Trade War with China
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(same report)
However, one question that always emerges when China’s rise is discussed is whether wrongdoing or game-playing has distorted the picture. For example, China has been involved in some of the most high-profile and widespread examples of suspected peer review fraud that have been uncovered in recent years. Typically, such fraud occurs when the email addresses of the authors’ suggested peer reviewers turn out to be controlled by the authors themselves or by companies connected to them. In April 2017, more than 100 Chinese-authored papers were retracted en masse by the journal Tumor Biology after editors found “strong reason to believe that the peer review process was compromised”. And according to data from Retraction Watch and published by the website Quartz in 2017, Chinese-authored papers accounted for more than half of the retractions for fake peer review between 2012 and 2016, while Taiwan accounted for another 15 per cent – the second highest amount. However, at 276 and 73 papers out of a total of 502 papers, it is only fair to note that the detected cases of fake peer review accounted for a minuscule proportion of the 9.3 million pieces of research published during the five years in question, according to Scopus.
Chinese research faces other issues, too. Plagiarism concerns are never far from the headlines, while Times Higher Education has uncovered examples of Chinese institutions making large cash offers to Western researchers in return for listing the institution on their papers, in an apparent attempt to improve their rankings. However, it is very difficult to determine the true extent of any of these practices. Ivan Oransky, founder of Retraction Watch, says that while “in many ways fake peer review is the easiest to [spot]”, China has “many, many other problems”. He, too, is unsure of their overall impact, but believes that it is important to look at the incentives that Chinese researchers are given. “There are a few things that happen in China that either don’t happen elsewhere, or happen on a smaller scale,” he says. One example is the bonuses offered for publishing in journals with a high impact factor. Another is the promotions for Chinese clinicians who publish. “So it is like publish or perish on steroids. What that has given rise to…is that organised crime has realised that there is potential here,” Oransky says. This has led to companies sprouting up in China “that may claim to be doing something very legitimate but actually aren’t”. He gives the example of companies that write manuscripts for researchers and then also go on to sell those manuscripts to other researchers for submission to different journals under their own names.
Oransky says that the fixation on whether China is overtaking the US on research volume – which in his view is an “irresponsible” way to assess relative performance – does not help matters. “I’m sure the Chinese government loves that, so it is going to create incentives for people to publish more papers,” he warns. For Rui Yang, associate dean for cross-border and international engagement at the University of Hong Kong, the high-profile episodes of fraud have a knock-on effect for Chinese science that will harm it in the long run. “The immediate effect is that international circles [lose] trust in China’s research, and scholars are no longer keen to work with Chinese colleagues,” he points out.
This reputational risk is not lost on the Chinese government. It came down hard on the more than 400 academics implicated in the Tumor Biology case and, last year, announced a range of reforms designed to clamp down on academic misconduct. The recording of instances in a national database could lead to the researchers involved being blacklisted and prevented from accessing future funding or jobs. Nicholas Steneck, an expert in research integrity at the University of Michigan, says it is “too early to tell” if China’s crackdown will bear fruit. But, he adds, when assessing the impact of misconduct on Chinese research it is also important to remember that the problems are not confined to China. “It certainly would help if publication incentives were more realistic, but that is true in most countries,” he says. “Globally, there is too much misconduct in research. No country can sit back and say: ‘We are doing a good job.’”
He concedes that the difficulty of controlling China’s gigantic research system means that it “may have more questionable publications than other countries. But it also does excellent research based on high standards of integrity. I think China should be given a chance to show that it is making a sincere effort to improve integrity.” Other observers suggest that the more closely China becomes involved in increasingly globalised scientific collaboration networks, the more its researchers will, of their own accord, strive to adhere to international standards. And this trend will only be furthered by the huge numbers of Chinese academics being trained abroad, they add. William Kirby, Chang professor of China studies at Harvard University, says that “any place where there is enormous pressure to publish – and that is certainly true in China…[imposes] pressures for people to bend professional norms. So that is a worry, but I don’t think that is a particularly significant worry in the long run because of the growing strength of professional oversight…and because of the strength of international standards.”
Ultimately, I sense you need more cross-country collaborations and exchanges of ideas to gradually root out fake peer-reviews and plagiarisms. Thus, improving the overall quality of research. However, Trump is closing the door to such exchanges. while Chinese researchers may be more incentivized to overtake the U.S. in publishing "research volumes" at face value rather than really trying to solve their country's real problems.
My whole family is in academia/corporate RnD. I'm just gonna say this.
China's low quality research problems are OK. It will improve over time with GDP and institutional improvements. Right now the priority is to send students overseas to learn as much as possible and hope some come back. The ones at home will learn basic research techniques which will allow them to be employed at companies which are more profit driven.
Money spent on science is never wasted, it doesn't matter even if only 1% of the research is useful. It's better than fighting wars, welfare, ...
A country needs to spend as much money as possible to train scientists/high tech workers even if it means that money is wasted. A few of these will lead the others.
China's low quality research problems are OK. It will improve over time with GDP and institutional improvements. Right now the priority is to send students overseas to learn as much as possible and hope some come back. The ones at home will learn basic research techniques which will allow them to be employed at companies which are more profit driven.
Money spent on science is never wasted, it doesn't matter even if only 1% of the research is useful. It's better than fighting wars, welfare, ...
A country needs to spend as much money as possible to train scientists/high tech workers even if it means that money is wasted. A few of these will lead the others.
I am not rejecting China's accomplishments. What I am saying is that the West - especially Anglo-Saxon countries - still dominate the fields of technology, political discourse (including media), international trade and finance, and military. There is no point challenging Pax Americana as China still has lots of domestic issues to be dealt with, especially issues relating to its own domestic governance, political legitimacy, and relative technological vulnerabilities. When Germany went head-to-head against Pax Britannia in 1914, the German Army at least had marginally better rifles, artillery, and machineguns than the Brits. Although the Germany Navy was smaller, its dreadnaughts had more accurate guns, as demonstrated during the Battle of Jutland. German scientists turned out just as many state-of-the-art military technologies (like gas) as the Brits did. In fact, Germany was the first to field poison gas shells. If was only the entry of the United States that turned the tide of war against Germany. The sheer size of the combined British, Franch, and U.S. Navies also strangled Germany's maritime trade routes. Today, China has none of the advantages that Germany enjoyed prior to 1914.
Great Point! However, this is where the Trump Administration is targeting China with precision strikes. As disproportional as banning China students sound, you do have a bunch of white supremacists in charge of the most powerful nation and institutions on Earth. This is a brutal fact to be reckoned with. The good old days of Bush and Obama years are gone. I really don't know if Beijing understands who they are dealing with. Also, reports of espionage, IP theft, academic influence operations, and technology thefts from U.S. laboratories do provide the Trump Administration with ammunition to stop limit Chinese students from learning about the technologies of tomorrow.
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manqiangrexue
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Basically, the article you quoted is the same kind of degenerative logic seen everywhere when the West starts to lose to China. When it comes to the economy, they first start to say the US is bigger better and growing faster. Then, when China was growing faster, the US said, we're still bigger. Then, then China's PPP became bigger, the US just said screw it, you're making up data. With the military too, first they say Chinese military equipment is outdated; then, when China begins to produce top end military equipment, they say Chinese users lack training or that it looks like a stealth fighter but probably isn't. Here, when Chinese science is growing bigger and more powerful, they focus on something this is immeasurable, which is integrity. The articles I posted from Nature Rankings does not count just any articles published; these are very high standard peer reviewed articles. If the argument has degenerated into "No, Chinese articles are of worse quality " then the only answer can be, "No, I disagree; Western articles are of inferior quality." The author's data actually shows how small a problem this actually is; that there were only 273 retracted papers from Mainland China out of 9.3 million publications. And despite all this, the fact is that China is putting a lot of emphasis improving both the quality and quantity of its own scientific output both academically, and commercially so this small problem is really already included in the analysis of the rise of Chinese science. In other words, it's a small issue that is being worked on, and in the mean time, Chinese science is rising all the same.
They still dominate some fields; others they have ceded to China and others they are ceding. No fields are safe; that is what the panic is about. I have no idea why you brought up some irreverent war with Germany, Britain, etc... but the current situation is the US is going to start freaking out before China has completely overtaken it. Once again, you cannot hope for China to wait until it has overtaken the US everywhere before this confrontation takes place because the US is simply not that stupid. It's already a miracle that it took the US this long to realize the China challenge and it's quite frankly very late, trying to close the door on a guy who already has 1 arm and 1 leg inside the room. If the US waited until China was ready in every field, it might as well lay there sleeping, door open, sword hanging on the coat rack.
They are actually not able to effectively target incoming Chinese students because America's own academic institutions have raised STRONG disapproval saying their research would suffer immeasurably. Even though these are Chinese nationals coming to the US to learn, they do a lot of critical work while they are here and some of them even choose to stay. So to target Chinese students would cripple America's own research capabilities. This is a brutal fact that the US has to reckon with and that's that they rely on Chinese and other foreign scientists.
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in my opinion Trump administration is all but populated by some sort of evil geniuses that are surgically targeting china. In my opinion us policy toward china and other issues will backfire badly with a recession (trump recession) before the next presidential elections. Look at the mess that much more intelligent mp have done in iraq and global financial crisis during the bush administration. Please Read "fire and fury" to understand what kind of idiots are these people.
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