Author: Liu Shengjun Public account: Adam Smith Economics
The development of chips is not enough to throw money, but also to smash physicists and mathematicians. ---- Ren Zhengfei
01: Southern King North Lee
Li Shenzhi was a thinker who was impressed by both Wu Jinglian and Jiang Ping. In the 1980s, there was a saying in the ideological circles that "there was Wang Yuanhua in the south and Li Shenzhi in the north", which shows the high status of him.
The jurist Jiang Ping wrote respectfully:
My academic achievements in the past thirty years may be closely related to the enlightenment of two people: Li Shenzhi and Wu Jinglian. I have only been in contact with Mr. Li Shenzhi for five years, that is, during the Legal Committee of the Seventh National People's Congress (1988-1993), the conversation between us can be said to be "a little bit of understanding with a sharp mind."
Born in 1923 in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, Li Shenzhi is known as a leading figure in the field of ideology at the turn of the century. Since 1949, he has been the head of the editorial team and deputy director of the International Department of Xinhua News Agency, responsible for the "Reference Materials" (the so-called "Great Reference") and the "Reference News". Participated in the Panmunjom negotiations. From 1954 to 1957, he was Zhou Enlai's diplomatic secretary. Li Shenzhi was transferred back to Beijing from a labor camp in 1973, and in 1979 he took off his rightist hat and reinstated his party membership. In 1980, he was transferred to the first director of the American Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (Zi Zhongjun was the second). In 1988, he became the vice president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
In 1979, Li Shenzhi accompanied Deng Xiaoping on a visit to the United States. There is an important conversation on the plane:
• Li Shenzhi asked Deng Xiaoping: "Why do we attach so much importance to our relations with the United States?" ”
• Deng replied: "Looking back at these decades, all the countries that have good relations with the United States have become rich." ”
02: The system is higher than the technology
Now that Sino-US relations have fallen into the "Thucydides Trap," the United States has even more threatened its "core technology" and fought the "stuck neck" war.
At present, how to break through the "core technology" has become a hot topic of discussion among the whole people.
Huawei folding screen phone
China's backwardness in the field of science and technology is not a new issue that can only be found today.
Looking back at the evolution of human civilization, it can be divided into three stages: hunting civilization, farming civilization, and scientific and technological civilization. Agrarian civilization belongs to a "static society", and the progress of the productive forces is extremely slow. At this stage, China's "great unification" system has demonstrated its advantages, and Chinese civilization has long been proud to rank first in the world.
However, when mankind entered the era of "scientific and technological civilization", the "great unification system" and the "closed country" after the Ming Dynasty became the shackles of innovation. Due to the explosive growth of productivity brought about by scientific and technological innovation, China's family foundation, although thick, cannot withstand the powerful impact of Western powers.
China has fallen from its peak so fast that even Western observers are stunned. In 1954, joseph Needham, a famous master of the history of science and technology, put forward the "needham mystery" in the "History of Science and Technology in China":
In the 1st to 15th centuries, Chinese scientific inventions and discoveries were far ahead of their contemporaries in Europe; But after the 16th century, Europe gave birth to modern science, which has been shown to be one of the basic factors in the formation of a modern world order, while Chinese civilization has failed to produce similar modern science, why does Chinese science continue to stay in the empirical stage, and only primitive or medieval theories, and what are the obstacles?
This kind of historical impact of "saving the survival of the dead" prompted the outbreak of the "May Fourth Movement", and "Mr. De" and "Mr. Sai" began to appear in Chinese newspapers and periodicals.
After the founding of the People's Republic of China, "scientific and technological modernization" became the key content of the famous "four modernizations."
In 1988, Deng Xiaoping put forward the thesis that "science and technology are the primary productive forces" in a conversation with Czechoslovak President Husak.
It can be said that since modern times, "science and technology" has always been a major topic explored by the Chinese people.
In fact, in today's world, there is no longer any controversy about the recognition of the value of science and technology. Science and technology have become the pursuit of all countries, and innovation has become the dream of all entrepreneurs.
However, the real effort of "strong technology" is outside of technology. Nobel Laureate D. North North) profoundly states:
The key factor in economic growth lies in institutions, and an effective system that provides individual stimuli is the decisive factor for economic growth. Among the many factors, the role of property rights is the most prominent. In North's view, efficient organizations need to institutionally arrange and establish ownership in order to create a stimulus that turns individual economic efforts into activities in which private rates of return are close to social rates of return.
Although the progress of science and technology plays an important role in economic development, what really plays a key role is the system, including ownership, distribution, institutions, management, laws and policies.
As a thinker who inherits the past and the future, Mr. Li Shenzhi has a very profound insight into the problem of "path dependence", which is still sobering to read to this day.
03: Li Shenzhi's Historical Insights
Read the article by Comrade Feng Shize (former editor-in-chief of the English edition of Social Sciences and the Chinese edition of UNESCO's International Journal of Social Science) about Lord Acton's statement that "power corrupts people", in which he said:
The great May Fourth Movement warmly welcomed Mr. Desai II, which has been in existence for more than seventy years. If you think about it, science I think we have always had, including the traditional period, although not as developed as in the West (if not, where did Needham's great work begin?). ）...... Democracy is absent in China's technological culture...
After reading it, I couldn't help but be surprised as to why the two major defects of traditional Chinese culture discovered by the "May Fourth" sages after decades of exploration by their predecessors were easily overthrown by him "seriously thinking about". Comrade Feng Shize was my friend, so I immediately called him and told him that he was wrong. Not only did he do good, but he asked me to write an article to correct his misjudgments.
Why is there no science in traditional Chinese culture? Of the world's ancient cultures, only Greek culture has had science and democracy since the so-called "Axial Age" when civilization began, and the oldest Sumerian culture, such as Indian culture, Chinese culture, and more ancient Egyptian culture, does not have any. This is common knowledge in world history.
Academy of Athens
Needham praised the technological inventions in Chinese history (remember that article specifically mentioned Chinese invented stirrups, which made people unite with horses and had great significance for civilization), but.
Why is there no science in China? The reason is simple:
First, China has not developed a set of scientific theoretical ropes according to strict logical reasoning, one after another, and it is new and new every day;
Second, China has not developed mathematics as the common language of all sciences.
This is a statement that will be convincing at first reading.
At the time euclid invented the rigorous geometry, China only had the Book of Divination, the I Ching, but now it is pushed to be the "YuanDian" of the ancestors of science. Mathematics has certainly existed in China since ancient times, to give an example, every carpenter, to make a round table, knows how to "trail a Wednesday". The accuracy of Pi calculated by Zu Chongzhi is said to be hundreds of years earlier than that of Europeans. But China has never had geometry. "Arithmetic" in China has always been regarded as "absolute learning", that is, learning that cannot be passed on, often out of a "genius" and then another "genius" a few years later, to get its "secret of not passing on", or to carry it forward, and then become a "no-genius". So repeatedly, there is no inheritance system that can be written in words. And these people, whom we recognize today as "geniuses," have no status at all in the eyes of the sages and scholars of all dynasties, but are only "square skills" or "magic numbers."
Qing Dynasty missionaries John Tang and Nan Huairen
There are four major inventions in Chinese history, which have been known to the world in recent times, especially Chinese. Needham worked even harder for us Chinese discovered many inventions that were ahead of the rest of the world, and Chinese ambition. However, the vast majority of Chinese could not tell the difference Chinese inventions turned out to be mostly technical and rarely scientific.
However, the sages of the late Qing Dynasty, such as Liang Qichao and Yan Fu, understood this, and the sages of the "May Fourth" such as Chen Duxiu and Hu Shi understood this. The reason why the latter wants to loudly support Mr. De (democracy) and Mr. Sai (science) is because there are no such two treasures in China's vast and profound five-thousand-year culture.
They all want to introduce these two different concepts into China, enlighten the people of the Chinese, do not know Chinese and do not appreciate, the word "academic", before thousands of years has been indistinguishable, the next eighty years is still indistinguishable. Not only that, China also invented the term "science and technology", which is popular everywhere, such as "high technology", "high technology" and so on, and so on. Combining "science" and "technology" is actually a mixture of "science" and "technology" without distinction.
The harm of such confusion is extremely great, at least if the real scientific concept cannot be input, the real science will not go up.
Wu Dayu, president of Taiwan's "Academia Sinica," said in an article entitled "The Reasons Why China's Science Lagged Behind the West in Recent Hundreds of Years":
Unfortunately, we coined the term "technology" in modern times. The issues we are currently focusing on are important points. If our motivation for exploration is to seek knowledge and "seek truth", it is often in the boundless field, starting from some ideas, logically, and continuing to carry out, which is the essence of "scientific" exploration. If there is a specific problem, a goal-specific exploration is called "technical research". Each stage of research, the intelligence required, is not fundamentally different, but the goals of exploration and the methods of exploration are different.
Although the results of scientific development may greatly improve our material life, the main driving force of scientific researchers is not aimed at material harvest. The main difference between scientific research and technological research is that the former is not limited by predetermined goals, but endlessly advances for the "quest for knowledge".
Mr. Wu considers the Chinese to invent the term "technology" as "very unfortunate", and his feelings are very deep. I asked my friends, who could be called "Japan Passers", and asked them if they had the word "science and technology" in Japan, which also belonged to the Chinese character culture circle, and the answer was "no", only "science" and "technology".
Mr. Wu Dayu also read Joseph Needham's "History of Chinese Science and Technology", but his feelings after reading it are different from most of us who have read it " patriotism spontaneously", but "slightly uneasy". "Covering these comparisons may give some Chinese people a basis for being proud and complacent, thinking that our nation's science and technology have long surpassed the West, but have only lagged behind the West in the past few hundred years."
Mr. Wu went on to talk about the difference between science and technology. What he did not say is that Chinese scholarship from the beginning of its birth is "the study of seeking goodness", and everything starts from "should be" and comes down to "should be", and "reality" is not much considered; Western scholarship is "truth-seeking learning" Everything starts from "reality" and verifies it in "reality". The driving force of Western scholarship is the so-called "intellectual curiosity" (intellectual curiosity). The highest realm of Chinese scholarship, from Confucius's so-called "Yao Shun's way of cultivating oneself and pacifying oneself" to Song Ru's so-called "the chest is full of heavenly reason, let alone the selfishness of human desires", is completely irrelevant to "seeking knowledge".
As far as Mr. Wu Lao mentioned the three words of "seeking truth", why did he add quotation marks to these three words? It turned out that the word "truth" in traditional Chinese culture was introduced to China from India through Buddhism. After learning from the West and the East, we used it to translate the word truth in English, and its original meaning is no different from "fact" or truth, which can be said to be a value-neutral word, and our generation has regarded it as a word of high value since childhood, and from elementary school onwards, we must pursue the "truth" of saving the country and the people, and be ready to dedicate ourselves to the "truth" at any time. In terms of understanding the "truth," China and the West are really far apart.
The Tang monks learned the scriptures
At the beginning of this century, there were already leaders in the ideological circles who distinguished between what is science and what is technology. Later, their masters of traditional Chinese studies, "Mr. Antiques", such as Wang Guowei and Chen Yinke, have always lamented that "Chinese is too practical and has no theory." Unexpectedly, less than eighty years after the "May Fourth", a lot of science and technology was also imported, and people gradually became accustomed to it and lost the correct observation and profound experience they had at the beginning. Especially in the past two or three decades, both bombs have gone to the sky, high-rise buildings have risen from the ground, computers and big brothers can be seen everywhere, China seems to be a "science and technology power", but few people know that "science and technology power" is definitely not a "scientific power". My impression is that at the beginning of this century, the science and technology that the Chinese people have so hard to distinguish between science and technology have become blurred again by the end of this century.
Looking back on the past, what we are ashamed of is that we have not lived up to their expectations in both democracy and science. However, we do not have to have an inferiority complex because of this. For although Greek culture had its unattainable splendor in ancient times, the inheritors and promoters were originally barbarians who had little cultural roots, that is, the Germans who constituted the main body of today's so-called Westerners.
In this era of globalization, we Chinese there is no insurmountable difficulty in catching up with and surpassing the West, and since we have some scientific accumulation today, all we need is thorough consciousness and the consensus of the whole people. "Shame is almost courageous", and the most feared thing is the "pride and self-satisfaction" that comes from ignorance.
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