Will China Again Lead the World?

600 years ago China was well ahead of Europe in science and
technology.  The Chinese were using  gunpowder, paper,  movable type
printing and the magnetic compass.  They had perfected the crossbow
long before the Europeans.  

Between 1405 and 1433 AD China sent seven fleets of ships across the 
Indian Ocean as far as Africa. The fleets contained hundreds of ships,  
and  with a combined crew of up to 28,000 sailors.  All three of the 
ships of Columbus plus that of Vasco da Gamma could have been stored 
on the deck of one of the  Ming Dynasty treasure ships, which at over
400 ft long and with 9 masts, were the largest wooden ships ever built.
The book "1421, the Year China Discovered America" by Gavin Menzies
claims that the Chinese sailed all over and around the earth during
those years of the Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne.


Then after a power struggle, a new emperor ordered a halt to the 
expeditions and eventually had the shipyards dismantled and forbade 
oceangoing shipping.

For some reason they also decided not to continue  the development of 
their and other technologies.  It was only when the knowledge spread 
to Europe by way of travelers like Marco Polo that technology continued
to advance, and Europe took the lead in technology and with it, world 
domination. 

Today we may be seeing , depending on how you look at it, either a repeat 
of that process or a reversal of it.  Today the technologies involved are 
not printing and gunpowder, but nuclear power and genetic engineering.   
While the West (Europe and the USA/Canada) currently has the lead in 
these fields, we are  forfeiting  it to Japan (nuclear) and China (both, 
but especially genetic engineering).

The Wall Street Journal March 29, 2000 had a story on the drive by China 
to become the world leader in genetics and the applications of genetic
engineering.   China has a large and growing population with increasing
wealth but a shrinking amount of arable land.  Heavy use of pesticides in
the past has created insect pests that are resistant to them. The Chinese 
leadership sees genetically modified crops as the best hope of dealing 
with these problems.

China has been directing billions of dollars of research money into
modifying the genes of  crops, animals and even humans.  A state-of-the-art
genetic research laboratory is planned  for  Inner Mongolia.  Such is
Beijing’s excitement that even its traditional suspicion of foreigners has
been set aside, and seeds for GM crops are being bought from Monsanto. 

And the effort is paying off.  In the past year, the government of China
has approved the use of  a dozen new strains of rice, potatoes, tomatoes,
corn and trees, all developed domestically.    There is also a program to
clone the  Giant Panda to help save it from extinction. 

Cotton on the North Plains of China had been decimated by insecticide
resistant bollworms  a decade ago, but is now thriving due to new  insect
resistant varieties of cotton plants that increase yields up to five fold .

Genetic modification offers the possibility of  crops  with greater
nutrition, higher yields and that require less fertilizer and insecticide
to grow.  If this technology is going to be blocked in  Europe and even the
USA by  various opponents, at least it will continue in China.  And while a
thousand years ago, ideas and goods were slow to spread across the world,
today  the knowledge is likely to remain available to all.

And if in a few years I can’t buy the new GM seeds for my garden locally,
maybe I will be able to order them from China over the internet.



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jim blair (jeblair@facstaff.wisc.edu) For a good time call
     http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/4834

PS: I predict that the next man to walk on the moon will be Chinese.