In China now the goal is the make surveillance omnipresent. Already in premier universities, including Peking University, classroom lectures are routinely surveilled to monitor inappropriate discourse.
No, eventually you get Lysenkoism, where the authorities start choosing what theories are correct for some reason or other, for reasons that leave them utterly disconnected from truth. But you can start down the road without noticing the problem because the price doesn't come due right away, and if there's an active scientific community somewhere else you can use that for a connection to truth. But eventually, if you turn your back on truth, you will cease getting truth, and you will pay.
Fortunately, for, uhh, national security reasons, our own science community is toying pretty strongly with the idea of substituting politics for scientific inquiry in many or most fields as well, which will prevent Chinese science from being able to lean on Western science for that connection to reality. Yay...(?)
That's what led to bad design of the Chernobyl RBMK reactors and ultimately the fall of the USSR. Yes, the US also helped them go bankrupt by making them think it has more nukes. When you've got politics in the scientific process, the science becomes politics.
>No, eventually you get Lysenkoism, where the authorities start choosing what theories are correct for some reason or other, for reasons that leave them utterly disconnected from truth.
I don't think so.
I think that most people take a single historical example (USSR) and at a certain paranoid era and extrapolate it to every kind of totalitarian or vaguely similar society -- as if its some inevitable byproduct.
An authoritative society can just as easily be quite hands off with sciences (as long as they don't meddle in politics, e.g. not so with social sciences for example).
In fact, post-Mao China has already diverted a lot from USSR (and of course of USSRs under-productivity).
They already have pragmatic (if authoritarian) political goals and approaches, and could not care less what Mao said or what the "laws of historical materialism" are, etc -- whereas early communist elites were hang up on such things.
One added difference between USSR then and China now (besides the obvious huge change in productivity and wealth) is that Chinese elites also know about Lysenkoism and its results.
You don't need to go to extremes to find this process happening. Like I said, it's already happening in the West, right here, right now. Plenty of sciences have been damaged or almost destroyed in the West by creeping authoritarianism and even now the sights have been set on the "hard sciences" and engineering. There's little reason to believe it's going to be any slower in China than where there at least the residual fumes of openness of inquiry and thought, and some people who still operate as if that's the order of the day.
Knowing it's a bad idea doesn't seem to stop anybody here, because the driving forces of politics and power don't care. Submission is more important than correctness.
It's a terrible thing for well over a billion people to have to go through in order for a tiny elite to learn. I can't think of a better solution, though.
