China Decoded: China's world-level plans get a Beidaihe push

Editor’s note: China Decoded is entering a new chapter. Beginning this edition, Kirsten will be taking the lead. We’re delighted to have her at the helm.

August in Beijing is always scorching and temperatures this year have hit the high 90s (mid-high 30s in Celsius), so China's leaders might well be wishing they could catch a sea breeze. But where?

For 50 years from 1953, they decamped to Beidaihe, a seaside town about 180 miles east of the capital on the Gulf of Bohai (we have a map below to show you where that is). The arrangement produced the occasional image of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, his premier and spymaster, chatting on the beach under flapping umbrellas.

But CCP leader Hu Jintao abolished the Beidaihe "summer office" in 2003, and while the power-by-the-beach myth of Beidaihe endures, mostly among overseas China watchers and journalists, it isn't any longer formally a place where policies are discussed by the top leaders with sand between their toes.

Here's what the beach looked like in 2000 shortly before Hu nixed the fabled "summer office":

Informally, we can't be 100 percent sure, like with many things in China, but most "Zhongnanhai-ologists" (CCP watchers who try to figure out what's going on behind closed doors) don't really buy the myth of Beidaihe anymore.

That's perhaps a shame for the CCP, as the event did humanize the remoteness and forbidding nature of its power. But that's their decision.

Beidaihe is still a privileged vacation spot for people favored by the state, including model workers and scientists and intellectuals whose job is to "serve the country."

CCP leaders are fond of saying that the contest for global pre-eminence will be decided on the "battlefield" of science and technology. It's a contest that the CCP has waged for decades, though the outside world didn't notice for a long time. It does now. My colleague John shows us why, below.

This year, about 60 leading science officials attended Beidaihe, something we can be pretty sure about as video footage on the state's CCTV network showed them lined up wearing the obligatory black trousers and white shirts. They will certainly, nearly all, be CCP members.  

In a nod to the older political tradition, they did meet with a very senior CCP leader: Xi Jinping's trusted right-hand advisor Cai Qi, a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, the grey-haired consiglieri to the CCP general secretary.

Xinhua made a point of saying that Xi "entrusted" Cai to meet with the scientists, so we know that what Cai said came directly from the big guy. 

Here's Cai Qi literally at Xi's right hand, on the left of the picture, meeting with an unseen Russian President Vladimir Putin, in Beijing, May, 2026:

Cai's message was clear: work harder to make China the global leader in "strategic frontier" and "key core" technologies, and, importantly this year, basic science, to ensure that China will lead simply everywhere. The country must become a "talent superpower" and the "world top talent center and innovation highland," Cai said.

According to a communications company that wrote about the meeting and that enjoys vice-ministerial status so it's authoritative, "keen observers will readily notice a striking change in the official ranking of these fields: basic research has risen from third place last year to first place this year." So that's a clue. More basic research, everyone! 

If you look at some of the faces in the CCTV video as Cai is telling the people who are technically on vacation to work harder, they do seem a bit glum towards the end. It's hard to read anything into expressions, but it would be understandable. After all, it's a busman's holiday, and not one you can realistically say no to. 

Who was all there? State media didn't say, but it's pretty certain that attendees included the heads of key state education and research institutes like the Academy of Sciences and Tsinghua University, and powerful and large state-owned companies that are active in national strategic areas like aviation and space, biomedicine and shipbuilding.

The theme this year: “Striving Forward in the 15th Five-Year Plan,” Cai told the scientists.

John has more detail on some of the international talent that China recently gained to help push that plan forward, including a Nobel Prize winner, and on how well China is doing overall—hint, extremely well.

The CCP has for decades had policies to spot and transfer top science and technology talent from overseas as well as training their own talent pipelines, often at places like the University of California, Berkeley, then getting them home to "serve the country." There are also tons of bright people in-country to choose from amid 1.3 billion people, and a lot of funding.

So, while the glory days of Beidaihe may have passed, it still serves a twofold purpose as an annual domestic push for more and better science, and an outward-facing message about China's rising power. 

For those who don't mind reading the pretty indigestible prose that is daily fare for John and me, here's a bit more detail from that communications company that has vice-ministerial status, China International Communications Group (CICG), which is managed by the Propaganda Department of the CCP Central Committee. 

"The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council invite outstanding experts and representatives from various fields to spend their vacations in Beidaihe. This is an important institutional arrangement that has been in place for many years," CICG said.

"It not only reflects the Party and the state’s warm concern and high regard for intellectuals and scientific and technological talent, but has also historically served as a 'barometer' for observing the priorities of China’s talent development efforts, the strategic layout of science and technology, and the direction of national development strategies," CICG continued.

"This year’s invited expert representatives continue to span multiple key fields, including basic research, strategic frontier technologies, critical core technologies, and the philosophy and social sciences. However, keen observers will readily notice a striking change in the official ranking of these fields: basic research has risen from third place last year to first place this year." 

There you go, keen observer. Now you know. 

Beidaihe today can be very crowded, as this photo shows:

And for your enjoyment, here it is festooned by seagulls, in another contemporary image:

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Didi Kirsten Tatlow is Senior Correspondent, International Affairs/Investigations at Newsweek. She is based in Berlin, Germany. You can get in touch by email here.

Top Chinese scientists have gathered in Beidaihe this week where they met with Xi's right-hand man, who had science and technology on his mind. 

Conversations at what used to be Beijing’s equivalent of the U.S. presidential retreat Camp David or Russia’s Sochi resort on the Black Sea likely are centered on winning the intensifying rivalry with America over emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and supercomputing. 

The core of technology is innovation, which is driven by talent. China views human capital as a key component of “comprehensive national power” (综合国力), which also includes measurements like the size of the military or the availability of natural resources.

Back in 2021, researchers at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) found that China had been producing more Ph.D.s in hard science and engineering than America since the mid-2000s, and that the gap would only widen into the mid-2020s.

Five years later, CSET’s projections have proven remarkably accurate.

The Chinese pipeline for research graduates may have produced over 77,000 new science and technology talents last year, nearly double the U.S. total, or triple if international students are excluded from the count, according to CSET’s calculations.

The last time the U.S. had such a lead in talent production was a quarter-century ago.

CSET’s modeling included natural sciences, engineering, agriculture and medicine but excluded social sciences and psychology, so the Ph.D. gap actually is much wider, if less meaningful for this discussion.

It’s often said that quantity has a quality all its own, so here’s something else China is doing in large numbers: its scientists are publishing more articles in research journals around the world.

The chart above shows the percentage share of U.S.- and Chinese-authored works in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, where top U.S. thinkers Omar Yaghi and Charles Lieber published some of their best-known research in the field. 

Lieber, who was convicted by the U.S. Justice Department for failing to disclose Chinese funding while at Harvard, joined the Shenzhen campus of China’s Tsinghua University in 2025. Yaghi, a Nobel laureate formerly of UC Berkeley, moved to Tsinghua’s main campus in Beijing just last month.

China’s numerical advantage might well pay off. It now has a large pool of talent to advance the country’s understanding of theoretical and applied sciences as Beijing seeks to dominate the technologies of tomorrow.

And with a little help from talent from the West, the “post-post-Cold War” could go either way.

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