Science and the Rise of China

I would like to begin this post by pointing out a couple facts.  First Mandarin Chinese is the most widely spoken language in the world.  About twice as many people in the world speak it than English, the next most popular language.  Second is that the Chinese appear to have no particular cultural aversion to science.  They are rapidly increasing their output of scientific papers.  They are likely to surpass the United States in this regard in about 2050.  This is, no doubt, due to the rapid economic growth of China.  Science costs money, and it follows that the more money you have the more science you are able to do if you are so inclined.  The Chinese show every indication of possessing such an inclination.

This blog post is not intended to be alarmist.  Chinese progress in science is not something that we need to be afraid of.  Quite the contrary, scientific knowledge is a public good that benefits all of humanity.  The real competition is not between American science, European science, Chinese science and the science of other parts of the world, but between knowledge and ignorance.  If the U.S. produces less science than other countries when its population and economic output are taken into account, the problem isn't that we are falling behind and will eventually become an economic basket case.  It's that our country is failing to live up to its full potential to benefit humanity.  A better way of putting it is that some other country is doing something right, and that if we look at what they are doing we can learn from it in order to see how we can be more helpful.

However, in one sense this does produce a challenge.  What will it mean when more scientific papers are written in Mandarin that English.  I should be careful not to overstate the problem.  Many European countries have a fairly decent output.  However in terms of the number of citations, their work is a little less productive. I suspect that this is due to the language barrier.  Native speakers of English have a natural advantage that speakers of other European language lack.  English is more widely spoken than any other European language.  In fact it is more widely spoken than any other language with the exception of Mandarin.

It is not that people who speak English are somehow more intelligent.  A scientific paper that is written in English is directly accessible to a broader proportion of the scientific community than one written in any other language.  For this to be so does not depend on any inherent superiority of the English language.  A group of scientists who all speak the same language will develop a technical jargon in that language in order to better express the relevant ideas within the given discipline.

The point here is that we need to be aware that when it comes to science we are rapidly approaching an era when the lingua franca will be Mandarin Chinese.  Speakers of that language are likely to have an advantage in producing science over speakers of any other language.  This will not take anything away from speakers of English.  In fact, it will not even prevent them from putting out just as much science as when more papers were written in English.  The increase in China's scientific output will contribute to an increase in the amount of scientific progress of humanity as a whole.