Mike Segar/Reuters

Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York speaks about the COVID-19 relief legislation recently passed by the U.S. Senate during a news conference in New York City, March 8, 2021. Many Democrats hope some core provisions of the bill become a permanent part of the social safety net.

As President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan speeds toward final passage this week, Democrats are hailing the bill as one of the most sweeping pieces of progressive legislation in decades – one that they say will lift millions of Americans, particularly children, out of poverty, and could herald a deeper and more long-term shift in public attitudes toward government assistance. 

The bill allocates $92 billion – or about 5% of the overall price tag – toward public health initiatives, including testing, tracing, and vaccination, as the Monitor detailed last week. Nearly half of the bill’s cost goes toward the third and largest round of stimulus payments to date, as well as expanding many existing government benefits – including the child tax credit, the earned income tax credit, Medicaid coverage, and other subsidized health insurance. For an average family of four making less than $150,000 annually, that could amount to more than $10,000 in tax-free benefits, some of which will be paid out monthly. Lower-income families could receive double that.

“It’s one of the most important and transformational bills to come out of the Congress in the last quarter century,” says Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, who chairs the House Democratic Caucus. He says he looks forward to supporting the bill, which “meets the moment that we’re in right now.” 

Some are characterizing the legislation as the largest expansion of government welfare benefits since Lyndon B. Johnson or even Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Although its key steps would need to be renewed in order to endure, the bill arguably moves the country closer to a form of universal basic income. That’s a concept that gained attention in the 2020 primaries, when Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang promoted it as the most effective way to help struggling Americans, circumventing government inefficiency by allowing individuals to solve their needs in the best way they see fit, which in turn would funnel money back into the economy. 

“It is unequivocally a landmark legislation in the sense of putting the biggest dent in U.S. poverty rates and child poverty in particular, really probably since the Great Society and maybe even since the New Deal era,” says Samuel Hammond, director of poverty and welfare policy at the Niskanen Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C. In particular, he highlights the expanded child tax credit. “It’s really hard to overstate the anti-poverty impact of just that one piece in particular.”

Erin Scott/Reuters

Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney of Wyoming participates in a news conference with House Republican leadership in the U.S. Capitol as the House prepares to debate the Senate's version of President Joe Biden's COVID-19 relief bill in Washington, on March 9, 2021. Republican lawmakers have argued the bill spends much more than the economy requires.

Supporters argue this outpouring of government aid is exactly what’s needed as Americans grapple with the twin challenges of a pandemic and an economic downturn caused by local, state, and federal shutdowns, which saw unemployment rise to nearly 15%. 

“A blessing to many people who have been suffering”

“Some of us have been blessed. And as a result of being blessed, I sometimes think we don’t realize how other people are suffering,” says Rep. Al Greene of Texas, an assistant Democratic whip and member of the Financial Services Committee whose constituents are also still grappling with the fallout of last month’s winter storm. “I’ve been blessed for one reason: to be a blessing to others. And I think that this bill is going to be a blessing to many people who have been suffering.”

Having passed the Senate on a 50-49 party-line vote Saturday, the bill heads back to the House, which is expected to send it on to President Biden for his signature this week. The Senate version stripped out the House’s $15-an-hour minimum wage provision, and also pared back weekly federal unemployment insurance payments from $400 to $300 per week, while phasing out stimulus payments at a $160,000 annual household income rather than $200,000. 

Still, many Republicans are calling the bill excessively large, and accusing Democrats of using the pandemic as political cover for advancing a liberal wish list at a time when the federal deficit just hit an all-time high of $3.1 trillion. 

“I do think there are citizens in the United States who still need help, without question,” says Rep. Byron Donalds, a Florida Republican and House Budget Committee member whose mother ate sardines and made her own clothes to put him through private school. “But we didn’t start there and then it got out of hand. It started out of hand. I think it’s important we understand that. It started way out of hand.”

Critics also question why, when there are now growing signs of recovery, this bill is almost as large as the $2.2 trillion CARES Act passed at the beginning of the pandemic. Approximately $1 trillion in Congress-approved COVID-19 relief has yet to be disbursed. Meanwhile, unemployment has fallen to 6.2% as many states are reopening their economies, students are heading back to school, and new cases have declined rapidly.

Jacquelyn Martin/AP

Vice President Kamala Harris meets via videoconference with leaders of women's advocacy groups and Democratic members of Congress including Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, on Feb. 18, 2021. Congress' relief bill includes changes to the child tax credit long urged by Ms. DeLauro.

“We should be opening up America and celebrating the end of this terrible scourge. Instead we’re battening down with irrational fear,” said GOP Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky prior to the Senate’s passage of the bill, while expressing concern about its impact on the national debt after the U.S. had already borrowed $4 trillion over the past year. “[This] is a power grab in the sense that government will grow larger ... and as government grows huge, it’s hard to get government smaller ever. Every time the government has a huge explosion in growth, we never are able to pare it back.”

Four social-welfare expansions 

The bill’s four largest welfare expansions are all temporary unless renewed. Those include the expansions of the child tax credit, the Affordable Care Act subsidies for health insurance, the child care tax credit, and the earned income tax credit (EITC). Experts say the expanded benefit most likely to be renewed is the child tax credit, which will increase from $2,000 to $3,000, with an additional $600 for those under 6 years old, and made fully refundable. That means that for those whose tax bill is lower than the amount of the benefit, they will receive not just a discount on their taxes but a cash payout. 

House Appropriations Committee Chair Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut said in a statement that the changes to the child tax credit, which were modeled on her previously proposed American Family Act, would cut child poverty nearly in half. 

“This is a historic day, one that I have been working toward since 2003,” she said after the Senate’s passage of the bill on Saturday. “By expanding and improving the child tax credit, this legislation forever changes the way that our nation supports both middle class families and children in poverty.”

Republicans have supported extending greater government support to children, but some say it should be tied to work requirements to discourage parents from relying on government funding in lieu of employment. 

Some analysts say Democrats are overselling the likely impact of the bill. While it opens the door to expanding America’s welfare state, it’s not on a par with the creation of Social Security, Medicare, or the Affordable Care Act, says Marc Goldwein, senior vice president and senior policy director at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

“I don’t think that the comparisons to the New Deal or the Great Society are apt. The main thing this bill does is COVID relief,” says Mr. Goldwein. He, along with others, argues it provides more aid overall than is necessary and is not as well targeted as it could have been.

The risks of too much versus too little

“This is something the country can’t afford. You’ve just got like a trillion dollars too much here,” says Desmond Lachman, resident fellow and economist at the American Enterprise Institute. He sees the bill as politically motivated and worries it could cause the economy to overheat. “If they were just interested in the economics, they would never have done something this big.”

Republicans have come under fire for not sounding alarm bells earlier on, with much of conservative media more focused in recent days on issues like Dr. Seuss and cancel culture. Still, GOP Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma notes that every single Republican voted against the bill. “It’s not like pounding on the table and yelling louder would have made much difference,” he says.

Yet the bill’s price tag and accelerated passage through Congress are indicative of how much the goal posts have moved since the Obama era, when the president faced significant pushback even from centrist Democrats for an $800 billion package during the Great Recession. As the GOP has taken a more populist turn, even Republicans have warmed up to the idea of sending families cash, with President Donald Trump pushing for $2,000 stimulus checks in December just before he left office. And many Democrats see their inability to get more relief to taxpayers and reinvigorate the economy in 2009 as one reason they lost big in the 2010 midterms. 

“They feel like they made a mistake during the Great Recession by doing too little,” says Mr. Goldwein. This time, he adds, “they would rather borrow a trillion too much, it seems like, than 100 billion too little.”

India, home to nearly 1.4 billion people, is in the midst of a massive, countrywide COVID-19 vaccine drive. But no sooner had New Delhi begun to administer vaccines to its own citizens, back in January, than it began sending millions of free doses around the world.

The neighboring Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan was the first to receive Vaccine Maitri (Vaccine Friendship) shipments of AstraZeneca vaccines, followed by Nepal, Bangladesh, the Maldives, Myanmar – and Dominica, where the Caribbean island’s prime minister himself helped unload boxes at the airport.

As of mid-February, just 10 countries had administered 75% of all vaccines, according to the United Nations, securing large supplies for themselves in what has been termed vaccine nationalism. One hundred and thirty countries, meanwhile, had not yet received a single dose – a trajectory the U.N. secretary-general called “wildly uneven and unfair.”

One, a global nonprofit that combats extreme poverty and preventable disease, has estimated that the United States is likely to have a surplus of 453 million doses even if it vaccinates 100% of its population.

Experts say India sees the power vacuum around vaccines as an opportunity for diplomacy and soft power, in line with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s bid to raise India’s international profile. Next door, Beijing has also pushed vaccine diplomacy, but India’s industry strength, which is producing vaccines faster than they are currently being distributed at home, may give it an edge.

“From the very beginning of the pandemic, the Indian government seemed to be projecting itself as a responsible global stakeholder ... as an important part of global governance and the global health scenario,” an image supported by India’s strength in the sector, says Harsh Pant, professor of international relations at King’s College, London.

As of late February, India had exported about 36 million doses of vaccine across the world, about 20% of them as grant assistance. Meanwhile, it has launched the second wave of its domestic campaign, aiming to vaccinate 300 million of its 1.3 billion people by mid-summer.

Two giants

Even before the pandemic, India was a major pharmaceutical hub, and manufactured about half of all vaccines sold globally. Now, the privately-owned Serum Institute of India (SII), the world’s biggest vaccine manufacturer, has been producing 2.4 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine a day, more than it can distribute domestically.

SII vaccines make up a large contribution of the World Health Organization’s COVAX initiative, which aims to make vaccines accessible for lower- and middle-income countries. The first shipment under the initiative was sent from India to Ghana late last month.

India’s vaccine diplomacy isn’t surprising. It is in line with the Modi government’s strategic use of soft power to aid diplomacy and foreign policy. Since his election in 2014, Mr. Modi has successfully proposed an “International Day of Yoga” to the United Nations, visited 58 countries, and reached out to the Indian diaspora, especially in the United States.

Ben Curtis/AP

Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta (center) visits the central vaccine depot in Kitengela town on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya, March 4, 2021. Around 1 million doses of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine manufactured by the Serum Institute of India arrived in the country on Wednesday as part of the COVAX initiative.

But India is not alone in dominating vaccine diplomacy. There’s also China, which long promised several southeast Asian and African countries its homegrown vaccines and has been sending its own shipments across the world. For years now, China has made large investments in countries in India’s neighborhood, like Nepal, the Maldives, and Sri Lanka, that India has been unable to match. At the same time, India’s ties with Nepal – bordered by both India and China – have seen a setback, and disputes continue over India and China’s ill-defined borders along the Himalayan regions.

“Competition between China and India is now a permanent feature of international politics,” says Jabin Jacob, an associate professor of international relations at Shiv Nadar University outside New Delhi. “There is certainly an element of competition between the two countries to show themselves as leaders in Asia.”

“Both countries see themselves as offering models of political and economic development distinct from the West, the Chinese more so than the Indians,” Professor Jacob says. But India sees itself as an alternative to both “Western democracy and Chinese authoritarianism,” he adds.

This time, India seems to have an advantage. The lack of transparency and efficacy data regarding China’s vaccines has made many abroad wary. Some countries, like Sri Lanka, have rejected the Chinese vaccine made by Sinopharm and purchased vaccines from India instead.

Professor Pant says he’s “skeptical” whether vaccine diplomacy can be a “game changer” for India’s relations in the region. “Smaller states in India’s neighborhood will always try to balance India against China over the long term, and that’s to their advantage,” he says. “But I think in the short term it certainly changes the perception of India being a bully.”

Risks at home

Some analysts argue vaccine diplomacy is a luxury that New Delhi is undertaking at the cost of its own citizens’ well-being. India has the second-highest number of COVID-19 cases globally, preceded only by the United States, and pandemic restrictions caused the economy to fall into a recession for the first time in nearly a quarter century. Meanwhile, India’s own vaccine drive has not been up to speed.

Amit Dave/Reuters

Hindu monks wait to register their names to get a dose of COVISHIELD, a COVID-19 vaccine manufactured by Serum Institute of India, inside a temple premises in Ahmedabad, India, March 8, 2021.

New Delhi is taking “considerable political risk domestically” by sending so many vaccines abroad, says Oommen Kurian, head of public health initiatives at the Delhi-based think tank Observer Research Foundation. But he argues that, as a large country with an underfunded health system, India’s rollout at home needed to be slow, and could not match the pace of production, at least initially.

India’s vaccine outreach coincides with months of negative press abroad, amid a historic farmer protest against three hastily enacted agricultural laws. One critic was Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who last December expressed concern over the use of force on protesters. His comments drew sharp reactions from India, where the Foreign Ministry called his remarks “ill-informed” and lodged a formal protest.

But in February, as Canada faced shortages in supplies from Pfizer and Moderna, it reached out to India to request vaccines manufactured by SII. Mr. Modi tweeted about receiving a call from “my friend” Mr. Trudeau and assuring him that India would do its best to facilitate vaccines. Afterward, an Indian ministry spokesperson told reporters that the Canadian prime minister had “commended” India’s efforts to “choose the path of dialogue” with protesters. About 500,000 doses of the vaccine arrived in Canada last week.

In the big picture, though, “it’s important not to overplay the long-term effects of vaccine diplomacy,” Professor Jacob says. “Once the pandemic is past, more traditional factors of power are likely to return to center stage, which means India will still have a lot of catching up to do with the West and China.”

Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele won a decisive victory in last week’s elections – though his name wasn’t even on the ballot.

Strong support for his New Ideas party in the Feb. 28 midterms gives a seal of approval to his presidency. It allows the party to confirm Mr. Bukele’s nominees to key positions in the independent attorney general’s office and the Supreme Court. The party could also push for controversial moves like the removal of presidential term limits. By potentially gaining a supermajority via an alliance with a smaller party, New Ideas’ consolidation has raised concerns around the erosion of checks on presidential power, which has important implications for the United States, as well.

Under former President Donald Trump, the U.S. used development aid as an incentive for Central American governments to crack down on migration at all costs. In Mr. Bukele, the U.S. found a receptive partner. Now, the Biden administration is pivoting, saying it wants to help Central American governments strengthen democracy and fight corruption so as to tackle the root causes of migration.

Mr. Bukele’s newly solidified power is not the first roadblock in the Biden administration’s efforts to pursue a values-based foreign policy: Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, and others have presented early tests. Arguably, President Joe Biden already had his work cut out for him in Central America, where some presidents hold onto power in highly contested, irregular votes, or barely go through the motions of fighting corruption.

El Salvador presents the unique challenge of a hugely popular president who is criticized by groups like Human Rights Watch over concerns that he’s put the country on the path toward dictatorship. Mr. Bukele has one of the highest approval ratings of any president in Latin America, with over 71% support; he’s also the youngest leader, at age 39. 

“I wouldn’t be surprised if we witnessed a clash” between Presidents Bukele and Biden, says Carlos Mauricio Hernández, an expert in political science and philosophy at Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas in the capital, San Salvador. Mr. Biden will have to find delicate ways to “encourage [Mr. Bukele’s] respect for institutions and transparency without awakening his neurosis” of being under attack, Mr. Hernández says.

“That’s the big challenge for the U.S. right now,” Professor Hernández adds. “To relate with a leader who thinks and behaves more like a ‘Trump’ president,” who emphasizes personality and personal relationships, than a “Biden president,” who is more focused on institutions.

Some believe it’s too early to say how Mr. Bukele, who won the presidency in February 2019, will wield his enhanced power. “He might choose to respect the rules,” says Patricio Navia, an adjunct professor in the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University. 

A populist rises

Mr. Bukele won office vowing to rescue El Salvador from widespread gang violence and systematic corruption perpetuated by both right- and left-wing governments. He’s leaned heavily on social media to get out his message – frequently criticizing or smearing those who contradict him. The president gained support at home during his quick and authoritative response to COVID-19, although public health experts deemed many measures counterproductive.

Until last week’s vote, El Salvador’s legislature was controlled by two traditional parties that constantly blocked Mr. Bukele’s agenda. “He didn’t have the tools or ability to negotiate with those parties, so there was a political standoff,” says Professor Navia.

That impasse led to controversial moves like Mr. Bukele deploying the military to the Legislative Assembly in February 2020 to pressure policymakers to approve an international loan.

Jose Cabezas/Reuters

A woman participates in a protest against El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele at the Constitution Square in San Salvador, El Salvador, Feb. 9, 2021. The message in the helmet reads, "No to violence."

In a nation that suffered a long history of dictatorships and a 12-year civil war, public support for putting near-total power in the hands of a president is confounding to some.

But Jimmy Alvarado, a journalist at El Salvador’s leading independent news site, El Faro, says such support stems from a track record of corruption and perceived failures by elected leaders since the 1992 peace accords that ushered in democracy. He says he’s heard people refer to former dictators like Maximiliano Hernández Martínez in rosy terms, such as “there wasn’t any crime because he killed all the criminals.”

These comments underscore not only the serious impact violent crime has on so many communities in El Salvador today, but also the lack of faith in democracy to improve average citizens’ lives. “There’s not a lot of societal value placed on democracy,” Mr. Alvarado says, in part because “there hasn’t been much to illuminate the positive things democracy has brought” to the country.

Competing priorities?

A “significant challenge” for the Biden administration will be to accomplish all the things it wants to do in terms of addressing root causes of migration, “and at the same time keep democratic governance principles front and center,” says Cynthia Arnson, director of the Latin America Program at the Wilson Center.

“The region is more challenging than it was when [Mr. Biden] was first trying to put together a massive aid package to address root causes of migration” as vice president under Barack Obama, she says, citing increased levels of government corruption and organized crime.

Mr. Biden’s plans for the region have been touted in general terms, but not announced in detail. 

Will he be “more concerned with promoting democracy, or stopping a migration crisis?” Professor Navia asks. “Obviously [Mr. Bukele’s victory] doesn’t help with the idea of promoting democracy, but it might make a migration crisis less likely now that there is somebody in charge in El Salvador.” This contrasts with the legislative impasse during Mr. Bukele’s first two years and may help bilateral negotiations since Mr. Bukele now has a stronger mandate. 

Analysts agree there are concrete steps Mr. Biden can take to start building stronger relations with El Salvador and to prioritize the importance of democracy. For starters: naming a U.S. diplomat to replace a Trump appointee who left in January. 

There’s also the need to tread lightly, engaging Mr. Bukele without criticizing him. “The U.S. should support policies popular among Salvadorans. That way Bukele will have more incentive to support those policies as well,” says Mr. Navia, pointing to anti-corruption measures as an example.

“The U.S. shouldn’t make the same mistake with Bukele that it made when [Venezuela’s Hugo] Chávez first came to power, popular and democratically elected. The U.S. can’t declare him a dictator after overwhelmingly winning free and fair elections. That would be the worst possible strategy.”

Workman Publishing and Penguin Random House

“Libertie” by Kaitlyn Greenidge, Algonquin Young Readers, 336 pp.; and “A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World's Smartest Birds of Prey” by Jonathan Meiburg, Knopf, 384 pp.

This month’s selections sweep across the literary landscape with fervor and imagination, illuminating aspects of the human condition and celebrating the desire for transformation. 

1. The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World by Laura Imai Messina

In a coastal garden in northeast Japan sits the Wind Phone, which offers visitors a place of grace for their sorrow. This quiet novel follows grieving Yui and Takeshi as they form a friendship of shared experience – and navigate the trickier shoals of a deeper relationship – in lyrical, unrushed prose. 

2. Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge

“Libertie” follows a Black girl born free in the Reconstruction era. Her mother is a doctor who wants nothing more than for Libertie to follow in her footsteps, but Libertie has different ideas of what freedom – for herself and for her people – truly looks like.

3. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

In his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in 2017, Kazuo Ishiguro explores questions about what makes humans irreplaceable. This parable about a society in which science has been taken to ethically questionable levels is, thanks to its narrator – a kind, smart, sympathetic, solar-powered Artificial Friend – a surprisingly warm morality tale about love, hope, and empathy that subverts our expectations about dystopian fiction.

4. The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen

In this sequel to his 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Sympathizer,” Viet Thanh Nguyen drives home the brutal – and often horrifyingly absurd – effects of colonialism and every other kind of “ism” on human beings. The Vietnamese immigrant narrator cleans toilets and runs drugs in Paris, not because he wants to, but because this is what the subjugation of his country has brought him to. The novel is not for the faint of heart, but it speaks with power. 

5. Red Island House by Andrea Lee

Simon & Schuster

“Red Island House” by Andrea Lee, Scribner, 288 pp.

Andrea Lee traces an African American scholar’s marriage to a wealthy Italian businessman and her uneasy relationship with the pleasure palace he’s built on an impoverished island in Madagascar. Told in linked stories, “Red Island House” offers a captivating take on colonialism, privilege, race, and heritage.

6. Surviving Savannah by Patti Callahan

Patti Callahan’s inspiring historical novel launches off from the 2018 discovery of a luxury steamship that sank in 1838 off the coast of North Carolina, killing half its passengers, many of whom were wealthy Southerners. The steamship, believed to be the Pulaski, has been called the Titanic of the South. The novel moves between the 19th-century passengers and modern-day treasure hunters and museum curators.

7. A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meiburg

Jonathan Meiburg’s superb book begins as the story of a bird and ends having marshaled natural history, travelogue, biography, and memoir to conjure people and places both known (Darwin) and not (the South America of the glyptodonts). Along the way he shows how inaccurately we understand our species’ place in the world.

8. Plunder by Menachem Kaiser

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

“Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure” by Menachem Kaiser, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 288 pp.

A master storyteller embarks on a journey to learn about his grandfather and to reclaim an apartment building that was stolen during the Holocaust. The odyssey is fascinating and thought-provoking.  

9. The Barbizon by Paulina Bren

The Barbizon was New York City’s premier women-only residential hotel in the 20th century. This delightful history explains how, in a pre-feminist time, it sheltered the ambitions and dreams of thousands, including Grace Kelly and Sylvia Plath.

10. The Gospels translated by Sarah Ruden

After having tackled Virgil’s “Aeneid” and St. Augustine’s “Confessions,” classicist Sarah Ruden turns to the Gospels. She grounds them in thorough research and infuses them with a fresh, immediate voice that captures each Gospel’s characteristic tone.

AP

An employee works on a solar panel at a factory in Jiujiang, China, Jan. 5.

When research scientists in China look at the success of American tech firms, they often note one source for their creativity: a generous allowance for failure. They admire the freedom granted in labs to make mistakes, something that is difficult in a society like China that prizes conformity and quick profits. Imagine the shock then last Sunday when a former minister for industry and information technology, Miao Wei, admitted that China is failing in its goal of becoming a global leader in inventing new technologies within this decade.

“It will take at least 30 years to achieve the goal of becoming a manufacturing great power,” he said, according to state media reports.

While China has been the world’s biggest manufacturer since 2010, its industries remain far behind countries such as Germany and South Korea in scientific innovation, Mr. Miao said. It needs to “foster talent” in new ways, he added.

His words echoed those of other Communist Party leaders in high-level meetings in recent days setting forth the next five-year economic plan. Premier Li Keqiang promised increased support for “sources of innovation,” or the creativity that drives “breakthroughs” in key fields, especially computer chips. Simply throwing more money into research and development or seeking rapid economic growth is no longer enough.

A recent article in the official China Daily explained the challenge: “It is not uncommon for researchers to be distracted from their work by the many unnecessary and over-elaborate formalities of the current system, and why they are so keen to publish as many papers as possible and apply for as many patents as possible in a short time, rather than spend years ‘sitting on cold stools’ dedicating themselves to fundamental research that might produce no findings or returns in the end.”

Only if researchers “are emancipated from the shackles” of proving the value of their work can they “be emboldened to act as trailblazers,” the article added.

Beijing has even set up the Institute of Chinese Scientific Culture to study the factors that promote inventiveness. It also built a center for mathematical research designed to allow researchers “to meander, think and look for the artistry and beauty in numbers” and “to facilitate those eureka moments,” according to an official account.

China has yet to develop a “spirit of science” comparable to the scientific revolution of the West after the Enlightenment, wrote Liu Yadong, the chief editor of Science and Technology Daily, in 2018. A scientific spirit comes out of society’s values, such as the pursuit of truth and a tolerance for failure. Measuring science by its commercial returns is superficial, he stated.

The world’s most innovative societies have usually been those in which people are allowed to pursue ideas outside official norms. Many societies are still coming to terms with the idea that there are ideas yet to be discovered. Creativity “is not a stock of things that can be depleted or worn out, but an infinitely renewable resource that can be constantly improved,” notes a 2015 report called the Global Creativity Index by a group of international scholars.

As China’s authoritarian leader Xi Jinping cracks down even further on political dissent, he’s also trying to allow more freedom of thought and freedom to fail among scientific researchers. Mr. Miao’s admission of China missing its goal of becoming an innovation giant illustrates the contradiction. The problem is ripe for a breakthrough. If Chinese researchers had their way, they’d probably opt for more freedom to solve it.