Drawing on historical observations about American power, the article explores China's ambition to become a frontier science civilization. This involves attracting and recombining global talent in an open, diverse, and creative ecosystem.

Singapore’s founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew once offered a striking observation on the nature of American power, wrote Harvard professor Joseph Nye in 2011. China, Lee argued, could draw upon its massive population but the United States possessed a deeper structural advantage: the ability to attract and recombine global talent within an unusually open, diverse and creative ecosystem. America’s innovation system was not merely large. It was generative. Fifteen years later, on April 30,...