A recent Times article described how China is stepping up efforts to lure home the top Chinese scholars who live and work abroad. The nation is already second only to the United States in the volume of scientific papers published, and it has, as Thomas Friedman pointed out, more students in technical colleges and universities than any other country.
But China’s drive to succeed in the sciences is also subjecting itsresearch establishment to intense pressure and sharper scrutiny. And asthe 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 inscience and technology, and what are the impediments to creating aresearch 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’sincreasing demand for obedience smothers creativity in many of thesocial 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 oftechnology? Beijing is making a big effort to do so. Recently, manypatriotic Chinese are returning to build their careers in hardsciences. Western analysts reason that the flow of talent must meanthat 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 remainslargely unreformed, and important impediments to scientific advancementremain. First, there is the Communist Party’s orthodoxy. Wide swaths ofbiology, for instance, are considered sensitive because the regimepromotes dubious theories of ethnicity and race.
A Climate for Misconduct
Cong Cao is a researcher with the Neil D. LevinGraduate Institute of International Relations and Commerce at the StateUniversity 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 editorialscommenting on a case in which scientists at Jinggangshan University inChina 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, theChinese equivalent to the American Association for the Advancement ofScience, 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 toseveral factors, including the pursuit of promotion and other materialrewards, the lack of autonomy in the research community, and societalinfluences.
Can Quantity Lead to Quality?
John Kao, the chairman and founder of the Institute for Large Scale Innovation,has been an adviser to many organizations involved in developinginnovation strategies and capabilities. A former Harvard BusinessSchool 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 “bruteforce” strategy in creating many new institutions of higher educationthat in turn will produce a large number of new scientists andengineers. The underlying assumption seems to be that quantity willlead to quality; in other words, world class achievement will emergewhen the “installed base” of talent reaches a critical mass.
In this approach, the Chinese certainly have the law of largenumbers on their side; the high end of the Chinese bell curve is amountain of talented people. Thus, it seems inevitable that brute forcequantity will eventually lead to “premium quality” measured in suchterms as scientific breakthroughs and Nobel Prizes.
Many Reasons to Return
Vivek Wadhwa is a visiting scholar atUniversity of California, Berkeley, senior research associate atHarvard 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 programin 2005, nearly all of the graduating Chinese students told me theyplanned stay in the U.S. for at least a few years. Most said theywanted 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” ratesfor Chinese Ph.D.’s have hovered around 90 percent for the last twodecades.
Now when I talk to my Chinese students, most are buying one-way tickets home. When my team at Duke, Berkeley and Harvard surveyed 229students from China during October 2008, we found that only 10 percentwanted to stay permanently. Fifty-two percent believed that the bestjob opportunities were in China, and 74 percent thought the best dayslay ahead for the Chinese economy.
The Stem Cell Example
Jonathan Morenois a professor of medical ethics, history and sociology of science atthe University of Pennsylvania. He is a senior fellow at the Center forAmerican Progress.
Whether China can succeed in reversing the brain drain, especiallyin cutting edge areas like stem cell research, will depend on more thanraw government investment in human capital like young scientists andmaterial assets like labs. Although the centralized Chinese state hasundeniable advantages, transparency remains the oxygen of efficientscience.
The U.S. should emphasize scientific exchange through personal relationships.
Even before the recent dust-up between Google and the Chinesegovernment, I found access to Web sites about such seemingly innocuoustopics as U.S. research standards blocked during a recent visit to aBeijing campus.
Still more challenging for China will be to develop into a trustedplayer in the competitive and skeptical global community of lifescientists. Investment in basic research lags well behind efforts toproduce clinical applications. Private treatment centers offer dubiousstem cells to desperate patients without adequate oversight.
But there is no denying that China is becoming an ever more important player in regenerative medicine.
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 visitingprofessor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
China faces promise as well as challenges in its goal to becoming aleader in innovation. Its strengths derive from a strongly supportivecentral government while its weaknesses lie at the local levels.
The government is adaptable to new ideas, but rigid hierarchies and limits on information are obstacles.
The government has the determination, plans and resources to recruittop talent. During the current economic downturn, a new initiativecalled “A Thousand-Person Plan” was formulated and implemented, torecruit thousands of Chinese scholars abroad in science, engineeringand enterprises. These scholars can receive compensation equal to theirsalaries abroad, and significant amounts of research funding that oftenexceed what they may receive abroad.
China has the ability to achieve its goals because it has often doneso once it determines that these objectives are imperative to itsfuture. The government is very adaptable to new ideas and practicesthat it deems necessary. And when necessary, China is efficient inallocating resources and implementing effective policies.
In reality, obstacles abound. Scholars fresh from abroad canexperience cultural shock in dealing with the established hierarchy inthe research community, which is often based on seniority and closelyknit networks. Subjective factors often trump objective standards ininternal and local evaluation processes, resource allocation and grantapplication.
