production, right? The very fact that China didn't have industrial revolution means that almost in all cases, the applications of technologies are zero, are zero. It's a little bit like Soviet Union. Soviet Union had advanced physics, advanced military technologies, but the economic applications were very little, so their economy didn't actually benefit. In that sense, each application is exactly the same as any other, sorry, each invention is exactly the same as any other invention in terms of the economic impact because their economic impact is all zero. I'm stating the extreme case. Obviously, in irrigation, some of the Chinese technologies were used to raise the yield, to grow the rice, and to grow other products. There's no question about it. There were applications, but those applications were not big enough to transform the Chinese economy from a primitive economy to an industrialized economy, right? So those applications were kind of, in terms of the historical, from a historical perspective, they're actually minor. Again, I'm not saying there were no applications, but just from a sort of a transformative aspect, those applications are actually not that significant, right? So sort of combine these two aspects together. We don't weight the inventions and our measures. So again, this is not a very satisfactory response, but I think these are the ones that we rely on. Yeah, I think definitely all the research we do actually have the limitations of the data, especially when you and your team actually went back to all this kind of historical data. So there are lots of things uncontrollable. Following on the data and also the measurement, there are two other questions regarding using the population as a denominator. Whether this, you know, because this can definitely amplify the effectiveness point as well. So if you can give a quick response to that one, would be helpful. And then to follow on and also the measurement, also talking about whether you spread out the duration of each period, because some actually really short-lived by this way, right? Like Tan actually specialised. So Matthew Lee actually talked about if we spread out duration of each period, what do you see the different patterns on the same trends? Yeah. So let me answer the second one first, taking into account the duration of the tennis days. So the short answer to that is it makes very little difference. So what you can do is you divide the number of dimensions by population and then by the number of years of a tennis day. There are some differences, like minor differences, but in a sort of a bigger scheme of things, the differences are very minor. So you still have these sort of three eras. The only difference is that the last era, in terms of how far the decline is, is a little bit more shallow than the measure that I showed. But fundamentally, the big patterns are preserved. You have the peak era, you have the second decline, you have the first decline, you have the second decline. And the timing does not make a big difference. So I think it's entirely legitimate to use both measures, one is just use the population and the other is to use both population and the dynasty duration. And the results are not that different. In terms of just using the population as the denominator, whether or not that is unfairly kind of biasing our measure, I think that's an incredibly legitimate point. If you look at the later dynasty, they tend to be the ones with bigger population. So you could argue that this measure is a little bit unfair toward the later dynasties, such as Qing dynasty, such as Ming dynasty. Okay, so let me give two responses. One is that, okay, so then you say, okay, let's use just the absolute number of inventions. So let's just don't think about population at all, let's just use the number of inventions. And actually some scholars have done that, and they use that. Let me tell you what the problem is. By using this measure, Qing dynasty, the last dynasty, will be judged as the most inventive dynasty in Chinese history, more innovative, more inventive than Tang dynasty. I think that's, if you sort of, sometimes we say, you know, the smell test, right? So this is smell test. I don't think a single Chinese historian is going to say, he's going to agree with that. So clearly there's something wrong, right? And the reason is very obvious. Qing dynasty had a lot of people, and a lot of people, you know, would kind of have more ideas. And if you don't take into account the population size, then you are biasing the measure in a very unscientific way. The question is that whether or not scaling the inventions by population has the other bias that I talked about. Well, not necessarily, right? So actually I said, I give two responses. Let me give three responses. One is that if you just look at the absolute measure, it will produce a very weird picture that nobody would agree with. So let's not do that. Then two more responses. One is that this is actually a very standard measure. And especially if you measure something that is more spontaneously coming out of the population. Let me give you an example. The World Bank measures entrepreneurship by different countries, by looking at the business creations divided by the population. So the population is defined as the working age population from 16 to 68, something like that, right? Maybe 65. That means that each person in that age cohort is capable of starting a business. This is actually very close to the kind of inventiveness we are measuring. Because in the Asian times, it is not like, you know, there's an MIT, you work at MIT, you produce inventions, you produce technology. There is no university. You kind of just do it on your own. It is very much like starting a business today, right? The standard measure of entrepreneurship measure is a density measure divided by the size of the population. The other response is that conceptually this is actually the right measure. Yes, there is no reason why more people means fewer ideas. It's actually the opposite. The economic conventional theory is the opposite. The more population, the more people, the more ideas, right? So if you read the economic literature, they actually talk about that explicitly. The more people, the more ideas, right? So in fact, the ratio, the ratio should actually increase if you have a larger population as the base. If the number of ideas increase faster than the population, right? But what we see is exactly the opposite, right? Which is that larger population produces fewer ideas, fewer inventions. And that makes sense only if you believe in a Marthusian logic, right? Which is wrongly proved to be wrong, right? If you only believe in Marthusian logic that the more people, the more miserable situation is, there's no other scenario to say that more population should result in fewer inventions. It has to be something else that restricts a large number of people from being invented, right? And then we look at what are those conditions that restrict the inventiveness of the population. So I don't know what Professor Juan just mentioned. I'll quickly refer, you know, Justin Linhufu. So he also looked into this particular puzzle by looking into the supply and demand on the equilibrium. So this might be some of the interest to look into. Because of the time limit, we will just have one last question. I do apologise because of the time limit. We couldn't answer all the questions from Professor Juan, but, you know, the question will be responded later by email. So the last question to you is that Honbo, so Professor Honbo actually is also my colleague. And she's particularly interested in your framework, whether your framework considers how the external environment, especially when we're looking to, you know, this kind of development of the rest of the world and how closely connected of those kinds of global work will affect both the scale and the scope within China, and especially in the stages of technology development of contemporary China. So give your last perspective on this one. So there was one part I didn't get because my the voice didn't come out. And so she actually would like to ask whether your framework considers how external environment, you know, the development of the rest of the world, because what we're talking about in this trade revolution, we're looking into the different places of economic development and how closely and the different countries in the region are connected to each other with this kind of expert environment affectals the scale and scope within China. Yeah. So let me first say that Justin Lin, I read his papers and cited him in my book. He and I actually agree on this civil service examination. He believed that civil service examination was bad for inventions. The problem though is that he also said that the technology began to decline in the main dynasty. So if you attribute the decline to civil service examination system, then the civil service examination started in sixth century. So at least there's that disconnect between the framework and the dating of the decline. But on the external world, my chapter on contemporary China is very much about contemporary world about the external world. So essentially the argument in chapter nine is, yes, China doesn't have freedom of speech and free universities and academic freedom. But China is able to access the academic freedom outside of China by establishing academic collaborations, research collaborations. If you look at the top ranked publications by Chinese scientists, they are almost all of them are collaborated with foreign scientists. And if you look at top Chinese companies, I already mentioned Alibaba that had the foreign investor. Huawei has 130 suppliers to Huawei before the US began to restrict the US companies from selling to Huawei. So essentially, Hong Kong was also very important because a lot of these high tech companies in China registered themselves in Hong Kong and got their capital from Hong Kong. Lenovo got its early round of capital, maybe round B from Hong Kong rather than from China. So all these external conditions are actually very important to Chinese economic development and to Chinese technological development. My worry is that the coupling between China and Europe, between China and the United States is going to reduce these collaborations. At least at MIT, probably some people know one of my colleagues was arrested by the US government for basically for false charges, but that's a separate issue. And Harvard professor Charles Lieber was arrested. So the collaborations are going to decline. And the kind of collaborations that produce scientific discovery, technological advances are going to decline. And that's bad for China, as well as bad for the West as well, because collaborations are very important. Then the issue is, we need to think about the politics, we need to think about foreign policy, what kind of politics, what kind of foreign policy should country like China adopt in order to continue with the collaborations with the West in order to continue autonomy of places like Hong Kong. Taiwan is actually very important. Taiwan is a big producer of Islamic conductors and to kind of destroy Taiwan. I can't think of a good economic argument for doing that. So I think the question is very good, which is that the external world is actually a critical component in China's rise as a technological and economic power. Thank you so much, Professor, for your time and for your response to all these excellent questions put forward by our audience. And I hope everyone enjoyed today's webinar because it's very informative. It actually brought us back to the history to look into the historical development in terms of technology, scientific, and across the Chinese history, but also looking to what the broad implications that we could see in contemporary China, because I think there are lots of statistics, right? But I agree, I totally agree with what Professor Juan has mentioned about those kinds of external world are so important. It's not just one way because we need meaningful conversation. We need collaboration, you know, regardless of ideological things, because I just feel like, you know, the world has changed to some extent and not always the right direction, not for the academic collaboration, but also for the collaboration across the countries in the regions. But I'll stop here. Like I said, thank you everyone and especially a big thanks to Professor Juan for your time. We really enjoyed your talk and we hope that we would like to have you as an in-person and we can have a more meaningful conversation and discussion in this very important topic. I'll conclude here today. Thank you again for everyone. Thank you. Bye, everyone. Thank you. Bye-bye.