Abstract:Beijing has been China’s political and cultural capital for at least six centuries. Its contemporary domination of Chinese science is the result of Communist central planning: a deliberate concentration of funding, institutions, researchers and facilities, including mega-science infrastructure such as the Beijing Electron–Positron Collider, as well as the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), located 1,900 km away, in southwestern Guizhou, but operated by the Beijing-based National Astronomical Observatory of China.