Yes. Most scientists and engineers are quite conformists anyway.
It's social progress that you can't have, not innovative science and technology.
It's social progress that you can't have, not innovative science and technology.
Fortunately, for, uhh, national security reasons, our own science community is toying pretty strongly with the idea of substituting politics for scientific inquiry in many or most fields as well, which will prevent Chinese science from being able to lean on Western science for that connection to reality. Yay...(?)
I don't think so.
I think that most people take a single historical example (USSR) and at a certain paranoid era and extrapolate it to every kind of totalitarian or vaguely similar society -- as if its some inevitable byproduct.
An authoritative society can just as easily be quite hands off with sciences (as long as they don't meddle in politics, e.g. not so with social sciences for example).
In fact, post-Mao China has already diverted a lot from USSR (and of course of USSRs under-productivity).
They already have pragmatic (if authoritarian) political goals and approaches, and could not care less what Mao said or what the "laws of historical materialism" are, etc -- whereas early communist elites were hang up on such things.
One added difference between USSR then and China now (besides the obvious huge change in productivity and wealth) is that Chinese elites also know about Lysenkoism and its results.
Knowing it's a bad idea doesn't seem to stop anybody here, because the driving forces of politics and power don't care. Submission is more important than correctness.