January 18, 2010, 6:45 pm
By THE EDITORS
But China’s drive to succeed in the sciences is also subjecting its research establishment to intense pressure and sharper scrutiny. And as the standoff last week between Google and China demonstrated, the government controls the give and take of information.
How likely is it that China will become the world’s leader in science and technology, and what are the impediments to creating a research climate that would allow scientists to thrive?
- Gordon G. Chang, author and columnist
- Cong Cao, author of “China’s Scientific Elite”
- John Kao, founder of Institute for Large Scale Innovation
- Vivek Wadhwa, entrepreneur and columnist
- Jonathan Moreno, professor of history and sociology of science
- Gang Xiao, professor of physics and engineering
Hard Sciences Require Freedom, Too
Gordon G. Chang is the author of “The Coming Collapse of China” and a columnist at Forbes.com.
China’s one-party state cannot produce world-class historians, economists, political thinkers or even demographers. Beijing’s increasing demand for obedience smothers creativity in many of the social sciences and “soft” disciplines.
Wide swaths of biology, for instance, are considered sensitive because the regime promotes dubious racial theories.
But can the country nurture scientists, doctors and innovators of technology? Beijing is making a big effort to do so. Recently, many patriotic Chinese are returning to build their careers in hard sciences. Western analysts reason that the flow of talent must mean that China has turned a corner.
In one sense it has. China is an increasingly modern society, perhaps the world’s most dynamic nation. Yet its government remains largely unreformed, and important impediments to scientific advancement remain. First, there is the Communist Party’s orthodoxy. Wide swaths of biology, for instance, are considered sensitive because the regime promotes dubious theories of ethnicity and race.
Beijing, unfortunately, talks about the Hans as a majority grouping, but it is a made-to-order ethnicity with an important political purpose. Woe to the scientist who sets out to study China’s origins.
Second, Hu Jintao, the current supremo, has reinvigorated Marxist instruction in schools and universities. At the very least, incessant campaigns are a distraction from real research and study. Every month spent on understanding “the primary stage of socialism” or “the important thought of the Three Represents” is one fewer month devoted to the periodic table or sub-atomic particles. Of course, the new ideological indoctrination stifles free thinking across the board.
Third, China’s schools are deeply flawed. Plagiarism and corruption, for one thing, are rampant and probably getting worse.
In December, two university researchers were found to have faked data in 70 papers published in 2007. Incredibly, the pair received wide support across China as many argued that the country’s bureaucratic educational system encourages the forgery of data and the production of low-quality publications.
Such a system, it is safe to say, does not promote scientific breakthroughs.
Finally, it is ironic — and a bit sad — that Beijing is trying to encourage science while it is tightening censorship of media and the Internet, forcing Google out of the country by attempting to cripple its operations, and issuing rules that will cut off access to Web sites that have not registered with the authorities, potentially disconnecting China from the Internet.
Shutting off China from the world, which is the effect of many of the central government’s recent actions, is not going to help make the country a leader in science or technology.
A Climate for Misconduct
Cong Cao is a researcher with the Neil D. Levin Graduate Institute of International Relations and Commerce at the State University of New York and the author of “China’s Scientific Elite” and “China’s Emerging Technological Edge: Assessing the Role of High-End Talent.”
China’s ambition to become an innovation-oriented nation by 2020 (as outlined in its Medium and Long-Term Plan for the Development of Science and Technology: 2006−2020), will be significantly impeded if it does not make effort eradicating misconduct in science.
The pressure for “visible” outcomes encourages academic fraud and corruption.
Recently, Lancet and Nature, two leading international science journals, published editorials commenting on a case in which scientists at Jinggangshan University in China were caught fabricating some 70 papers submitted to Acta Crystallographica Section E.
The case is just the tip of the iceberg of academic frauds in China. According to the China Association for Science and Technology, the Chinese equivalent to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, more than half of the Chinese scientists who responded to its recent survey indicated that they were aware of incidents of misconduct involving their colleagues.
The rising scientific misconduct in China can be attributed to several factors, including the pursuit of promotion and other material rewards, the lack of autonomy in the research community, and societal influences.
In China, academic credentials mean significant economic benefits and sometimes political opportunities. For instance, an elite membership in the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering is a stepping-stone for controlling resources and for gaining material privileges equivalent to those of a vice governor. With so much emphasis on a higher professional title, no wonder some scientists have risked being caught for fraud.
The campaign for more international publications, especially in journals included in the Science Citation Index, a bibliometric database compiled by Thomson Reuters, has an unintended consequence — institutions of learning have placed more emphasis on quantity, and assessed, promoted and rewarded their scientists accordingly. When a scientist has difficulty fulfilling the required quantity for the position legitimately, he or she is likely to divide the research into “the least publishable unit,” or even take a detour.
Institutional expectations for Chinese scientists have mounted, especially when the Chinese government has in recent years significantly increased its investment in research and development. The pressure for “visible” outcomes or even a Nobel Prize in science in 20 years has further fueled this growing misconduct.
The institutional watchdog responsible for exposing, investigating and punishing deviance cases exits on paper only, largely because of the lack of the autonomy in the scientific community.
And it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to expose misconduct committed by high-profile scientists, because of the interference from both the involved people and the political leadership who make them pre-eminent in the first place.
Thus, those being punished are most likely small flies, while the big tigers are usually untouched, which has terrifying and lasting consequences.
Finally, China’s research community adapts to an environment in which the influence of commercialism has been powerful and the bureaucracy has become seriously corrupt. Therefore, it is hard to conclude whether the corruptive society has caused more frauds in science, or whether the misconduct in the scientific community happens to take place in a society experiencing problems amid dramatic changes.
Can Quantity Lead to Quality?
John Kao, the chairman and founder of the Institute for Large Scale Innovation, has been an advisor to many organizations involved in developing innovation strategies and capabilities. A former Harvard Business School professor, he is the author of “Jamming” and “Innovation Nation.”
The drama of China’s continuing progress in the sciences will be based on its ability to translate quantity into quality.
China’s current practices of central planning reveal an industrial nostalgia rather than an ethos for innovation.
What does this mean? China is now pursuing what I call a “brute force” strategy in creating many new institutions of higher education that in turn will produce a large number of new scientists and engineers. The underlying assumption seems to be that quantity will lead to quality; in other words, world class achievement will emerge when the “installed base” of talent reaches a critical mass.
In this approach, the Chinese certainly have the law of large numbers on their side; the high end of the Chinese bell curve is a mountain of talented people. Thus, it seems inevitable that brute force quantity will eventually lead to “premium quality” measured in such terms as scientific breakthroughs and Nobel Prizes.
However, to attain quality, China will also have to master the skills of nurturing talent and supporting creative culture. China’s current practices of central planning and quotas for patents and publications reveal an industrial nostalgia rather than an innovation economy ethos that embraces creative leaps and serendipity.
There is also the question of whether China can create a comprehensive innovation system that marries its growing prowess in science and technology to related fields such as entrepreneurship, design and social innovation that are essential for realizing the value of scientific achievement.
Meanwhile, China continues to build its talent engine, and to the extent that it is perceived as a place for creating wealth, for finding academic opportunity as well as research funding, talent will flow there in increasing numbers. This blending of indigenous and imported talent will be another modality by which quantity is translated into quality within the Chinese system.
Many Reasons to Return
Vivek Wadhwa is a visiting scholar at University of California, Berkeley, senior research associate at Harvard Law School and director of research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.
When I joined Duke University’s Masters of Engineering Management program in 2005, nearly all of the graduating Chinese students told me they planned stay in the U.S. for at least a few years. Most said they wanted to make America their new home.
Anti-immigrant policies in the U.S. and a booming economy in China are causing highly skilled workers to go home.
Indeed, according to the National Science Foundation, “stay” rates for Chinese Ph.D.’s have hovered around 90 percent for the last two decades.
Now when I talk to my Chinese students, most are buying one-way tickets home. When my team at Duke, Berkeley and Harvard surveyed 229 students from China during October 2008, we found that only 10 percent wanted to stay permanently. Fifty-two percent believed that the best job opportunities were in China, and 74 percent thought the best days lay ahead for the Chinese economy.
Add to this the anti-immigrant hysteria which is building in the U.S. Senate (new legislation has been proposed to restrict visas for foreigners) and a booming economy in China, it is no wonder they’re headed home. There are no hard numbers available on the numbers of returnees to China, but anecdotal evidence indicates that tens of thousands have already returned and larger numbers will return home over the next few years.
When you visit the research labs of multinationals in China and meet local entrepreneurs, you notice that top positions are filled by returnees. They are bringing home valuable knowledge about Western markets and experience in creating innovative technologies. And they are telling their friends still in the U.S. how good things are back home.
In another survey of 637 returnees to China conducted from March to September 2008, we asked how they had fared since returning home. Seventy-two percent said they were doing better professionally. The percentage in senior management slots increased from 9 percent in the U.S. to 36 percent when they returned. Seventy-seven percent valued the opportunity to be back with their family and friends.
Everything wasn’t rosy: Returnees complained of pollution, reverse culture shock, inferior education for children, frustration with excessive bureaucracy and health-care quality.
The bottom line is that the U.S. is providing China a huge amount of foreign aid without even realizing it. We’re exporting engines of economic growth and helping them become our long-term competitors.
The Stem Cell Example
Jonathan Moreno is a professor of medical ethics, history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
Whether China can succeed in reversing the brain drain, especially in cutting edge areas like stem cell research, will depend on more than raw government investment in human capital like young scientists and material assets like labs. Although the centralized Chinese state has undeniable advantages, transparency remains the oxygen of efficient science.
The U.S. should emphasize scientific exchange through personal relationships.
Even before the recent dust-up between Google and the Chinese government, I found access to Web sites about such seemingly innocuous topics as U.S. research standards blocked during a recent visit to a Beijing campus.
Still more challenging for China will be to develop into a trusted player in the competitive and skeptical global community of life scientists. Investment in basic research lags well behind efforts to produce clinical applications. Private treatment centers offer dubious stem cells to desperate patients without adequate oversight.
But there is no denying that China is becoming an ever more important player in regenerative medicine.
A recent analysis by a group from the University of Toronto indicates that China published 20 times as many stem cell scientific papers in 2008 as it did in 2000. Chinese labs have produced at least 25 human embryonic stem cell lines and perhaps as many as 70.
The stem cell example is a window into Chinese advances in biology. China is now second in published papers on the biomedical sciences, according to a report released on Friday by the National Science Foundation. The U.S. lead is partly due to China’s decision to focus more on its chemical industry, but the long-term trend is clear.
In response, the Obama administration is working on new public-private partnerships in STEM education, has set a goal to raise R&D investment to 3 percent of gross domestic product (from 2.68 percent currently), and is developing a framework to revitalize U.S. manufacturing as part of an innovation-based economy.
In the short term, the U.S. should build on the advantages of an open society by emphasizing scientific exchange through personal relationships. Recent improvements in the visa system will help. In my experience, the new generation of Chinese scientists is intensely interested in intellectual property (though I’m not sure they appreciate the irony); we should invest in our patent system to ensure timely and valid awards. Our continued leadership in science might turn partly on these intangibles.
Strengths From the Top
Gang Xiao, a professor of physics and engineering, is the director of the Center for Nanoscience and Soft Matter at Brown University. He graduated from Nanjing University in China and has been a visiting professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
China faces promise as well as challenges in its goal to becoming a leader in innovation. Its strengths derive from a strongly supportive central government while its weaknesses lie at the local levels.
The Chinese government is very adaptable to new ideas and practices that it deems necessary.
The government has the determination, plans and resources to recruit top talent. During the current economic downturn, a new initiative called “A Thousand-Person Plan” was formulated and implemented, to recruit thousands of Chinese scholars abroad in science, engineering and enterprises. These scholars can receive compensation equal to their salaries abroad, and significant amounts of research funding that often exceed what they may receive abroad.
China has the ability to achieve its goals because it has often done so once it determines that these objectives are imperative to its future. The government is very adaptable to new ideas and practices that it deems necessary. And when necessary, China is efficient in allocating resources and implementing effective policies.
In reality, obstacles abound. Scholars fresh from abroad can experience cultural shock in dealing with the established hierarchy in the research community, which is often based on seniority and closely knit networks. Subjective factors often trump objective standards in internal and local evaluation processes, resource allocation and grant application.
At the local government and university levels, the delivery of necessary services, support and promised share of funding may be delayed. The center’s goals have a small impact on the priorities of local officials preoccupied with a myriad of daily challenges. Accumulated frustration can discourage returning scientists from a long-term commitment.
Developing a research environment conductive to discovery and innovation also takes more than modern research facilities and money. Scholars need to be able to think independently, form collaboration networks without interference, and distribute and access information freely. The Internet is one of the most productive tools for scholars. Though the government has no intention to block Web access for scientific research, the lack of full Internet service will limit Chinese scientists’ research efforts.
To meet these challenges, China will increasingly need to use international scientists to provide objective assessment on scholars’ research, to provide more efficient local service to scientists, and to facilitate full Internet access.
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