[nebula]

I could be completely off the mark here, but is it wrong in my part to assume that China may not necessarily have the right environment for basic research to flourish? The way you mentioned the "China being excited" translates to "Chinese authorities deciding to push basic research". That will no doubt get human and other resources allocated for it, but is it sufficient? China, and USSR may not be a fair comparison, but I feel China is much closer to how the USSR functioned, of course with the added opening up of the economy, and probably economic freedom within the country (The two missing pieces that led to bankruptcy of USSR). Now, let me explain the reason why I brought this comparison here. USSR in its day probably matched the west in defence, and to some extent space tech, but did USSR produce any original major basic research breakthroughs? Basic research is not amenable to top-down push and needs an environment where ideas and expressions of those ideas have freedom. Anyway those are passing thoughts I had when I read your comment.

[T-A]

The USSR had world-class mathematicians and theoretical physicists. A partial list of household names among the latter:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Alexeyevich_Abrikosov

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolay_Bogolyubov

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Cherenkov

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludvig_Faddeev

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Fock

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitaly_Ginzburg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Gribov

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abram_Ioffe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Landau

[nebula]

Thanks a lot for the pointers. Many here have already pointed that I am buying too much into the "free market" propaganda; may be I was indeed brainwashed into buying that, but I am trying to open my eyes and learn. AFAICT, there seems to be strong correlation between wealth/prosperity of a nation and the openness of its economy. Are there any counter examples to this? Coming to back to the original topic, is it fair to say there is no strong correlation between development of science and freedom of thought? Well, it may be true if the state does not repress the ideas being produced under science; I can now see why that might have been the case under USSR, and even in China. Scientific thought being largely apolitical may not have to be repressed by authoritarian regimes. Any holes in this logic? Sorry for being naive!

[T-A]

I agree about the relation between prosperity and openness of the economy. But the relation to science, especially theoretical work requiring little more than pencil and paper, is less clear. Trivial example: lucrative opportunities in finance might have lured away some of the old USSR's math talent, to the detriment of Soviet mathematics.

The best and worst thing about authoritarian / totalitarian / one-party systems may be their focus. Few people making all the important decisions lead to few things being pursued vigorously. If they happen to be good things, great; you get an Academy of Science or a national space program with plenty of resources and social support. If they happen to be bad things, you get national disasters like Lysenkoism [1], "Deutsche Physik" [2] and the shuttering of Chinese schools and universities during the Cultural Revolution [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Education

[vkou]

> AFAICT, there seems to be strong correlation between wealth/prosperity of a nation and the openness of its economy.

Countertexamples: Saudi Arabia, UAE, Haiti, China vs India, China vs Brazil, Authoritarian South Korea vs Democratic South Korea.

Generally, it's not simple - there's a lot of factors at play that influence a country's economic prosperity.

[gnipgnip]

India is not really open; sure it's a "democracy", but it's really a de-facto feudal state, often with very little private property rights, and a bureaucracy that would put the Vogons to shame. It's not clear if contemporary India is better than contemporary China in any social/economic aspect (other than possibly allowing a free-movement of its people).

Indeed considering that India's literacy rate is bettered by regimes like Myanmar and DPRK, one wonders why India is being played up, when in reality the only real comparison at this point is with other lower-middle income nations in Africa. This is not to say there is prosperity in cities which are essentially brought up to serve English-speaking nations, but to replicate this across the country[1] will likely lead to a further fall in education levels (this obsession[2] gets back to my "feudal" point). Unlike manufacturing in China, India can't ever extend the service economy (other than e-retail) to its own market.

While some may romanticize Modi's plebeian origins [3], it must be inferred from his policies that he remains yet a handmaiden of the feudal powers that put him into power. I have been to (native?) universities in India, and level of ignorance/acceptance of the current situation baffles me to no end. It should be noted that, considering the stiflement of economics in India, a job in the state apparatus is seen often as the entire point of life outside the IT realm.

Don't fall for all the propaganda being spewed from India for self-flattery, and from America for its "Asian pivot". The reality is much more nuanced and murkier.

[1] http://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/indi...

[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/11/06/the-problem-...

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/opinion/sunday/how-english...

[maverick_iceman]

India's backwardness is the result of decades of socialist policies. Restrictive license permit raj, inefficient and wasteful public delivery system, inflexible labor laws are some of the reasons that have kept India hobbled up.

[gnipgnip]

Myanmar, DPRK, Vietnam etc. were less "socialistic" than India ?

Words, words, words, how they trap us all.

[gnipgnip]

Not to mention many results in optimization/computer-science came out of Russia.

[geofft]

> did USSR produce any original major basic research breakthroughs?

Yes. If you look through just a college-level algorithms class curriculum, you'll find:

- Leonid Levin, who discovered the concept of NP-completeness in the early 1970s (as did Stephen Cook, independently)

- Georgy Adelson-Velsky and Evgenii Landis, who invented the AVL tree, the first self-balancing binary search tree, in 1962

- Andrey Kolmogorov, who did a bunch of things including Kolmogorov complexity, an important concept in information theory that underlies our understanding of entropy and compression

- Vladimir Levenshtein, another information theorist who gave his name to the concept of Levenshtein distance

[vkou]

All this despite a few decades of suppression of computing science as an un-Marxist "bourgeois pseudoscience".

There were plenty of passionate and talented Soviet researchers - although it also helped to work in a discipline that was promoted, as opposed to repressed by the state.

[neves]

You are believing too much in American propaganda of the association of free markets and creativity.

[johnzim]

One does not beget the other but it certainly makes it easier to propagate.

[neves]

Maybe. What I'm saying is that there is a correlationm but we can't say there's causation, at least not how the American propaganda states. It is plain simple propaganda as the soviet Russia used to do.

[product50]

The level of brainwashedness here is unbelievable! The OP didn't even bother to research or put data behind his claim/theory.

[_23sd]

IMO, the problems with scientific research in China have little or nothing to do with state repression and more to do with an overcommodified educational system: too much competition at every step from primary school exams to tenure track positions, too much pressure to get high impact publications every few months, too much administrative bloat and rankings-centered priorities.

In other words, they have the same problems that American researchers complain about on HN all the time, only worse. It's fine to find the quality of Chinese research intolerable, but there should be more awareness that that's where we're headed.

[lostlogin]

The following wiki page is interesting - the Nobel prize section in particular. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_in_th... And a counter example: The regime in 1930s-1940s Germany was more repressive and they had a lot of major research breakthroughs.