Project Details
Projekt
Scientific Empire: Infrastructure Control and Ideational Binding in China’s International Big Science Projects
Applicant
Dr. Anna Lisa Ahlers
Subject Area
Political Science
Term
since 2026
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 550231771
Empires have often built their dominance and legitimacy on possessing and controlling advanced knowledge and technology; today, global political centers are also hubs of innovation and academic excellence. Establishing China as a global scientific power is central to the government’s development vision and closely linked to the country’s current foreign policy strategies. A recent key aspect of China’s science policy is the promotion of internationally oriented "big science", i.e., cost-intensive, large, and often globally unique apparatuses, institutions, and clusters dedicated to a specific and novel research field. This project regards China’s government-funded large-scale infrastructures - including huge telescopes, giant particle colliders, and massive life science databases - as a means for the country to gain a competitive edge at the frontiers of research and to provide a counterbalance to structures long dominated by North America and Europe. By studying policy learning and implementation strategies, and the operation and overall meaning of large-scale research infrastructure, we seek to provide innovative perspectives on China’s imperial practices in this area. We examine how elite actors in China’s science policy and organizations adapt their strategies in response to demands for technological autonomy and global securitization of science. Besides mapping China’s big science projects, we focus on their governance, and particularly on how foreign research partners are selected and engaged. This approach enables us to assess the degree of control China exercises over these infrastructures. Furthermore, by analyzing international perceptions of these projects and their output, we gain insights into the global status China achieves via its big science initiatives. Through document analysis, interviews, focus group discussions, a survey, and case studies of three China-led large research infrastructure projects, we will seek to answer the following questions: Why and how are Chinese decision-makers adapting their policies to attain and expand centrality and safeguard autonomy in global science? Does the strategy of extensively building large-scale research infrastructure succeed in these regards? To what extent is it deliberately creating asymmetric dependence in China’s academic relations? The project also explores whether big science infrastructure ideationally binds foreign actors to China, not only through unique material resources but also by requiring adherence to local research practices and promoting specific scientific values within these facilities under Chinese governance. Overall, this project constitutes the first systematic study of how China’s political and academic elites develop, plan, and implement big science strategies, with the aim of establishing the country as a world center of knowledge production and capitalizing on the dependence of its partners - essentially, building a scientific empire.
DFG Programme
Research Units
