On May 14, the Tianwen-1, China’s first Mars mission, succeeded in its goal to land a rover on Mars. This mission made China the second country, after the US, to have successfully conducted a landing on Mars and marked a key milestone in the development of China’s space program. The rover, named Zhurong after a Chinese mythical fire god, landed at Utopia Planitia in the northern hemisphere of Mars. Utopia Planitia is a wide basin (about 3,300 kilometers in diameter) that is thought to have been formed by an impact in the planet’s early life. It has been reported that this region holds subsurface ice as well as liquid water deposits, making it a promising area of research into the planet’s history. This is also where NASA’s Viking 2 mission landed in 1976.

The Chinese space agency, officially known as China National Space Administration, first announced their plans for a Mars mission in 2006. Historically, the Chinese space program was not at par technologically with its US, European, and Soviet counterparts. The US missions to Mars progressed in stages, starting with orbiters, then landers, and finally landing a rover. China, however, planned and accomplished an orbiter, a lander, and a rover all in their first mission. The fact that they succeeded in landing (a task at which the European and Russian space agencies have failed), as well as achieving three complex goals in a single mission, is clear testimony to the fact that China has rapidly caught up with the technological advances and to their confidence and ambition. This ambition is confirmed by the fact that China has the highest number of launching pads among all countries.

A key enabler of China’s technological advances is their one-party rule based system of government, which facilitates long term planning and preparation. The influence of the Chinese government in the society greatly accelerates large-scale shifts to new technologies, as seen with the considerable success of the government’s policy to promote electric vehicles in the automobiles market. For instance, last year, about 40 percent of the electric vehicle sales worldwide took place in China, slightly less than the number of sales in Europe.

In the US and Europe, focus on achieving short term political goals has often led to funding cuts to space programs and other incentives for technological progress. Within multi-party systems of government, governments often feel the incentive to prioritize short term goals to increase the odds of electoral success. Within such a system of government, therefore, there is a greater risk of scientific and technological innovation not being prioritized. Many indicators of technological progress (such as the number of peer-reviewed research papers published annually) appear to show that China is gaining an edge over other countries; with the Chinese government recently announcing their plans to invest in science and technology at unprecedented levels, this discrepancy in technological progress is expected to further increase manifold.

China’s tremendous scientific and technological progress shows that more countries need to focus on long term planning and development. To achieve this goal, it must be ensured that the organizations responsible for incentivizing research and development are independent of populist agenda, so that they would not be forced into making decisions that impede long term progress. Organizations and think tanks responsible for science and technology policy making should be entrusted to politically neutral experts and facilitated to work on long term goals.

Removing political influence from science and technology policies will also ensure that the developments would be more easily accepted by the wider society and smoothly implemented. The vaccine skepticism that emerged globally during this pandemic is a stark reminder of how subjecting science and technology to populism impedes economic progress and costs precious lives. If the current global trend of populist interference in science and technology policies continues, such countries are destined to be left far behind. Anthropogenic climate change, arguably the greatest threat to our planet, is also increasingly being transformed into a politically charged subject, undermining the endeavors to bring about global cooperation and planning on the matter.