2019年经济学人 世界应如何看待中国成科技大国?(1)（在线收听）

Red moon rising

红月升起

If China dominates science, should the world worry?

如果中国主导科学，世界应该担心吗？

A hundred years ago a wave of student protests broke over China’s great cities. Desperate to reverse a century of decline, the leaders of the May Fourth Movement wanted to jettison Confucianism and import the dynamism of the West. The creation of a modern China would come about, they argued, by recruiting “Mr Science” and “Mr Democracy”.

一百年前，中国大城市爆发了一股学生抗议浪潮。五四运动带头人极度渴望扭转中国一个世纪的衰落，因而想要摒弃旧思想、引进西方活力。他们认为，引进“德先生”和“赛先生”，能带来一个新中国。

Today the country that the May Fourth students helped shape is more than ever consumed by the pursuit of national greatness. China’s landing of a spacecraft on the far side of the Moon on January 3rd, a first for any country, was a mark of its soaring ambition.

如今，五四运动的学生们帮助建立的新中国比以往任何时候都更加追求国家繁荣。1月3日，中国成为第一个在月球背面着陆宇宙飞船的国家，展示了中国的雄心。

There is no doubting Mr Xi’s determination. Modern science depends on money, institutions and oodles of brainpower. Partly because its government can marshal all three, China is hurtling up the rankings of scientific achievement, as our investigations show. It has spent many billions of dollars on machines to detect dark matter and neutrinos, and on institutes galore that delve into everything from genomics and quantum communications to renewable energy and advanced materials. An analysis of 17.2m papers in 2013-18, by Nikkei, a Japanese publisher, and Elsevier, a scientific publisher, found that more came from China than from any other country in 23 of the 30 busiest fields, such as sodium-ion batteries and neuron-activation analysis. The quality of American research has remained higher, but China has been catching up, accounting for 11% of the most influential papers in 2014-16.

习近平带领中国复兴的决心毋庸置疑。现代科学依赖于金钱、制度和大量的智力。正如我们的调查所显示的，中国的科学成就排名正急速上升，部分原因是中国政府能够统筹三方面的工作。中国已经在探测暗物质和中微子的机器上花费了数十亿美元，并在研究基因组学、量子通信、可再生能源和先进材料等方方面面的机构上投入了大量资金。日本出版商日经新闻和科学出版商爱思维叶对2013-18年1720万篇论文进行了分析，发现在钠离子电池和神经激活分析等30个最热门的领域中，来自中国的论文居首。美国的研究质量一直较高，而中国一直在迎头赶上，在2014-16年度最具影响力的论文中，中国占到了11%。