How China can make it to the next age

One theory is that the technology that provided the high-quality optical glass from which lenses were made was simply not present in China. A major force behind the glass industry in Europe was the market for high-status drinking vessels - which in China was catered for by the porcelain industry. There was nothing to be seen through the bottom of a tea bowl.

Analogously, it is very likely the West failed to invent gunpowder because of a lack of bamboo. When bamboo is burned the sap and air trapped in the segments can expand and explode, and from this primitive technology it is a reasonably short step to pack the segments with a substance capable of expanding even more rapidly. Pao chuk - or "bursting bamboo" - was the earliest form of firecracker and appears to have been the progenitor of all pyrotechnics. No bamboo, no gunpowder.

Clearly, then, some inventions are highly contingent. There is a strong element of chance as to where, when and even if they occur. If China's precocity in explosives was in part a geographical accident then it was another accident that its precocity in porcelain precluded developing optical glass.

Yet now, at least in theory, we all share what we might call the same epistemic base. In other words, we all have access to the vast array of existing knowledge from which new knowledge can be built. Past "ages" have always varied from continent to continent and even country to country, but the age of the Internet - the Information Age - has at its heart a technology that enjoys almost universal coverage.

With an estimated three-quarters of the global population now online, the ability to sift through the secrets and treasures of the world is unprecedented. The publication of new material and discoveries is both relentless and geographically all-enveloping. The so-called death of distance is all but complete, taking with it the traditional constraints on cooperation and collaboration.

But the Information Age is not without its drawbacks. The first problem is the sheer scale. Google chairman Eric Schmidt has posited that the same amount of information that was produced between the dawn of time and around a decade ago is now generated every two days.

The second concern is a direct result of the first: how do you find the good stuff amid such an extraordinary superabundance? Certainly not by following the sort of lowest-common-denominator, thumbs-up/thumbs-down, crowd-sourcing heuristics that tend to saddle us with little more than novelty dance crazes and pictures of kittens.

If the worldwide web represents the collective mind of humanity then we would do well to discern its likeness to the mind of the idiot savant. It may be ordered, but it is not necessarily understood. All the information in the world is fundamentally useless if it cannot be curated and processed.

Given the events of the past 35 years or so, it is especially important that China grasps the full implications of this truth. The epoch of isolation is long gone, as are the ill-deserved futility of Zheng He's travels and the asymmetrical exchange of knowledge that characterized the years following the Age of Exploration. As an emerging superpower, China is now desperate to maintain its extraordinary ascent, one that has left China poised to surpass the United States as the world's leading economic power; and it could be forgiven for deciding that utilizing mankind's new-found and all-availing epistemic base offers the best means of achieving its aim.

The author is a researcher in the field of entrepreneurial creativity with Nottingham University Business School and co-deviser of the ingenuity problem-solving process at University of Nottingham Institute for Enterprise and Innovation. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

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