Artem Oganov, a noted Russian chemist, who recently received China’s highest award to foreign scientists for his work in crystallography, said, in an interview with South China Morning Post, that China is now leading the world in science. In 2008 he predicted that China was on its way to becoming No. 1. “I knew that [China] will rise to the top position, but I did not expect that it will be so fast and so strong,” he said. “We live now in very dramatic times when politicians, especially Western politicians, burn bridges. [The] future belongs to those who build the bridges, not those who burn them. And the most natural bridge between different cultures and nations is science,” he added.
During his years at University College in London, Oganov realized that Russian and Chinese scholars were looked down upon and that most of his friends there were Chinese or Russian. In 2008 he had an opportunity to travel to Hong Kong to see what was happening there. He said he learned that China had, through “extremely clever strategic planning of its government, regained, little by little, its former glory.” It did this not by “humiliating and destroying others like ‘Make America Great Again,’ but by building itself up” and by opening up to the rest of the world.
