by When I first see the topic of this week, I immediately think of “Mr. De and Mr. Sai”, which was a very popular slogan during the New Culture Movement in China. This slogan refers to democracy and science respectively based on their pronunciation, and were considered as two important factors that people emphasized on during that period of China. Regarding this topic, I think it’s meaningful to examine Chinese history, to see how science and democracy are co-related and take an important role in constructing society.
When looking back on the history of different countries and development of different societies, it can be seen that both science and democracy are important and necessary factors, especially in modern ages. A country (or society) won’t have a good development if one or both two of them are absent. We can take Germany and Soviet as example. Both two countries had a really advanced technological development during war times. Especially for Soviet. After the Russian Revolution of October, Soviet start to establish research institutions. Until 1929, there are more than 400 research institutions in Soviet. People said that one out of four scientists were came from Soviet at that time. Also, the Space Program of Soviet help it delivered the first human satellite, as well as sent Gagarin to be the first human beings who entered the space. However, though significant progress has been made in the scientific field, the highly bureaucratic Soviet economy is often unable to properly transform the innovations made by scientists. This is one of the main reasons why the Soviet economy began to stagnate in the 1960s. The same situation happened in Germany. From these two cases, we can conclude that merely focusing on science can’t help a country to develop well, unless democracy is also taken into account.
However, only democracy itself also failed to establish a well-developed society. China in Qing Dynasty can be considered as a good example of this. Throughout Chinese history, people had made many great inventions and explorations about science, such as the four great inventions. However, feudalism thinks use orthodoxy to ensure the stability of the society is more important than developing science. Thus, they refused the import of science and cultural from other countries. Because of this, science and technology in China were fell behind other countries, and finally was defeated by the powerful ships of Western scientific and technological civilization. It can be seen that the absence of democracy will stifle the development of science.
In the early period of modern Chinese history, President Mao highly agree with the importance of both democracy and science. However, in the later period, his view toward democracy has changed. He said that “Sometimes, democracy seems to be the purpose, but in fact, it is just a mean to reach that purpose.” His policy after that become more and more radical, but without democracy, no one dare to speak out the truth. The periodical consequence was the Great Leap Forward, which caused the negative growth of population in China. Under such condition, China does had progression on science. For example, China had made its first atomic bomb. However, I don’t think it’s a proper development, as the Great Leap Forward, as well as the Cultural Revolution, not only lead to science that couldn’t be used at that time, but also violate people’s rights, and also put economy of China on the edge of collapse.
Science should be used, together with democracy, to ensure the positive development of the society, instead of cultivating autocratic. There’s a movie named The Lives of Others, which tells a story of how science and technologies were used to take control of others’ life. To express freely and the exchange of ideas is a basic human right. Science should serve to help the development of civilization, but the involvement of scientific and technological projects in citizens under public power will only increase instability and affect social harmony. When thinking about the relation between science and democracy, I think democracy should be taken as an insurance of the proper use of science to promote social development. Nowadays, the development and attitude of science is no longer an issue for most countries, as we are sharing the scientific knowledge in a great scope. However, how to ensure democracy, so the societal development won’t go in to the wrong track is indeed, the hardest challenge facing by us.