In China, Dreams of Bright Ideas

In an interview, Hu Shuhua dismissed those concerns. Traditional culture did not prevent China from become the world's leading high-tech nation 1,000 years ago, he pointed out, contributing such inventions as gunpowder, porcelain and the compass and such technology as navigation, book-printing and silk-making. The Confucian ideal may mean modern Chinese schoolchildren are less outgoing than their Western counterparts, he said, "but you don't have to be outgoing to be innovative."

Beginning with the Communist victory in 1949, however, Mao Zedong's rule imposed a rigid political and social orthodoxy on China that took traditional conformity to new extremes. Education during the Cultural Revolution was abandoned or distorted for a whole generation -- the generation now wielding power in government corridors, universities and boardrooms. Much has changed over the last 25 years of reform, but the heritage of conformity remains strong.

"In the '60s and '70s, everything we saw was the revolution," recalled Wang Yiyang, 36, who designs and sells soft-contoured, ready-to-wear garments in his own Shanghai shop. "All the pictures showed Mao or heroic workers. Of course, that had a big impact on us."

In that atmosphere, innovation has been rare in modern China. Wang Wei's dream notwithstanding, no homegrown Chinese fashion designers have won fame on the world's runways, for instance, and no Chinese has won a Nobel Prize without leaving his homeland and the system that runs it.

Research funds remain hard to get and are often politically directed. Although China has vowed to make science and technology account for more than half its growth by 2020, Chinese institutions still spend only 1.1 percent of gross domestic product on research and development, compared with 3.2 percent in Japan and 2.6 percent in the United States. Chen Jin, the man touted as the inventor of China's first homegrown microchip, was recently uncovered as a fraud, his invention actually a Motorola chip stamped with Chen's brand name.

The party continues to discourage innovation in many fields, particularly politics or information and art that touch on political themes. The government, it seems, wants innovation to produce revolutionary new products but not revolutionary new ideas.

Even as President Hu was urging party members to "actively promote cultural innovation" in April, censors were ordering more than 20 paintings with political content pulled from an exhibition in Beijing's Dashanzi art colony. Similarly, in May, Premier Wen urged scientists to "raise the level of self-generated innovative ability" just as his government ordered a blackout on the film "Summer Palace," a Chinese production containing references to the 1989 student protest in Tiananmen Square that gained acclaim at this year's Cannes Film Festival.

Wang Wei learned about conformity early in life. His father, a painter, was forced to produce Cultural Revolution schlock during the day, Wang recalled, and was able to indulge his love of traditional Chinese painting only at night, in the privacy of the family's Shanghai apartment.

Wang started imitating his father early on, drawing street scenes on walls and earning praise from teachers for classroom art. By age 13, he had represented Shanghai in a national art contest, sticking to everyday urban life as his theme.

"That was sort of an inheritance," he said.

Before long Wang was enrolled in design courses at Shanghai's Donghua University. As he prepared for his entrance exams, the June 1989 protest drama played out without him in Beijing and other cities across China.

The inroads made by Western culture during the 1980s had a strong impact on Wang and his fellow students. They listened to the Rolling Stones and Michael Jackson. But they showed little interest in Tui Jian, whose homegrown rock was the background music of the Tiananmen protests.