Strange to think that revolutions, unrest, the Sino-Japanese war, and the civil war all provided better conditions for fostering top talent than Mao's China did.
I think it is bit more nuanced than just Mao, pre 1935 you could do ground breaking research in almost any field with limited to no funding at all. Since the war you need increasingly large amount of budgets which western universities with full government support enjoy, ans it was not possible to compete for India or China or even the Soviet Union to keep up.
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The cultural changes you allude to, certainly were a medium term negative factor, but the pre 1950 setup were hardly sustainable or efficient. In pre Mao China or similarly British India (or even till recently) it was not a meritocracy there was a privileged elite who had all the opportunity and few shined if they were also talented.
Today China is one of the most meritocratic economies after all - despite all the authoritarian flaws, we are only seeing positive growth in foundational scientific research and rapidly in contrast with the rising anti-science sentiment we are seeing in so many parts of the western and western influenced world.
The socio-cultural reset was important and necessary for both China and India to progress, the methods of the Mao era are questionable both for their cruelty and also for how efficient and effective they were it was just bad all around however the need of the reset came from a valid place I think.
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There is whole dimension of bias which does disadvantage particularly Chinese research output today. Don't get me wrong I am not saying there is conscious bias against Chinese researchers. The bias is because despite the esteem the Nobel prize is not a global one.
The committee sit in Scandinavian countries closely working with Norway government. The members are predominately affiliated to western universities and fluent in English or other European languages and read Nature / Science type of western journals.
This always put Soviet researches before and now Chinese and Indian(to a lesser degree) at a disadvantage compared to their western peers.
The committee are not equipped to judge the research output of the whole world, till recently this was not a problem, because western research post WW-II was the majority of the world output, but that is increasingly not true and in a multi-polar world.
Also for killing tens of millions of people, which not only is murder of each person but also those millions of people - and then their families - never benefit.
They were misguided, ineffective, and directly or indirectly killed people in the millions.
I am just pointing out that, the atrocities of the era doesn't justify seeing pre 1960s or pre1950s years of China with rose tinted glasses as a better era, it wasn't unless you were in the elite.
It would be no different than seeing the 1970s or any earlier generation in U.S. history as a better era. Only a very small in-group perhaps had it good. Everyone else be it black, women, indigenous, various immigrants, religious, neuro or sexually diverse have only seen net improvements in last 300 years.
But are you saying reform and change were unnecessary? The people of China were suffering immensely; the country had been in a state of domestic violent conflict, on and off, since before 1911 (as of 1949). The Communist Party became more corrupt.
Mao's policies and politics made all that much worse, but that doesn't mean nothing needed to be done.
That development would have continued.
I understand the anger and the desperation that made the Communist takeover possible but doing nothing at all and keeping all the elites in charge (instead of replacing them with new ones) would have been better.
> China was already developing economically and technologically
That's an odd version of history. China just went through WWII, including the awful Japanese invasion, which interrupted a massive civil war that restarted afterward, and which followed decades without a real national government.
> there was a large migration of Chinese to the area after it came under Japanese control
Japanese control didn't work out well for Chinese people, to say the least.
> keeping all the elites in charge
The elites had led China to disaster for a century, 'the century of humiliation' it's called (though blaming outside forces, which do deserve some blame).
> replacing them with new ones
Here we agree.
> would have been better
Certainly there is no source that can more than guess at that.
The better option would have been true democratic reform. It has worked superbly well in parts of China - Taiwan and Hong Kong. It was starting to work in 1989, and leaning in that direction before Xi.
I wonder to what extent that lead to the curbing of consideration of those behind the iron curtain.