China vs the West: Snow’s ‘two culture’ theory goes global

Richard Holmes 28 August 2024

In 1959, CP Snow, a British scientist, civil servant and novelist, created a stir with a lecture, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution”. The two cultures were led by natural scientists and literary intellectuals.

There was no doubt about where Snow stood with regard to the cultures. Scientists, he said, had “the future in their bones”, and he was disdainful of those who were ignorant of the basic laws of physics.

He believed that Britain’s stagnation after the Second World War was the result of the domination of public life by humanities graduates and the marginalisation of natural scientists.

Snow’s lecture was met with an equally famous ad hominem blast from the Cambridge literary critic, FR Leavis, which probably did Snow more good than harm. Leavis may, however, have had a prescient point when he talked about how science had destroyed the organic communities of the pre-industrial world.

At the time, his nostalgia was largely misplaced. Those who lived in the villages and farms of England had little reluctance about moving, as did my forebears, to the cotton mills of Derbyshire and the coal mines of South Wales, but, looking at a world where every human instinct has become digital media fodder, Leavis might have been onto something.

It now looks like we have something like Snow’s two cultures emerging at the global level with their centres in China, and in North America and Western Europe.

Chinese society and higher education puts a high, perhaps obsessive, value on research in the natural sciences and engineering, while some in the West are increasingly sceptical, even contemptuous in some respects, of science and supportive of the social sciences and humanities.

It has been pointed out that Chinese universities are now graduating a much greater number of scientists and engineers and producing more research in the natural sciences than Western universities.

University rankings

That is true and gets truer every day, but there is more to this story. Chinese institutions now have a much greater number of publications in the natural sciences. They are also ascending in the medical and life sciences, although not quite so emphatically.

English-speaking universities and a few in Western Europe, however, dominate and most probably will continue to dominate the social sciences and the arts and humanities. Take a look at the latest global university rankings, produced by the Centre for Science and Technology at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Leiden Ranking provides lists of publications in broad subject areas. The top 30 universities for total publications in mathematics and computer sciences and the top 23 in physical sciences and engineering are all Chinese.

For life and earth sciences, 13 Chinese and just two American universities are in the top 20. There are also two Brazilian, one Mexican, one Dutch and one Australian university. For biomedical and health sciences, 11 Chinese and six American universities are in the top 20.

The social sciences and the humanities, however, are very different. In these disciplines, English-speaking universities are the world leaders. The top 20 include 11 from the US, three from the UK, four from Australia and one each from Canada and the Netherlands.

China is not just a superpower with regard to mathematics, science and engineering: it is now effectively the superpower. It also contributes a large and growing percentage of the research in biomedical and life sciences. But the Anglo-American world still reigns supreme in the humanities and the social sciences.

University leaders

It is worth noting the academic backgrounds of top university leaders in the US and China. Elite American schools are usually led by academics with a background in the social sciences or humanities, while China’s are administered by those from engineering or the hard sciences.

The heads of the top 10 US universities have qualifications in economics, history, English, psychology, law and business. There is just one physicist and one geneticist, and no chemists or engineers.

The heads of the top Chinese universities have backgrounds in engineering, physics, chemistry, genetics and meteorology.

The contrasting values of China and the West can also be seen in the construction of global university rankings, which have become very big business over the last two decades.

The Shanghai Rankings, officially the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), were started by Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2003.

They were based on publicly available data from Western institutions, Nobel prizes, Fields medals, publications in Nature, Science and journals in the Web of Knowledge database, lists of highly cited researchers and faculty numbers derived from government sources.

The first edition did not include the social sciences, and the later ones have never included the arts and humanities. The Nobel indicators include the prizes for economics but not peace or literature.

AWRU was followed by several other research-based rankings, including the National Taiwan University Rankings and University Ranking by Academic Performance, published by Middle East Technical University in Ankara.

Shanghai was always reluctant to include surveys in its main rankings, although there was an academic excellence survey in 2023 that included top journals, awards and conferences.

Once, at a conference in Australia, it was reported that Nian Cai Liu, director of the Shanghai Ranking, was asked why his ranking did not include surveys. He replied bluntly: “Because I’m an engineer”.

A rival ranking tradition emerged a year later when a British newspaper, Times Higher Education Supplement, teamed up with QS Quacquarelli Symonds, a consulting company, and produced the World University Rankings.

These did include the social sciences and the humanities and, in contrast to Shanghai, they also added data submitted directly from institutions and from surveys of academics and employers.

Both Times Higher Education, renamed after becoming a magazine, and QS have continued to produce world rankings, and both have tried to give a fair weighting to the social sciences and humanities.

There are also instructive differences between the national university rankings produced in the US and China. The US News and World Report’s Best Colleges Ranking is heavy on inputs, and on student retention and graduation, and recently widening participation has become more significant.

The Best Chinese Universities Rankings, published by Shanghai Ranking, emphasise student quality as measured by the famously rigorous entrance exam, student employment, research, links with industry and internationalisation.

A widening gulf

At the moment, it seems that China will continue producing more and better science, and the West will continue producing more research and writing in the social sciences and the humanities.

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence of the consequences of this widening gulf. The bridge to nowhere in California, that useless pier off the coast of Gaza, and a series of incidents involving the Boeing 737 contrast with China’s high-speed rail network and space exploration programme.

But is it possible that Western strength in the arts and humanities and the social sciences will translate into soft power that will balance the emerging Chinese scientific hegemony? That, at the moment, seems unlikely, but it would be unwise not to hedge a bet on this consequence.

Richard Holmes is an independent writer and consultant and the producer of the blog University Ranking Watch, where this post was first published.

This article is a commentary. Commentary articles are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.