Late in the summer of 2016, a long-simmering dispute in the Chinese scientific community and the general public over China's desirability of devoting significant resources to ambitious high-energy accelerator projects boiled up and out in the press and on the internet.[1] The debate had two dimensions, scientific and political, and the two dimensions were inseparably intertwined.

The author of this account of that debate was himself a participant in it, and thus this account, while intending to be informative and fair, does not seek to be neutral.[2]

Members of the APS Forum on International Physics know well the leading roles played by the Chinese-American high-energy theorists C.N. Yang and T.D. Lee in fostering substantial personal, institutional, and political relations with China starting even somewhat before US President Nixon's visit to China in February 1972. They probably also know that these two physicists, close collaborators in the 1950s, had by the late 1970s quite different perspectives on many topics, including the priority China should give to accelerator-based high-energy physics.

Tian Yu Cao

By that time, C.N. Yang's standing in China, far outstripping that of T.D. Lee, was higher than that of any other scientist – so high that Deng Xiaoping came to C.N. Yang's Beijing hotel room in 1978 for their first meeting. But Deng was not persuaded by C.N. Yang's arguments against China undertaking to build the electron-positron collider advocated by T.D. Lee and other leading American particle physicists. That collider, the BEPC, completed in 1988, went through various upgrades in the following two decades, but by 2008 its inevitable shutdown had been set for 2022.

And that shutdown decision reopened the question of China's role in accelerator construction and experimentation – how modest or ambitious would it be?

The energetic director of the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wang Yifang (Y.F. Wang), projected the most ambitious thinkable successor to the BEPC. As the next big step in circular colliders beyond CERN's LHC, it was initially conceived as 54 km in circumference, i.e., twice that of the LHC, but in later versions, its circumference grew to 100 km. In 2012, following the discovery of the Higgs particle, the evolving plan was tailored as a Higgs factory, to be completed by 2022, producing a million Higgs particles by 2030. This Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC) was to be constructed in a tunnel of large enough cross-section to comfortably accommodate also an eventual proton collider ring (SppC) and the necessary roadway for service vehicles between the two accelerators. The estimated cost was 6 billion dollars for the tunnel and the CEPC, and two or three times that for the SppC.[3] As the Chinese government did not immediately commit – and has not yet committed – to the CEPC-SppC, the construction schedule necessarily slipped.

In 2016, when the debate broke out, CEPC construction was proposed to begin in 2021, with operation from 2028 to 2035, followed by the construction of the SppC.[4]

YF. Wang mounted a multi-pronged campaign to build scientific, financial, political, and public support for this initiative to make China the future center of high-energy physics. Leading figures in the US were recruited to advocate his program – Nima Arkani-Hamed, a professor in the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, was recruited to be the director of the IHEP's Center for Future High Energy Physics[5]; David Gross and Edward Witten repeatedly went to China as well as writing an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in September 2015. [6] Timed to coincide with Xi Jinping's state visit to Washington, DC, this 'pitch' by the Nobelist and the Fields Medalist carried considerable weight in China. YF. Wang himself (vainly) put a copy of the 2014 preliminary conceptual design report into the hands of C.N. Yang (who since 2005 had been living in China and who in 2015 showed his commitment to China by renouncing his US citizenship, reacquiring Chinese).

But Y.F.Wang's most prominent ally in this campaign was the Chinese-American mathematician and mathematical physicist，Yau Shing-Tung (or Qiu Chengtong, as written in pinyin). A generation younger than C.N. Yang, Yau, by all the usual measures of scientific accomplishment and recognition, out-shines even Yang – and thus every other Chinese scientist.[7] Moreover, Yau is gregarious, his institutional involvements multifarious. In the autumn of 2015, he published, together with a US science writer, a book advocating the CEPC-SppC, with a Chinese edition appearing in spring 2016.[8] Yau and his co-author emphasized that CEPC "would transport physics into a previously inaccessible, high-energy realm where a host of new particles, and perhaps a sweeping new symmetry, might be found" and that it could add to knowledge about "the Big Bang, gravity, dark matter, dark energy, and other far-reaching phenomena."

On August 7, 2016, Xinhua published an interview with Yau promoting his book.

This interview drew some press criticism referring to C.N.Yang's opposition to expensive accelerator building. Yau, exasperated after years of having Yang's opposition rehearsed to him, responded on August 29 with a posting on the WeChat website "The Intellectuals" [9] expressing, in more than just a few words, his incomprehension that C.N. Yang turns his back on the science which his own contributions had advanced so importantly. To this, Yang replied a week later, quite impersonally, on the same website with a reiteration of his arguments against China devoting significant resources to building accelerators for elementary particle research. Undoubtedly his most wounding thrust was: 'if this accelerator wins someone a Nobel Prize, will that person be Chinese?'. YF. Wang responded the next day, and the debate then raged – without Yau or Yang saying anything further.[10]

The enthusiasm of high energy physicists for this project, especially if conceived as one funded by China but open to international participation, is obvious. On the one hand, the discovery of the Higgs at the LHC, while no hints of more or better than the Higgs – i.e., more or better than The Standard Model – had come to light, served only to increase their interest in going to substantially higher energies. On the other hand, from SSC to LHC and beyond, governments' support has been diminishing and increasingly uncertain as funding priority has shifted to other branches of science-technology, branches believed to have direct impacts on economic progress, or at least have noticeable impacts on neighboring research areas. Thus new sources of funding are desperately sought for more powerful colliders, which might offer a new direction for the further advancement of particle physics.

In China, the CEPC-SppC project was strongly supported by official institutions and public opinion – at least it was up to the autumn of 2016, when the debate broke out -- for two reasons.

First, China's confidence in its scientific capabilities was consolidated by its experiences in collider physics (construction, technology, engineering, management and experiments) through the Beijing Electron Positron Collider (BEPC) project for more than three decades. The IHEP's more recent success, further boosted that confidence under Y.F. Wang's leadership, the observation of the oscillation of electron anti-neutrinos issuing from the Daya Bay reactor, a result obtained almost simultaneously with competing experiments in the west.[11]

Second, the deeper reason rooted in China's economic-political situation:

By riding the wave of globalization, which was made possible by US's strategic assistance, China's economy expanded rapidly. Within a few years of its WTO entry, it became the world's factory. In 2010 China overtook Japan as the world's second-largest economy. In 2011 China's manufacturing output surpassed that of the US to become the world's number one goods producer. However, China's impressive rise to global economic power was not driven by technological innovation. Instead, it was heavily dependent on the export of low-skill products, which is to say on low wages; This rendered China not merely vulnerable to global market fluctuations and foreign manipulations but was inherently unsustainable: rising wealth entailed rising wages for Chinese workers. Thus, China would eventually price itself out of the low-skill export market. This prospect led China's leadership to launch in 2006 the indigenous innovation program, and in 2012 it put forward the "innovation-driven development strategy," aiming at cutting down the technology dependency ratio below 20% by 2020. (The foreign control of China's high-tech industry had reached 70% in 2009.) And in 2015, China's leadership announced the "Made in China 2025" plan.

The technological situation was not easy to change.

Putting aside the rampant corruption in the science community, China lacked the absorptive capacity crucial for assimilation and innovation, due to its acute under-investment in technology education. But China's leadership believes that it has a magic key, namely big state-owned enterprises (SOEs). It believes that big SOEs embody the crucial organizational advantage China's system enjoys over the west: SOEs can pool all needed resources to address significant issues or carry out grand projects such as the A-bomb, the H-bomb, rocket, missile, and satellite projects, and did so even under the economically extremely backward conditions in the 1950s to 1970s.

Since 2006, big SOE's technological capabilities have increased significantly. They have given China notable technological achievements in many areas, including supercomputing, lunar exploration, high-speed trains, petrochemicals, nuclear technology, and high voltage electrical transmission. Not only did China begin to export home-made high-tech products in the global market, but instead of holding to its earlier practice of sitting on an ever-growing pile of foreign currency, China became the world's largest exporter of capital with its outbound foreign investment supporting and being supported by the party-state's increasingly proactive and assertive diplomacy, "The Great Power Diplomacy."

Emerging together with these developments is the Communist Party's call for realizing "The Chinese Dream of the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation." An important component of this mission, the Central Committee decreed in 2015, is to "deeply implement the innovation driving development strategy, give rein to the guiding role of scientific and technological innovation in comprehensive innovation, implement a batch of major national science and technology programs, build a batch of national laboratories in the area of major innovation, [and to] *vigorously put forward and take the lead in organizing international big science plans and big scientific projects*."[12] This was quickly followed by President Xi's offering the world "the Chinese wisdom and a Chinese approach to solving the problems of mankind"[13], thus openly challenging the US as the new global hegemon.

It is in this context that the importance of the Gross-Witten WSJ commentary and its powerful appeal in China are to be understood, that is, by its combining their presumptively authoritative judgment of the CEPC-SppC's scientific importance with an acknowledgment of the validity of the perspective being pushed by China's leadership: "With China emerging as a superpower in its own right, U.S.-Chinese collaboration on the Great Collider could play a similar role" CERN played in the cold war era in dampening "the dangerous tensions between the two superpowers". In official media (through articles, interviews, conference reports, news coverage, etc.), the project was universally praised and hailed as a sure indication that China is taking global leadership in HEP and sci-tech generally.

In social media, it was more controversial, and in private conversations among scientists, including physicists in branches other than HEP, complaints and criticisms were frequently heard. But not until September 2016 were these dissenting voices heard loudly and widely in both social media and the press.

The "single voice" situation began to change and the real debate started September 4 when C. N. Yang published his firm opposition to the project online. Yang was old (then 94), his article was short, but his opposition was clear and devastating:

1. Its scientific value (the selling point for string theorists Gross and Witten and string-related mathematician Yau) presupposed that there were particles, and specifically super-symmetric particles, waiting to be discovered. Since the very existence of such particles was only a conjecture, supposing that the great collider would be capable of discovering them was only piling "conjecture upon conjecture."
2. Its cost (at least $20 billion) is too much for a developing country like China, with hundreds of millions of peasants and migrant workers. Numerous extremely urgent social issues in health-care, education and environmental protection and restoration have to be addressed. Moreover, such huge expenditure in this direction "would inevitably exclude funding necessary for other fundamental science, including life sciences, condensed matter physics, astrophysics, etc."
3. It would deliver no benefits to human life within the next three to five decades, even if it is successfully carried out and pushes HEP one great step ahead.
4. The design, operation, analysis and interpretation would necessarily be guided and controlled by foreign scholars, who would consequently be awarded the Nobel Prizes.

Yang is an internationally recognized grandmaster of theoretical physics. In China, he is a national hero. Thus his opinion carried a super-heavyweight, and its public expression opened a channel for vocalization by the repressed opposition. Recognizing this danger, YF. Wang responded online the next day, arguing combatively:

1. Concerning the scientific value of the collider, Wang contradicted Yang's stigmatizing it as merely conjectural by stressing that the project has two phases, and the first, CEPC, phase (Higgs factory, precise measurements) is realistic and is an unavoidable step in advancing HEP. Only the second, SppC, phase, which tests the SM, and goes beyond the SM (which can, in any case, be only an effective theory) to discover new physics, is conjectural.
2. Concerning costs and benefits, Wang stressed: (1) "China now is very rich, but too pragmatic to make contributions to human civilization, and thus is unable to have soft power and exert influence. In return, this has negative effects on China's ability to obtain its interests in the world." (2) The project "will enable China to lead the world in HEP for decades." (3) As for its impact on other fundamental sciences, Wang stressed that the project is the best candidate for answering the party's call: "vigorously put forward and take the lead in organizing international big science plans and big scientific projects."
3. Wang bluntly challenged Yang's authority, criticizing Yang's views on HEP as being pessimistic, dogmatic, and out of the mainstream in the international HEP community – with the result that Yang had missed the opportunity to contribute to the SM. Wang repeatedly mentioned "many HEP Nobel laureates" and "the Directors of the main National Laboratories globally" as his backers. He also urged that the political leaders should listen to scientists of his generation who were necessarily the only candidates for sci-tech leadership, domestically and globally.
4. Wang cited Deng's ignoring Yang's objection to the BEPC project, thus strongly suggesting that political leaders should follow Deng's example and ignore Yang's objections to this collider project as well.

While Wang's online rebuttal was the subject of heated discussion, likewise online, it was almost three weeks before a reply to Yang's critique appeared in the official press. On September 23, the Xinhua Daily Telegraph, China's official news medium, published Gross's vehement, point-by-point contradiction of Yang: "no", "no", "no", "I strongly disagree," "I am shocked," and similar expressions alternating with statements of the strongest possible support for the project: "A golden opportunity for China to be a world leader of fundamental physics at one stroke"; CEPC "will advance the development of science, become a magnet to attract talents in physics and engineering globally", and "help to lift China to be an economic superpower".

Shortly after C.N.Yang's critique had been posted, on September 6, the Beijing office of MIT's Technology Review approached the author of this article, widely known in China as a historian and philosopher of HEP, requesting my commentary on the debate. I welcomed this opportunity to describe the controversy and my position on it. But when my commentary was delivered, the journal declined to publish it, finding it too negative toward the collider project. My commentary then appeared on the Wen.org.cn website on September 27 [14] and is reprinted in the World Scientific volume cited in note 9. Its major points are:

1. Anti-reductionism: In line with P. W. Anderson's view, HEP is too fundamental, that is, to fundamental to be relevant to other branches of fundamental science.
2. A theory-led view of scientific development: a 'Higgs factory' enabling precise measurements of Standard Model entities and processes will not give clues to new physics without a clear theoretical formulation. Thus any claim of knowing the secret of the universe from experiments without a clearly formulated theoretical understanding could not be more than empty words.
3. Nobelist S. L. Glashow supports Yang's position: HEP can have no practical utility, it extracts (rather than adds) economic resources. The reason: it investigates not the things existing in the world, but the things we create at considerable cost.
4. These 'things' – the tau, W, K, etc. particles -- are all too short-lived to have any practical utility.
5. Decision making should not be manipulated and monopolized by social groups with vested interests. Society as a whole, rather than a few experimental experts, should have the final say on how to spend huge amounts of money ($21 billion) squeezed out from hundreds of millions of migrant workers who live under miserable conditions.

Nor was the author of this commentary (and of the present article) the only writer to appeal in this debate to Nobelist Philip W. Anderson's arguments against large expenditures for particle accelerators.

Those arguments, most pertinently expressed in testimony to the US House of Representatives in opposition to the SSC[15], were often cited and quoted by opponents of the CEPC-SppC, and were included in the World Scientific volume cited in note 9.

Most important among them are:

1. The rejection of "the myths supporting the unique value of elementary particle physics" showcased his antireductionism. Anderson argued that "science can be fundamental without being irrelevant", but particle physics "has become so "fundamental" as to be almost totally irrelevant, even to the rest of science," "nothing high energy physics can do will ever be of the slightest direct help in solving these overwhelmingly hard problems" such as "what drives the new high-temperature superconductors, or what makes a snowflake, or how the mind or the economy works." Anderson provocatively asserts: "If the particle physicists tell you they will understand even the Big Bang better as a consequence of the SSC, they are being wildly optimistic; and if they claim any other relevance, they are wrong".
2. Practical arguments similar to those that Yang raised in his opposition: experimental HEP "competes for resources which I see as needed more elsewhere." This is particularly worrisome because HEP's large facilities "are not places where you discover breakthroughs … Rather, they are places in which you test breakthroughs once you have them." In contrast, small group work is the most innovative, and "must not be cut back in favor of the large facilities." Besides, there are other urgent scientific needs —in space science and, very importantly, science education.

Also introduced into the debate, and quoted in the World Scientific collection, are the comments made by Jonathan Katz of Washington University in St. Louis in a letter to the WSJ in response to Gross and Witten's September 2015 commentary. More radical than Anderson, Katz, an accomplished theorist – with a well-deserved reputation as outspoken contrarian -- called particle physics "moribund," a "dying" branch of science, and declared that "The future of physics lies in such fields as atomic and condensed-matter

physics. There, tabletop experiments of exquisite subtlety, with budgets in the hundreds of thousands, not tens of billions, promise (and have delivered) not only conceptual advances such as a deeper understanding of the fundamentals of quantum mechanics but also the possibility of technological breakthroughs such as quantum computing.

Mao's "Great Leap Forward" starved tens of millions. This "Great Scientific Leap Forward" promises to starve scientific progress.

Let hundreds of flowers bloom in laboratories around the world!" [16]

Negative comments were also posted anonymously to The-Intellectual web-journal by a highly regarded Chinese Academician whose identity many could guess:

1. The scientific objectives of the CEPC-SppC are not clearly defined: "when a scientific project is dubious, is it worth expending a huge amount of material and financial resources? The answer is negative".
2. Many key technologies are controlled by the west without which many technical details cannot be completed by China alone.

Wu Weimin – who had been involved with China's BEPC, the LHC, and many other projects -- advised the enthusiasts for the Great Collider to be realistic.

Regarding scientific capability, he reminded them that there is an ocean of difference between those at the low level of BEPC and high level required for CEPC; china's assumed financial might is not decisive for the transition from the former to the latter.

On June 24, 2012, Professor Cao Tianyu was invited to give a talk at the 40th Anniversary Celebration of the Advent of Quantum Chromodynamics at The International School of Sub-nuclear Physics in Erice, Sicily, Italy. After the special lecture of “Key Steps Toward the Creation of QCD”, before the singing and dancing performance dinner, a photo with Murry Gell-Mann, the main founder of QCD.

Higgs and Cao at the 40th anniversary celebration.

More shrewdly, Wu stressed that international cooperation is the lifeline of HEP machines such as LHC and CEPC and of the multi-thousand-physicist collaborations that create and carry out the experiments at them. Thus a project like CEPC would be impossible without the active participation and cooperation of the US government; the participation of individual US scientists and individual universities is insufficient; it has to be at the governmental level. But the precondition for this is that the US and China have mutual strategic trust, have established a strategic partnership. Since at present, this is not the case, the project has to wait for a proper time in the future.

To fully understand the debating style and strategies on the 'favored' side in the collider controversy, i.e., the institutional establishment side, one must understand the political culture of decision making in China. The party leadership takes as their top priority in selecting projects the symbolic value of the project as illustrating the superiority of the Chinese system, and specifically its unique capability of pooling all needed resources to carry out grandiose projects. Other merits of the competing projects are secondary. The symbolic is inevitably political and thus is more important than the scientific.

Even so, under increasingly fierce international competition, pragmatism is gradually becoming more important in resource allocation, as exemplified by China's very large investments in artificial intelligence, 5G, genetic engineering, and other innovative projects that are crucial for competition on the global stage.

Y.F.Wang's argumentation exemplifies this long-standing (but increasingly challenged) primacy of the symbolic in an email interview by the editors of "The Intellectual" website published online on October 20. There Wang, taking CEPC's unique and far-reaching contributions to China's soft power as well as its hard power as axiomatic, declared that "the leaders of our country have to make a political decision, whether to support it or not: if you want China to be a second class country, you can ignore it; but if you want to China to be a first-class country, then you have to support it." The published version of this interview had as title "Wang's further comments on the big collider: a political decision to make China world number one." Wang was embarrassed by the forthrightness of the title that the editors gave his responses, but his answers display very clearly the political character of his side of the debate, leaving China's leaders without space for deliberation: you have to support the project, otherwise, you will be blamed for blocking China's path to become a first-class country.

Y.F. Wang's vehement defense of the project was supported in an article signed by a group of 33 Chinese HEP physicists working in the US. Although this article, published on a website, is largely a tutorial on HEP, woven through it, is much the same presupposition and argumentation that appeared in concentrated form in Wang's October 20 interview and in the Gross and Witten 2015 WSJ commentary. Among these the most important was reductionism: the project's importance and the value was dramatically exaggerated through an implicit line of reductive reasoning more familiar as 'for want of a nail, the kingdom was lost': the CEPC's promised achievements are indispensable to the progress of high energy physics (HEP); the achievements of HEP are essential to fundamental physics (FP) generally; FP to fundamental science (FS); FS to science and technology (S&T); and, ultimately, S&T to the economy, culture and civilization. These radical reductionist claims were advanced through exaggerating the existent (but non-reducible) connections between neighboring areas, and ignoring the non-transitive nature of these non-reducible connections: the connections get feebler when they involve non-adjacent areas.

Second, like Y.F. Wang's interventions, the article by 'the 33'fails to distinguish between reasonable national aspirations and national' dreams of glory'. It conflates (i) emergence from economic backwardness and a condition of national humiliation, having a favorable image and positive reputation in the world, being confident of the capability of doing whatever other nations can do, or even cannot do, and many other similar aspirations that should speak to the hearts of the general public, and (ii) the unreasonable, immature, and even dangerous ambition to be a Great Power and achieve world leadership as hegemon, offering the world not only "the Chinese Model" but also "the Chinese wisdom and a Chinese approach to solving the problems of mankind." This latter form of "the Chinese Dream", with the "China miracle" in its economic performance, has been on the rise, indeed in high fever in some circles since 2013, along with policies promoting "Great Power Diplomacy", as manifested in establishing Confucius Institutes worldwide, hosting numerous international conferences, trying to establish a G2 world order, etc.

Carrying this conflation into the field of particle physics research, 'the 33' present the CEPC-SppC as the culmination of a world-historical migration of pre-eminence in HEP from the US's failed SSC to Europe's successful LHC to China's emergence as the world's fundamental research center. China, they say, was defeated and humiliated by the west mainly because of its lack of curiosity-based abstract science and science-based technology, and the CEPC-SppC will show that with the rise of China's economic power and the decline of the US, China now can do what the US and the west, in general, cannot do: stand at the apex of fundamental science. So the Chinese people can be proud of catching-up and surpassing the west in the area characterizing modern civilization.

Indeed, 'the 33' contend that the CEPC can make crucial contributions to China's Great Power ambitions. They argued that as an aspiring Great Power, China should not be content with its economic might, and has to take the leadership of human civilization in the forthcoming era, the era defined by ever-renewed science and high-tech, whose foundation is HEP. This leadership has to be embodied in grand projects – the Central Committee's 2015 call for leadership in such international projects was often cited -- and the CEPC is an ideal example of such. Its construction, hosted, financed, and controlled by China, will enable China to become, at one stroke, the world center and the world leader in HEP for decades to come. Such an achievement, of which the US is incapable, will greatly increase China's self-confidence, improve its image, and expand its influence. It will massively enhance China's soft power with a more attractive sci-tech diplomacy based on CEPC.

It was further argued that CEPC will also be crucial for the development of China's hard power. As the world's center of HEP, which is the crown jewel of fundamental science, it will function as a magnet to attract China science and high-tech talents from all over the world. This international collaborative project will also make it possible for China to acquire the most advanced technologies from participating western countries. Only with the talents and technology acquired through CEPC will China be able to transform its economy from an export-oriented, manufacturing economy relying on cheap labor, resource extraction, and environmental destruction into a (sci-tech) innovation-driven economy. Thus CEPC has to be recognized and appreciated as the major pillar in China's social and economic development.

To these often-heard contentions, implicitly framed within 5000 years of Chinese history, 'the 33' added the urgency of a (favorable) decision in light of the geopolitics of forefront accelerator construction. CERN, they argued, is at present fully occupied with upgrades to the LHC; the US focuses on neutrino experiments and supporting the LHC. Thus China has to seize this rare moment in time, this golden opportunity which may last only for 10-15 years. Moreover, they pointed out, pressing even more strongly for quick action is the prospect of US and European support consolidating around the International Linear Collider, proposed to be constructed in Japan with research objectives and projected construction period similar to those of the CEPC. Since such forefront HEP accelerator projects are necessarily transnational in the financial and personnel resources recruited for them, a commitment by the US and Europe to support one will inevitably preclude a commitment to support a second. Consequently, the CEPC is in direct competition with Japan's ILC, and China must act quickly.

In the three years since the intense phase of this debate, the Chinese government has 'slow-walked' the decision process. That unwillingness to make a commitment to achieving pre-eminence in HEP for China has pushed its HE physicists towards less nationalistic, more internationalist positions. Thus the document "The Planning of CEPC", prepared late in 2018, and posted on the CEPC website, sets out a genuinely international management structure while still anticipating that the call for proposals for those "China initiated international large science projects" envisaged by the Central Committee of the Party in 2015 would soon appear. However, judging from the CEPC website, that long-awaited call has still not been issued. Meanwhile, a series of "International Workshops" has been organized to promote the project as an international project. At the time of writing – mid-November 2019 – the third in that series of workshops is being held in Beijing (the two previous were held in Rome and Oxford): "One main purpose of the workshop is to make the CEPC study much more international by having broad participation and contributions globally, and to elevate the CEPC study group to an international organization." [17]

References

[1] Hao Xin, "Debate signals cloudy outlook for Chinese supercollider", September 12, 2016. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/09/debate-signals-cloudy-outlook-chinese-supercollider

Hepeng Jia, "Debate on China's super collider heats up" October 19 2016.

https://www.natureindex.com/news-blog/debate-on-chinas-super-collider-heats-up

[2] The author is grateful to Paul Forman for criticism and suggestions leading to a clearer account of this debate.

[3] A well-informed brief description of the project as it stood late in 2014 is given by Ernie Malamud, "The CEPC-SPPC Project, a Trip to China", in the Spring 2015 issue of this Newsletter. https://www.aps.org/units/fip/newsletters/201502/china.cfm.

A fuller description of the project as developed further in the following three years is given by Jie Gao, "China's bid for a circular electron-positron collider," CERN Courier, June 2018, pp. 21-25.

[4] Sophia Chen, "China's Proposed Heir to the LHC", APS News, May 2016 https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201605/china-heir.cfm

[5] Chen, APS News, May 2016.

[6] David J. Gross and Edward Witten, "China's Great Scientific Leap Forward: Completion of a planned 'Great Collider' would transform particle physics," WSJ, September 25, 2015. https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-great-scientific-leap-forward-1443136976?mod=article_inline

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shing-Tung_Yau .

Dennis Overbye, "The Emperor of Math", New York Times, October 17, 2006.

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/17/science/17yau.html

[8] ST. Yau and S.Nadis, From the Great Wall to the Great Collider: China and the Quest to Uncover the Inner Workings of the Universe (International Press of Boston, October 23 2015).

In an interview by J.N.A.Matthews for Physics Today, April 11 2016, Yau explained that: "I travel to Asia often. I helped establish six mathematics institutes (two in Beijing, one in Hangzhou, one in Hong Kong, and two in Taiwan), which I currently direct. I also started high school competitions in math and physics—perhaps soon to be followed by competitions in biology—all with the purpose of building up science throughout the region. When I heard about early plans for a new collider about five years ago, I naturally offered to help, talking up the idea with scientists I knew in China, the United States, and Europe. I also helped get proposals into the hands of influential decision-makers in China."

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.5.3035/full/

[9] The-Intellectuals is a mobile media platform founded by three scholars, Rao Yi, Lu Bai, and Xie Yu in September 2015, which is dedicated to "discussions on science, humanities, and general ideas, for those who are eager for acquiring and sharing human knowledge, for independent thinking and analyzing modern ideas, and for building a China full of intelligence. "It is very popular, not only among scientists and scholars but also among college students, and serves as an inclusive liberal platform.

[10] Three months after the publication of C.N.Yang's response to Yau, World Scientific, which publishes in Chinese as well as English, gathered some thirty items – most had appeared on the WeChat website "The Intellectual" -- into a small volume: 中国超大型对撞机之讨论 (卷一) 潘国驹 何华 孙晗 主编 [Deliberations on the super-great collider on China vol.1,] World-Scientific, 2016; ISBN 9789813202085 (paperback); ISBN 9789813208995 (hardcover); ISBN 9789813206762 (e-book). The remainder of this article summarizes and quotes views presented there, including those of the author. "Deliberations" is not perfectly neutral: it leads off with C.N.Yang's response to Yau, but Yau's intemperate provocation is not included (and indeed now seems to be unfindable on the web). It also does not include the Gross & Witten WSJ 2015 op-ed. It includes a translation of ST. Corneliussen, "A 'Great Collider' in China," Physics Today, October 13 2015, https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.5.8143/full/, who quotes the short letter by Jonathan I. Katz to the WSJ, Oct.3, 2015, savaging the Gross & Witten op-ed, and also includes a translation of Philip Anderson's "The Case Against the SSC" (1987), on which see note 15 below. World Scientific titled this "vol.1", promising yo follow the ongoing debate and eventually publish a second volume.

[11] An, F. P.; et al. (Daya Bay Collaboration) (2012-04-23). "Observation of Electron-Antineutrino Disappearance at Daya Bay". Physical Review letters. 108 (17):171803. arXiv:1203.1669. Bibcode:2012PhRvL.108q1803A. doi:10.1103/physrevlett.108.171803. ISSN 0031-9007. PMID 22680853.

[12] Communiqué of the Fifth Plenary Meeting of the 18th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, October 29, 2015. (Boldface added by the author for emphasis of the last clause.)

[13] Xi Jinping's speech on July 26, 2017: http://cpc.people.com.cn/xuexi/n1/2017/0815/c385474-29471759.html.

[14] http://wen.org.cn/modules/article/view.article.php/4259

[15] Published as "The Case Against the SSC" in The Scientist, June 1987: https://www.the-scientist.com/opinion-old/the-case-against-the-ssc-63734.

[16] (http://www.wsj.com/articles/beware-of -those-chinese-great-leaps-in-scinece -1443813909.)

[17] http://cepc.ihep.ac.cn/CEPC_Accelerator_Addendum/CEPC_Accelerator_Addendum.pdf .

https://indico.ihep.ac.cn/event/9960/material/1/0.pdf, p.3

Tian Yu Cao, received PhD from University of Cambridge in History and Philosophy of Science. He is now a Professor teaching philosophy of science in the philosophy department, Boston University. He published two books, Conceptual Developments of 20th Century Field Theories (Cambridge University Press, 1997; revised and expanded] edition, October, 2019); From Current Algebra to Quantum Chromodynamics – A Case for Structural Realism (CUP, 2010); edited two volumes：Conceptual Foundations of Quantum Field Theory (CUP，February 1999); Philosophy of Science [Vol. X of the Proceedings of the 20th World Congress of Philosophy, August 10-16, 1998] (Philosophical Documentation Center, 2001).

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