Yasheng Huang (黃亞生), a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, is a descendant of a legendary Chinese Communist Party (CCP) figure, his grandfather having been one of the CCP’s first 50 members. He went to the United States to study at Harvard University in 1981 and later joined the Harvard Business School faculty.  

Long a student of China’s economy, Huang has rejected the idea of the exceptionalism of the Chinese economic model. Prior to 2015, many believed that China’s economic development would lead to a political transformation, but Huang saw that concept as being completely misguided after digging up statements and policy archives of Chinese officials and businesspeople.

In more recent years, his research has expanded beyond China’s economy to focus on its historical development of science and technology. He has spent six years working on a “Chinese Historical Inventions Dataset” that tracks scientific development in China over the centuries as well as the reasons for its ups and downs.

Amid the current technological decoupling between the United States and China, what does Huang’s research portend for the future? The following are excerpts from CommonWealth Magazine’s interview with Huang in Taipei (conducted in Chinese), where he was promoting his new book “The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline.”

CommonWealth: What is the question you are trying to answer with your new book “The Rise and Fall of the EAST?”

Yasheng Huang: The book is not about the rise and fall of the “east.” EAST stands for exams, autocracy, stability and technology.

I wanted to explore how the Communist Party has been able to maintain long-term stability and if there were similarities with ancient Chinese regimes. 

It actually has to do with the imperial examination culture. Under the imperial examination system, the Chinese worshiped authority. There was no abstract thinking or systematic analysis, and there certainly was no sense of the “collective action” that is essential in democratic countries. With no commercial, religious or independent intellectual forces to compete with the regime, the state was dominant.

From that perspective, the communist party inherited Chinese tradition, but one aspect that the CCP did not inherit was “succession.” In ancient times, fathers turned power over to their sons, but the communist party hasn’t been able to do that. And it was already facing that problem during the Mao Zedong era.

CW: How is that system related to science and technology development?

Huang: There is an important proposition in economics known as the “Needham Question.” It asks: Ancient China made many important contributions to the development of science and technology, so why didn’t contemporary China have a scientific and industrial revolution?

Homogenized Thinking Means Fewer Inventions

I spent six years building a database on scientific development in ancient China that gathered more than 10,000 pieces of data to determine “inventions per capita” in each dynasty. Our research found that “great unification” in China led to the stagnation or collapse of science and technology.

People generally think of the Han dynasty when they hear the term “great unification.” Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty respected Confucianism, but from a historical perspective, the Han dynasty had Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism.

The “great unification” of Chinese thought actually began when the Sui dynasty instituted the imperial examination system [in 587]. 

Based on inventions per capita, the most prolific era in Chinese history was the Wei, Jin, Northern and Southern dynasties [220-589]. At the time, more than 30 different regimes were all competing with each other in China. It was a time of literary creation and intellectual freedom. Although the inventions of the era are not as well-known as those of the Song dynasty, there are similarities with ancient Greece, including discourse on the Pythagorean theorem and the medical achievements of Hua Tuo (華佗).  

CW: How does this historical data mirror what’s happening today?

Huang: The development of science and technology in today’s world depends on two elements, and both are essential. One is scale, such as the level of government support and injection of resources; the other is diversity [scope]. Creativity requires the autonomy of ideas.

TSMC is the best example of diversity. It works with many different countries and clients and is constantly absorbing new knowledge.

What Chinese leaders have never figured out is that scientific inventions and high-tech development in today’s world depend on globalization. 

Take Huawei. Most people think it has relied exclusively on the government, but many enterprises supported by China’s government have not succeeded. The key to Huawei’s success was international cooperation. Prior to 2018, it was working with at least 130 American companies.

In the past, many high-tech Chinese companies depended on the support of European and American venture capital. Many of them were companies registered in Hong Kong that benefited from Western finance and the protection of a legal system, but that has been completely destroyed.  

From the perspective of academia, almost all of China’s most cited scientific papers have involved overseas cooperation. The communist party does not allow academic freedom. It has outsourced freedom to places like MIT and Harvard.