China’s state-run science awards system has been exposed as fundamentally broken, with the South China Morning Post reporting deep concerns over its integrity and effectiveness. While the apparatus of state recognition rots from within, the same regime pushes forward with a propulsion engine concept capable of accelerating from Mach 0 to Mach 6—technology explicitly framed as the backbone for future fighter jets and missiles. The contradiction is glaring: the state’s scientific bureaucracy fails the people, yet its war machine hums with deadly efficiency. This is not innovation for liberation, but for domination—another reminder that under capitalism and state rule, science serves the generals, not the people. **The State’s Broken Reward Machine** The South China Morning Post reveals that China’s science awards system is riddled with flaws, raising serious questions about how resources and recognition are distributed within the country’s research institutions. The system, designed to reward scientific achievement, instead appears to be a tool of control, patronage, and manufactured prestige—all under the banner of ‘national progress.’ When the state controls the purse strings and the podium, science becomes just another arm of the apparatus, not a force for human emancipation. **Mach 6 for Missiles, Not for the Masses** Buried in the same report is the revelation of a propulsion engine concept that can propel a vehicle from zero to six times the speed of sound in a single leap. The technology is not aimed at high-speed trains for workers, nor at clean energy solutions for communities. Instead, it is explicitly positioned as the future power source for fighter jets and missiles—tools of war, surveillance, and state violence. The state’s priorities are laid bare: when the military-industrial complex demands speed, the people get silence. **Who Benefits? Who Pays?** The state’s science awards funnel prestige and funding to a select few, while the vast majority of scientists and workers toil under precarious conditions, their labor exploited to feed the machine. Meanwhile, the propulsion technology—developed with public money and institutional support—will be handed to the generals and the war planners. The people fund the research, but the state decides who gets protected and who gets bombed. This is the true cost of hierarchical science: the bosses of the military-industrial complex grow richer and more powerful, while the rest of us are left with the fallout. **No Reform, Only Abolition** Calls for ‘fixing’ the science awards system miss the point entirely. The problem is not inefficiency—it is the system itself. A state-controlled science apparatus cannot serve the people when it is structurally bound to serve the state. The same goes for the propulsion technology: no amount of ethical oversight will turn a missile engine into a tool for liberation. Real change comes not from begging the state to behave, but from building autonomous, horizontal networks of knowledge and technology outside its control. Until then, every breakthrough in state science is a step toward deeper domination.
