China gone modern: amid explosive growth and modernization, China and CFI congress speakers ponder sustainability and the popularization, enjoyment, understanding, and widest possible applications of science

In the nearly twenty years since our last visit to China (see "CSICOP in China," SI Summer 1988), the country has undergone a stunning economic and physical transformation. The major cities are almost unrecognizable. The capital city of Beijing is a sprawling mass of modern, new high-rises. Construction cranes steadily raise ever more. In marked contrast to the dreary public lighting of the late 1980s, giant neon advertisements and flashy decorative lights on buildings and bridges brightly illuminate the nighttime streets. On the northern outskirts of the city, a vast area hums under twenty-four-hour construction to accommodate the 2008 Beijing Olympics. (Given the new Chinas obvious ability to carry out huge projects, I think Olympic visitors are likely to be impressed.) Cars are everywhere (and not small ones either), fast replacing the ubiquitous bicycles of two decades ago. Five multilane "ring road" freeways circle the enormous metropolitan area.

To the south in Shanghai, Chinas economic capital with a population of around 17 million, the changes are breathtaking. An entirely new city, the Pudong area of Shanghai, has been constructed just east of the Huangpu River, marked by dozens of striking, imaginatively designed skyscrapers. One, nearing completion, is destined to be the third tallest in the world. All have been built since 1990. In this incredible period, three thousand new buildings of more than twenty stories have been erected. The three-sphered, three-legged Pearl Tower (468 meters, or 1,536 feet, high), beautifully illuminated at night, rivals the Eiffel Tower in iconic stature, and nearby skyscrapers likewise compete for the sky. An evening river cruise reveals the dramatic nighttime skyline. Some of the buildings sport twenty-story-high, swiftly changing, electric-lighted imagery.

And the planning and building goes on. Shanghai billboards tout the 2009 World Expo to be held there. The beautiful Shanghai Science and Technology Museum we visited is only five years old. The Shanghai Urban Planning and Exhibition Center boasts two huge, intricately detailed, three-dimensional scale models of the city. One is the core city as it is now. The other, the biggest in the world, extending over 600 square meters and covering most of an entire floor, envisions the city as it will be in 2020. The ports, the airport, the river facilities, and the subway system all are being expanded.

We took an evening ride to the international airport on Shanghai's new Maglev (magnetic levitation) train, covering 30 kilometers in an effortless eight minutes. In contrast, our harrowing, lane-shifting, racecar-like morning taxi ride through heavy traffic back to the airport took an hour and threatened to cost us our lives.

In Beijing, the very nice China Science and Technology Museum, which we also visited, is only thirteen years old and is already being replaced by a huge, new one, which is under construction at the site of the 2008 Olympics. CFI members enjoyed a special tour. The museum's deputy director proudly told us that as the biggest science museum in the world, it will encompass a total construction area of 180,000 square meters.

The energy and dynamism are palpable. Street markets remain, but on major thoroughfares every upscale store you see in New York, Paris, or London is stylishly present. The economic dynamo that is modern China has attracted and created great wealth. While we were there, news reports highlighted the fact that eight of the top twenty companies in the world (measured by their valuations on world stock markets are now Chinese. One hundred of the world's major companies have offices in Shanghai.

The stunning growth has been accompanied by typical consequences: urban sprawl, traffic jams, rapidly rising demand for electrical power, multitudinous new (but hardly clean) coal-fired power plants across the countryside (we saw half a dozen of them in a flight from Beijing to Xi'an), eye-watering air pollution, rapidly worsening income disparity, water capacity and water-quality concerns, water shortages in northern China, and rising urban vs. rural imbalances and tensions.

One could almost forget that the economic progress has not been accompanied by as much political progress--until viewing the formal, reverential, noncritical coverage on China Central TV and across the front pages of the Chinese newspapers of the seventeenth national Congress of the Communist Party in Beijing, which met while we were there. The TV and newspapers treated it all as an epic event, the cameras panning slowly over the aged, stone-faced party leaders, seemingly belying the modern transformation that has occurred all around them. (On the final day of the meeting, the congress did replace the vice president and two vice premiers with younger men.)

Nevertheless, Chinas leaders do tout scientific and technical progress among their highest priorities, something seldom if ever heard anymore from American political leaders. China has tripled its research and development spending since 2000, an increase the U.S. National Science Foundation has called "unprecedented for any country in recent memory." Science and technology have a respect and status among the Chinese people that is enviable in the U.S. They realize that their transformation has been propelled by--in addition to the unleashing of market economic forces--scientific and technological progress. But, as in Western societies, the results of science are understood and appreciated far more than the underlying methods and principles of science (including critical thinking and free, open inquiry) that account for its great success.