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Opinion
From ‘science fiction’ to reality: charting an unexplored aspect of China’s rapid rise
In its 3 years, the Post’s dedicated science team has reported on China’s frontier research, goals, innovators and technological leaps
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Chow Chung-yan began his journalistic career at the South China Morning Post and rose to become editor-in-chief in 2025.
Dear friends,
This month marks the third anniversary of our small but dynamic science reporting team. To celebrate, I’d like to share a story with you.
In 2014 – a year after Edward Snowden’s exclusive interview with the South China Morning Post – we published a follow-up. Our science reporter, Stephen Chen, wrote that China was developing a “hack-proof” quantum communication network that would revolutionise encryption. The story was met with scepticism. Few people knew what quantum communication was, and even fewer believed China could outpace the US, Europe, or Japan in this field.
Some readers questioned if we were treating “science fiction” as news. One drily noted that Stephen had already predicted the advent of quantum communication years earlier – yet the so-called “quantum leap” remained “unobserved”.
By 2017, however, mainstream Western media had finally begun taking China’s quantum technology seriously. Today, no one dismisses it as fantasy.
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