4 ms·

China only have 8 Nobel winners compared to the 425 from the US is crazy.

em500 1y ago
Maybe not that crazy given that most of their academic work was only published in Chinese until about 2 to 3 decades ago.
- ch4s3 1y ago
  I’m sure murdering tons of academics in the cultural revolution had nothing to do with it.
khuey 1y ago
If you're familiar with the history of China since the Nobel prize started in 1901 it's not surprising. Five of those eight did their work outside China too.
logicchains 1y ago
It's also quite interesting to compare to the Soviet Union, which managed around 30 Nobel laureates in spite of also going through a communist revolution and some genocides like China did.
- yanhang 1y ago
  china is still not its peak yet. the tech boom only starts few years ago.
- dredmorbius 1y ago
  Russia / the USSR had a recent intellectual, scientific, and technological history in ways that China largely did not. One datapoint: Sir John Barrow, Second Secretary to the Admiralty from 1804--1845, was part of a British envoy to China in the 1790s. Attempts to impress the Emperor with British science and technology left far less an impression than was hoped, with the Emperor dismissing the demonstration. A brief account of this being in the biography Barrows Boys by Fergus Fleming (1998). China does have a long history of scientific and technological development, though by the 20th century this was all but forgotten / overlooked by the Chinese themselves, and it fell on an outsider, Joseph Needham (TK-chinese) to reacquaint them with this past, in Science and Civilisation in China, a 30-plus volume work begun in the 1950s and still in production.
  - dredmorbius 1y ago
    TK-chinese: Needham's Chinese name is 李約瑟.
peterfirefly 1y ago
Yang got out before Mao. China managed to birth and educate several world-class mathematicians and scientists in the short span between the beginning of Westernized education and Mao's take over... and then it stopped for several decades. The lucky ones managed to get out. Strange to think that revolutions, unrest, the Sino-Japanese war, and the civil war all provided better conditions for fostering top talent than Mao's China did.
- manquer 1y ago
  India has similar number of laureates and nowhere had the similar kind of social upheaval or authoritarian regime like China or the soviet union had. I think it is bit more nuanced than just Mao, pre 1935 you could do ground breaking research in almost any field with limited to no funding at all. Since the war you need increasingly large amount of budgets which western universities with full government support enjoy, ans it was not possible to compete for India or China or even the Soviet Union to keep up. -- The cultural changes you allude to, certainly were a medium term negative factor, but the pre 1950 setup were hardly sustainable or efficient. In pre Mao China or similarly British India (or even till recently) it was not a meritocracy there was a privileged elite who had all the opportunity and few shined if they were also talented. Today China is one of the most meritocratic economies after all - despite all the authoritarian flaws, we are only seeing positive growth in foundational scientific research and rapidly in contrast with the rising anti-science sentiment we are seeing in so many parts of the western and western influenced world. The socio-cultural reset was important and necessary for both China and India to progress, the methods of the Mao era are questionable both for their cruelty and also for how efficient and effective they were it was just bad all around however the need of the reset came from a valid place I think. --- There is whole dimension of bias which does disadvantage particularly Chinese research output today. Don't get me wrong I am not saying there is conscious bias against Chinese researchers. The bias is because despite the esteem the Nobel prize is not a global one. The committee sit in Scandinavian countries closely working with Norway government. The members are predominately affiliated to western universities and fluent in English or other European languages and read Nature / Science type of western journals. This always put Soviet researches before and now Chinese and Indian(to a lesser degree) at a disadvantage compared to their western peers. The committee are not equipped to judge the research output of the whole world, till recently this was not a problem, because western research post WW-II was the majority of the world output, but that is increasingly not true and in a multi-polar world.
kragen 1y ago
9 if you count people from the Republic of China (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_cou...). But, since the Nobel was established, China has been invaded by Germany, Japan, Russia, Britain (largely India), France, the United States, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Japan again, and had a civil war which hasn't technically ended (plus the end of the Boxer Rebellion), a revolution, and the worst famine in human history. But probably the worst event for its Nobel chances was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution. The civil wars also brought to power brutal dictatorships, including in the so-called Republic of China. The US has been invaded zero times and had zero civil wars during that period, and in the US, the Cultural Revolution and dictatorship are just starting. Consequently many people who might have been Chinese, German, Japanese, Russian, etc., during the period in question were instead born in the US. And note that, on the page I linked above, 6 Nobel laureates from the US were actually born in China: Charles K. Kao, Daniel C. Tsui, Edmond H. Fischer, Yang, Tsung-Dao Lee, and Walter H. Brattain (!).
- cnasc 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - kragen 1y ago
    It seems that you didn't understand the comment you were replying to, indeed having gone to great lengths to misinterpret it.
    - cnasc 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - kragen 1y ago
        No, you wrote that comment. The comment you misinterpreted did not say any of those things.
- 1y ago
wslh 1y ago
~2/3 of US Nobel Laureates have not been born in the US. This tells you that things are a bit complex to analyze. You can also take into account second generation ones.
LYK-love 1y ago
The research competition is basically a funding competition nowadays. In the 20th century, China had far less research funding for universities compared to U.S.. That's due to two facts: 1. China was poor back then. 2. China had barely no high-tech industries which can provide additional financial support to labs and cultivate talents. Therefore, people got high-level education who want to pursue a research career would have less chance to get a job in China (at least mainland) and had to go to U.S., EU or Japan to utilize their knowledge. In fact, until now, U.S. still offers the highest the research funding to its universities. That's why there're so many Chinese students in U.S. schools.

Maybe not that crazy given that most of their academic work was only published in Chinese until about 2 to 3 decades ago.

ch4s3 1y ago
I’m sure murdering tons of academics in the cultural revolution had nothing to do with it.

khuey 1y ago

If you're familiar with the history of China since the Nobel prize started in 1901 it's not surprising. Five of those eight did their work outside China too.

logicchains 1y ago

It's also quite interesting to compare to the Soviet Union, which managed around 30 Nobel laureates in spite of also going through a communist revolution and some genocides like China did.

yanhang 1y ago
china is still not its peak yet. the tech boom only starts few years ago.
dredmorbius 1y ago
Russia / the USSR had a recent intellectual, scientific, and technological history in ways that China largely did not. One datapoint: Sir John Barrow, Second Secretary to the Admiralty from 1804--1845, was part of a British envoy to China in the 1790s. Attempts to impress the Emperor with British science and technology left far less an impression than was hoped, with the Emperor dismissing the demonstration. A brief account of this being in the biography Barrows Boys by Fergus Fleming (1998). China does have a long history of scientific and technological development, though by the 20th century this was all but forgotten / overlooked by the Chinese themselves, and it fell on an outsider, Joseph Needham (TK-chinese) to reacquaint them with this past, in Science and Civilisation in China, a 30-plus volume work begun in the 1950s and still in production.
- dredmorbius 1y ago
  TK-chinese: Needham's Chinese name is 李約瑟.

peterfirefly 1y ago

Yang got out before Mao. China managed to birth and educate several world-class mathematicians and scientists in the short span between the beginning of Westernized education and Mao's take over... and then it stopped for several decades. The lucky ones managed to get out. Strange to think that revolutions, unrest, the Sino-Japanese war, and the civil war all provided better conditions for fostering top talent than Mao's China did.

manquer 1y ago
India has similar number of laureates and nowhere had the similar kind of social upheaval or authoritarian regime like China or the soviet union had. I think it is bit more nuanced than just Mao, pre 1935 you could do ground breaking research in almost any field with limited to no funding at all. Since the war you need increasingly large amount of budgets which western universities with full government support enjoy, ans it was not possible to compete for India or China or even the Soviet Union to keep up. -- The cultural changes you allude to, certainly were a medium term negative factor, but the pre 1950 setup were hardly sustainable or efficient. In pre Mao China or similarly British India (or even till recently) it was not a meritocracy there was a privileged elite who had all the opportunity and few shined if they were also talented. Today China is one of the most meritocratic economies after all - despite all the authoritarian flaws, we are only seeing positive growth in foundational scientific research and rapidly in contrast with the rising anti-science sentiment we are seeing in so many parts of the western and western influenced world. The socio-cultural reset was important and necessary for both China and India to progress, the methods of the Mao era are questionable both for their cruelty and also for how efficient and effective they were it was just bad all around however the need of the reset came from a valid place I think. --- There is whole dimension of bias which does disadvantage particularly Chinese research output today. Don't get me wrong I am not saying there is conscious bias against Chinese researchers. The bias is because despite the esteem the Nobel prize is not a global one. The committee sit in Scandinavian countries closely working with Norway government. The members are predominately affiliated to western universities and fluent in English or other European languages and read Nature / Science type of western journals. This always put Soviet researches before and now Chinese and Indian(to a lesser degree) at a disadvantage compared to their western peers. The committee are not equipped to judge the research output of the whole world, till recently this was not a problem, because western research post WW-II was the majority of the world output, but that is increasingly not true and in a multi-polar world.

kragen 1y ago

9 if you count people from the Republic of China (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_cou...). But, since the Nobel was established, China has been invaded by Germany, Japan, Russia, Britain (largely India), France, the United States, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Japan again, and had a civil war which hasn't technically ended (plus the end of the Boxer Rebellion), a revolution, and the worst famine in human history. But probably the worst event for its Nobel chances was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution. The civil wars also brought to power brutal dictatorships, including in the so-called Republic of China. The US has been invaded zero times and had zero civil wars during that period, and in the US, the Cultural Revolution and dictatorship are just starting. Consequently many people who might have been Chinese, German, Japanese, Russian, etc., during the period in question were instead born in the US. And note that, on the page I linked above, 6 Nobel laureates from the US were actually born in China: Charles K. Kao, Daniel C. Tsui, Edmond H. Fischer, Yang, Tsung-Dao Lee, and Walter H. Brattain (!).

cnasc 1y ago
[flagged]
- kragen 1y ago
  It seems that you didn't understand the comment you were replying to, indeed having gone to great lengths to misinterpret it.
  - cnasc 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - kragen 1y ago
      No, you wrote that comment. The comment you misinterpreted did not say any of those things.
1y ago

wslh 1y ago

~2/3 of US Nobel Laureates have not been born in the US. This tells you that things are a bit complex to analyze. You can also take into account second generation ones.

LYK-love 1y ago

The research competition is basically a funding competition nowadays. In the 20th century, China had far less research funding for universities compared to U.S.. That's due to two facts: 1. China was poor back then. 2. China had barely no high-tech industries which can provide additional financial support to labs and cultivate talents. Therefore, people got high-level education who want to pursue a research career would have less chance to get a job in China (at least mainland) and had to go to U.S., EU or Japan to utilize their knowledge. In fact, until now, U.S. still offers the highest the research funding to its universities. That's why there're so many Chinese students in U.S. schools.