Read the passage and answer the following question
Although we are behind the foreigners in scientific achievement, our native ability is adequate to the construction of a great material civilization, which is proved by the concrete evidence of past achievements. We invented the compass, printing, porcelain, gunpowder, and the curing of tea and weaving of silk. Foreigners have made good use of these inventions. For example, modern ocean travel would be impossible if there were no compass. The fast printing machine, which turns out tens of thousands of copies per hour, had its origin in China. Foreign military greatness
comes from gunpowder, which was first used by the Chinese. Furthermore, many of the latest inventions in architecture in the West have been practiced in the East for thousands of years. This genius of our race for material inventions seems now to be lost; and so our greatness has become but the history of bygone glories.
I believe that we have many things to learn from the West, and that we can learn them. Many Westerners maintain that the hardest thing to learn is aerial science; already many Chinese have become skillful aviators. If aeronautics can be learned, I believe everything can be learned by our people. Science is only three hundred years old, and it was not highly developed until fifty years ago. Formerly coal was used as the source of energy; now the age of coal has given place to the age of electricity.
Recently, America had a plan for nationalizing the water-power of the country. America has hundreds of thousands of factories. Each big factory has to have a powerhouse, which consumes a tremendous amount of coal. The railroads in the country are busily engaged in transporting coal and have little time for transporting agricultural products. As a means of economizing coal and lessening transportation, a national central powerhouse is suggested. When such a house is built, the entire nation will receive energy from one central station. The result will be the elimination of enormous waste and the increase of efficiency.
When we learn from the West, it is evident that we should learn the latest inventions instead of repeating the various steps of development. In the case of the powerhouse, we may well learn to adopt the centralized plan of producing electricity, and need not follow the old plan of using coal to produce energy. In this way, we can easily within ten years catch up with the West in material achievement.
The time is critical. We have no time to waste, and we ought to take the latest and the best that the West can offer. Our intelligence is by no means inferior to that of the Japanese. With our historical background and our natural and human resources, it should be easier for us than it was for Japan to rise to the place of a first class Power by a partial adaptation of Western civilization. We ought to be ten times stronger than Japan because our country is more than ten times bigger and richer than Japan. China is potentially equal to ten Powers. At present England,
America, France, Italy, and Japan constitute the so-called Big Five. Even with the rise of Germany and Soviet Russia, the world