I have been thinking about why since the end of the Ming Dynasty and the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, China's science and technology have gradually fallen behind. Some scholars have shown that Kangxi was once very interested in Western science and technology, and invited Western missionaries to give him lectures on Western studies, including astronomy, mathematics, geography, zoology, anatomy, music, and even philosophy, and there are more than 100 books explaining astronomy. When? How long did you study? In the early days, between 1670 and 1682, he studied Western studies for two years and five months without interruption. The problem is that although some people were interested in Western studies at that time and learned a lot, they did not let this knowledge play any role in China's economic and social development. In 1708, the Qing Dynasty government organized missionaries to draw a map of China, and then spent 10 years to draw the "Imperial Opinion Panorama" with unprecedented scientific level, which was at the forefront of the world. However, such an important achievement has long been stored as a secret document in the inner government, which is completely invisible to the society and has not played any role in economic and social development. On the contrary, the Western missionaries who participated in the surveying and mapping brought the materials back to the West for collation and publication, so that the West's understanding of China's geography surpassed that of the Chinese for a considerable period of time. What does this mean? That is, science and technology must be combined with social development, and no matter how much we learn, we will only be a kind of curiosity, just a kind of elegance, or even regarded as a strange skill, then it will not be able to have an effect on the real society.

——"Accelerating the Transformation from Factor-Driven and Investment-Scale-Driven Development to Innovation-Driven Development" (June 9, 2014) from Xi Jinping on Governance, Foreign Languages Press, 2014

Further reading:

Qu Yuan's poem "Heavenly Questions" raised more than 170 questions about heaven and earth, nature and the human world, and was hailed as "a strange work through the ages". For Chinese history, there are also several famous "Tianwen". One of them is "Joseph Needham's question": Why was modern science and technology and industrial civilization not born in China, the world's most technologically and economically developed at that time?

It is undeniable that a very important factor in China's poverty and weakness and bullying in modern times is that it has repeatedly missed the scientific and technological revolution and has failed to apply advanced knowledge to economic and social development. The "prosperous era of Kangqian" has always been admired by people, but as long as we put the "prosperous era of Kangqian" into the long river of history and compare it horizontally, we will understand that the "prosperous era" is only "fat" and "illusion" to a large extent. European society at the same time as the Kangxi Dynasty had entered one of the most successful periods in the history of science, producing great philosophers and scientists such as Bacon, Newton, and Descartes. Kangxi was not a bad learner, he often stayed in his room with the missionaries for three or four hours a day, getting along with each other like a teacher and student, familiarizing himself with all kinds of precision instruments, and studying the knowledge of various disciplines together. Kangxi was fond of mathematics, especially fiddling with various mathematical measurement tools, such as semicircles, compasses, and geometric polyhedral models. According to the French missionary Bai Jin, Kangxi devoted his spare time to studying mathematics for two years. However, the Kangxi Emperor, who was praised by foreign missionaries as "the first emperor of the ages" and "the emperor of the ages", let science stay on his own hobby, did not think about the methodology and world view behind science, and failed to spread Western scientific knowledge to the whole country. The rulers refused to "shake hands" with Western industrial civilization and "share" advanced technology and knowledge, and as a result, there was a history of semi-colonial and semi-feudal society that could not be looked back on.

In March 2014, during Xi Jinping's visit to Europe, German Chancellor Angela Merkel presented him with the first accurate map of China drawn by Germany in 1735. What few people know is that more than ten years before this map, Kangxi organized missionaries to draw a "Panorama of the Imperial Opinion" with an unprecedented scientific level. The Jesuit Lei Xiaosi, who participated in the preparation of the map, sent it back to France, and the "New Map of China" based on this map was published in Europe. In 1840, when the British bombarded the gate of the Qing Empire with the "New Map of China" with strong ships and cannons, the "Imperial Panorama" was still locked in the palace and did not play a practical role in promoting economic and social development.

Xi Jinping is not only familiar with history books and knows Chinese history by heart, but also is good at thinking, and can summarize the code of the rise and fall of the country from history - science and technology cannot sit back and talk about it, but must be used in society. This is the essence of innovation he summed up from the story of Kangxi and technology, and it is also the exact answer to cracking the "Achilles heel". "Science and technology must be combined with social development", so that innovation can get out of the "ivory tower" and jump out of the "island", so that scientific and technological innovation can create more impetus and miracles for development like "leveraging the earth".

In this speech at the 17th Academician Conference of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the 12th Academician Conference of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, Xi Jinping pointed out that China has always had a chronic disease of ineffective, unsmooth and unsmooth transformation of scientific and technological achievements into real productive forces, and one of the important cruxes is that there are many institutional and institutional barriers in the chain of scientific and technological innovation, and the connection between innovation and transformation is not close enough. He made an analogy: If scientific and technological innovation is compared to the new engine of China's development, then reform is the indispensable ignition system to ignite this new engine. We need to take more effective measures to improve the ignition system and start the new engine driven by innovation at full speed.