“...soft places tend to produce soft men; for the same land cannot yield both wonderful crops and men who are noble and courageous in war. And so the Persians agreed with him and departed, leaving him alone. They had lost the argument with Cyrus, and chose to dwell in a poor land rather than to be slaves to others and to cultivate the plains.”
Excerpt From: Herodotus, Robert B. Strassler. “The Landmark Herodotus: Histories [2007, 2009].” iBooks.
The size of China's R&D manpower force looks even more formidable. Its total R&D personnel last year numbered almost four million, against 2.4 million for the whole of the European Union and 0.9 million for Japan. China also has a huge reserve army of graduates, thanks to 2,900 universities and colleges as of last year, with a total enrollment of 37 million, against the 21 million of the US. One in five of the world's university students is in China and, in line with other East Asian countries like Japan and South Korea, China has a relatively high proportion (about 40 per cent) of its university students taking up science and technology subjects.
http://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/how-china-is-fast-narrowing-the-technology-gap-with-the-west
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