Many of these ambitious youth have flocked to the cities from the countryside in search of a better life. But according to the most recent census, 39% of its population still hold rural hukous, or legal housing registrations. This means that when inhabitants leave their homes to work in the cities, the land cannot be sold. It remains bound to them forever.

Not everyone thinks this is wise. Reformers argue that farmers should be allowed to sell their plots before moving on. Large agricultural companies could then swoop in to buy the land and build vast Iowa-style factory farms all over the Chinese countryside. This, they say, would enhance China’s agricultural productivity and yield, which is currently comparatively low: the snaggle-toothed, sun-beaten peasants are deeply inefficient compared with the robot harvesters, fruit pickers and milkmaids at work in the West.

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The reformers warn, too, that China is becoming too reliant on America. And while still self-sufficient in grain crops, it is struggling to satisfy a growing appetite for meat which it currently imports in large quantities from America and Brazil. So in order to wean itself off American cattle, something which may become even more urgent with the advent of Trump 2.0, China will have to disinherit its peasantry and embrace the factory farm.

While tempted by the vision of agricultural self-sufficiency, President Xi Jinping is loath to do this. On a practical level, China’s political elites see the bountiful countryside as a social safety net during times of economic hardship. China doesn’t have a government-managed welfare system; faint gestures, such as the 医保 healthcare system, are still in their infancy. So the fact that the poor know how to grow their own food and have the land to do so is hugely important. It also provides a useful safety net in case of emergencies. During the Covid lockdowns, many of the migrant workers who keep Chinese cities running returned to their rural hometowns, planted cabbage and lived off their land. Had that land been sold, they might have starved instead.

China’s top brass also fear that if rural villagers were able to sell their land, they would be targeted by predatory corporate interests in league with corrupt local governments. This is exactly what happened in Russia during the Nineties, when citizens of the former USSR were given vouchers representing their share of the collective economy as it was privatised. Many of them immediately sold these vouchers to cowboys for cash, and drank it the same afternoon. Out of such misery, the oligarchic fortunes of Roman Abramovich and his cronies bloomed.

In any case, the CCP is terrified at the thought of swarms of disinherited peasants destabilising the urban outskirts. The hukou system currently keeps the 300 million peasants working in the cities in their place. These migratory workers are treated as second-class citizens and only residents are given priority access to local schools and hospitals. Eliminate this pecking order and Chinese public services will be overwhelmed.

But there’s another reason that Xi is hesitant to abandon the peasantry. Like the majority of Chinese leaders, he was sent to the countryside as a teenager during Mao’s Cultural Revolution — and still harbours deep admiration for the soul of the Chinese peasantry. At the age of 15, Xi was sent down to a village in northern Shaanxi, a poor and barren region, where locals live in caves. At first, by all accounts, he found it difficult to adapt to this troglodytic way of life. But it soon toughened him up. According to official propaganda, which is no doubt embellished, he built methane tanks, and dams to protect villagers from flooding. To this day, Xi credits his time in Shaanxi for teaching him what life was really about; happiness comes from struggle, he says, as he urges today’s young Chinese to do the same.

These feelings are echoed by the wider CCP leadership. For China’s elites, abandoning the countryside to robots and drones would be a sociocultural tragedy. Some respected theorists, including Wen Tiejun, believe that if the CCP betrays the peasantry, it is making itself vulnerable, as city dwellers aren’t nearly as loyal as the villagers. For Wen, the villagers preserve the true spirit of China, while the essence of the West has seeped into the corrupt cities. He has a point: the process of urbanisation is inevitably a process of social atomisation. In a city, it is every man for himself. Yet the CCP desires the opposite: for every man to be united in a shared effort, and it is villages, not cities, which produce men like that.

In 2006, former president Hu Jintao said that: “The countryside is the cradle of the Chinese nation, agriculture is the foundation of the national economy, and farmers are our bread and butter. If we lose these three, we will also lose the foundation of our nation.” Like Xi, Hu Jintao comes from a generation of elderly Chinese policymakers who once tasted rural life. They still prefer the austerity foods of their youth and many retire to the countryside in later life. These men often have an instinctual, conservative contempt for cities, and hold a near religious reverence for the ancient traditions of the villages.

So after decades of facing outwards, China’s elites are now turning inwards. Xi’s recent drive to protect Chinese ecology is a case in point: in the Qinling mountains of Shaanxi, he has ordered the demolition of villas and hotels three separate times. It has become one of his signature policies, deeply intertwined with nationalist ideas and anti-corruption campaigns. For Xi realises that while urbanites have no connection to the land, its past, or to each other, the peasantry keeps the idea of China alive. For as long as there are people tilling the fields and speaking in dialects, China will never forget who she truly is.

For Xi China’s building binge had a single purpose: to urbanise the nation. And now China has enough. Since 2004, 12.7 billion metres of housing have been built in China. In 1999, 65% of China’s population was rural; by the 2020 census, that proportion had dropped to 39%. Hundreds of millions of people moved into new houses, sometimes in entirely new cities.

In pursuit of this state-mandated goal, vast private building companies emerged and made their fortunes, including Evergrande and Country Garden. China’s GDP soared, not only due to the building boom, but also because new urbanites started to spend money. Rural subsistence farmers generate virtually no GDP: they plant crops, consume them and occasionally buy fertiliser. By contrast, urbanites buy washing machines and TV sets, they take trains, work at companies and eat dinner in restaurants. As of 2023, Shanghai’s per capita GDP is 190,000 RMB (around 26,000 USD); the average for rural China, according to government statistics, is around 20,000 RMB (around 2,750 USD). By embracing modernity and turning peasants into urbanites, China created infinite reserves of GDP.

Now this process is almost complete.

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China’s colossal property developers will suffer as a result. But in the eyes of China’s government, they are disposable. They’ve served their purpose. Before last month’s Third Plenum, some speculated that China would revive its housing market by inverting the three red lines and somehow giving investors cash from the magic money tree. No such luck. Although Chinese leaders do want to continue the process of urbanisation by, for example, reforming the Hukou system, they have no interest in pleasing property tycoons and investors. In an effort to prevent out-of-control urban growth along the lines of Tokyo or Seoul, the Chinese government retained the Hukou system — in which Chinese people are entitled to education or medical care only in their hometown — during the boom years. As urbanisation has slowed, the system is gradually being abolished, with the intention of encouraging a few more rural dwellers to move to the cities.

China officially plans to reach 75% urbanisation, so there are still more than 100 million people left to go. But Xi is keen to retain that rural population: they preserve the nation’s food security and traditions, and tend to China’s wild spaces. At the same time, the overriding goal of the CCP is to create the conditions for the optimum number of healthy, highly-educated, middle-class Chinese. When India’s population exceeded that of China last year, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that the quality of the individuals, not just their quantity, was relevant. This comment alluded to the sense that in the globalised economy, one highly-educated STEM engineer is worth 10, if not 100, peasants; while China’s total population isn’t growing, the population of middle-class urbanites is, and that is the population relevant to latest goal: turning China into a sci-tech superpower. And now, these new urbanites must start inventing semiconductors.

Some of the property developments that were unfinished or unsold when Xi blew the whistle will become affordable housing in line with the Singapore model. Housing values have stopped rising, leaving urban middle-class families whose assets are tied up in houses — which make up 59% of household wealth, compared to around 25% in the US — feeling hard done by. But despite the hit to China’s economy, Xi Jinping continues to insist that houses are for living in, not for speculation. If China’s middle class don’t like it, they can book a flight to Ecuador.

It’s worth pointing out that these urbanites are still rich relative to their countrymen: imagine if the government magically made London house prices stop rising. They’d be pretty unpopular in London, but for the excluded and resentful, this policy would be a winner — especially if it meant their children could go to work in London.

This could also affect the so-called “lying flat” generation. Right now, given that 96% of Chinese urban residents own their homes, the young can afford to be picky about working. Many of them choose not to. After all, they don’t need to pay the rent. Right now, renting your home is marginal in China; but in the years to come, it is bound to become much more widespread. When homes were an asset class, you didn’t need to rent them out; their value doubled rapidly, and being a landlord is a lot of work. But if house prices aren’t guaranteed to increase, the assets need to work to generate returns. And so will the youngsters.

When the CCP first decided to wind down the property boom with regulation, fears spread that China would face its own Lehman Brothers Moment. But for now, it has not materialised. The 2008 financial crisis engendered a long-term loss of faith in the economic system among Chinese policymakers and ordinary Americans. Just as the populist politics of Donald Trump are arguably a consequence of the Global Financial Crash, so are those of Xi Jinping. In cities such as Shanghai and Guangzhou, middle-class families who expected the value of their homes to continue rising forever are unhappy. And we are yet to discover whether this managed deflation, so different from the explosive shock of 2008, will erode the government’s credibility in the medium term.

Meanwhile, urbanisation has changed China forever. For the longue durée of Chinese history, Chinese society was overwhelmingly rural and agricultural; it is only extremely recently that peasants have become a minority. The new Chinese city, generic in form, which satisfies most human needs in a functional, basic way, has introduced a massive number of humans as consumers, potential scientists or investors, and historical actors. As to the results? As former CCP leader Deng Xiaoping said of the French Revolution, it is too soon to tell.

Already, China is unnerving American and European policymakers with its relentless supply of Electric Vehicles. But the EV boom is a symptom of a broader trend, and Beijing is busy masterminding similar revolutions in the fields of electric planes and medicine.

So is China the future of science? The numbers alone are intimidating. There are currently nearly 50 million diligent Chinese students at college today. In 2025, 77,000 STEM PhDs will graduate from China’s universities. Most of these graduates will spend their lives pursuing state-funded research within Chinese institutions. They will be given everything that they need to make scientific breakthroughs.

Yet their success isn’t inevitable. The technological advances that drove Chinese prosperity and civilisation came to an end in 1500AD, giving rise to Cambridge polymath Joseph Needham’s question: “Why did modern science… with all its implications for advanced technology… not develop in Chinese civilisation” which, in previous centuries, “was much more efficient” when it came to applying natural knowledge to practical needs?

In China, debating this question is a parlour game. Many plausibly suggest that the printing-press resistant nature of Chinese characters hindered the spread of mass literacy. Others argue that the nature of China’s educational system, so good at teaching what is known, doesn’t leave enough room for the unknown. And some feel that China’s greatest scientific minds gave up trying because there seemed to be nowhere else to go.

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Today, with China’s re-emergence as a scientific superpower, Needham’s question has been revived. Yet even as China builds massive new industries on the back of technological breakthroughs — in batteries, for instance, or telecoms technology — some in the West continue to claim that China cannot innovate due to the nature of its social structure. This seems at odds with the empirical realities of scientific research, as well as China’s lived reality — in many ways, from transport to finance, Chinese society is far more infused with technology than most G7 countries. Most urban Chinese live in cities whose size and technological sophistication rivals or exceeds that of London or New York.

Already, it seems that China’s state-led approach is working. It has, for instance, been highly successful in nurturing China’s Electric Vehicle industry. Why else would the European Union threaten China with EV tariffs of up to 38%? But Beijing’s strategy doesn’t always work: it is far less effective in fields such as AI and life sciences than in physics and engineering.

What explains this apparent inconsistency? Let us recall the Chinese bureaucrat and his English aristocratic counterpart. The founders of Nature, the world’s leading scientific journal, and those other eminent Victorians who did so much to drive the Industrial Revolution, existed in a humanistic and omnivorous intellectual world that was far less specialised than science is today. Western science was driven by brilliant amateurs long into the 20th century: in hindsight, Watson and Crick’s groundbreaking 1953 double helix paper looks more like the notes you take after a brilliant conversation during a drunken lunch, with the illustrations taken from the napkin you stuffed in your pocket. It certainly couldn’t be published today, and back then, it wasn’t even peer reviewed. Those were the days when science was the preserve of absent-minded gentlemen slowly untangling the threads of the world.

The mental world of the English language scientist, from John Milton’s Lucifer to Charles Darwin, and on through to the Silicon Valley tech bros of the present day, is a world driven by insatiable curiosity, rather than state policy. This is why Lucifer is the sly hero of Paradise Lost; the quest for knowledge has always been prized above all else. It was natural for English political thinkers to see society as being a war of all against all, rather than a team effort led by one authority. The English mind “looks down on all that are haughty; it is king over all that are proud”.

These Englishmen were free thinkers precisely because they were landowners, with the time and resources to wander the world asking questions. These free-associative questions are at the heart of scientific breakthroughs, the zero to one of pure intuition. Today, these sorts of breakthroughs — the ones that ask basic questions about why the world is organised in the way that it is — are the preserve of American and, to a lesser extent, English scientific researchers, often those working at startups such as OpenAI rather than within academic institutions. In 2024, Stanford University dropped out of the Nature Index’s top 10 institutions by research output (of which seven are Chinese). That’s not because the researchers of Silicon Valley are losing their touch, but because they would rather win the war of all-against-all that is capitalist competition. They don’t bother to submit their work to Nature anymore — they’d rather go straight to venture capital offices on Sand Hill Road.

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But money is not their sole motivation. Elon Musk is surely not indifferent to his fortune, but profit alone cannot explain his Promethean ambition, which resists the authority of America’s feeble government. In this light, it’s not surprising that many in Silicon Valley support Donald Trump. If all you dream about is pushing the boundaries of AI, Trump might appear attractive candidate, as he is less likely than Joe Biden to implement a wave of regulations. Either way, California’s tech bros aren’t cowed by the power of the state. Unlike in China, where the government is the sovereign, America’s true government is capitalism. If the Peter Thiels, Elon Musks and Balaji Srinivasans of the world see the White House as irrelevant and ineffective, who can blame them?

This libertarian, largely unregulated tangle of individuals is up against the state-run colossus that is Chinese science. The micromanaged industry is the offspring of thousands of years of the Chinese keju system, which chose elites based on meritocratic contests: who could memorise the rules most accurately? Unsurprisingly, these elites enforced, and revelled in, the contours of law. The Plan was everything; exile from the state was exile from life itself. (Most famous Chinese poets, from Qu Yuan to Li Bai to Su Dongpo, were fired from jobs as government ministers and took up poetry as a hobby; these men are the only true Chinese analogues to the English gentleman.)

Today, the Chinese system is enormous and fiercely competitive. But those who compare Chinese science to Soviet science are mistaken: their strengths are quite the opposite. The Soviet Union harboured creative figures, such as Vladimir Vernadsky and Nikolai Fedorov, who arguably came up with breakthrough concepts that erred on the side of wackiness, even as they found no structure or system to articulate and realise their work. The Soviets arguably invented the Internet, for instance, but never really scaled it; America’s big consumer market provided the opportunity for that. By contrast, the Chinese didn’t invent EV cars, solar panels or digital payment systems; they merely applied them at the massive scale of China.

For now, China’s skills lie in accelerating the improvement and driving down the prices of technologies others invented, to the point that they spark a global revolution. A comparison can be drawn with interwar German physics, which came to its high point in suburban California, Princeton and the deserts of New Mexico. The Chinese tend not to go from zero to one, rather, they go from one to 100.

It would be wrong, then, to suggest that Chinese research institutions in their current form will displace Silicon Valley anytime soon. Silicon Valley, Britain’s DeepMind and the biotech clusters near Boston and New York City aren’t really competing with the Chinese Academy of Science. Instead, these visionary individuals are imbibing large quantities of venture capital to create fantastic technologies with no clear commercial application (except for that lucky fraction that make it big time). The Chinese scientists are just completing their homework, using Western creations to solve the problems facing China’s population — whether that’s in the realm of healthcare, cheap energy and food, or preventative adaptation to climate change. In formal terms, one is basic science, the other, applied science.

Eventually, as termites attack a home, the Chinese ability to make inexpensive and high-quality analogues to the products of American stock market champions will undermine the capitalist system’s ability to generate and circulate capital. China will develop products for its own use, and export those products, eliminating the aristocratic monopoly of the West on biotech, high-end manufacturing, computing and all the rest. As the West reacts by seeking to restrain Chinese scientific advances, we will find ourselves rephrasing the Needham question:

Why did China advance so quickly in science in the 21st century?

Because we told them that they could not, and that they should remain inferior.

The lumbering behemoth of China’s state is mobilising, and even though the eccentric visionaries — the latter-day Vernadskys and Fedorovs — will emerge in the United States, China’s vast consumer market will see technology used and applied at a scale that has never been seen before. That is, until Beijing exports it all across the global south. The Electric Vehicle revolution is only the start.