Schrödinger’s panda

CHINA seems to swing from insecurity about its science to hubris. In 2015, when Tu Youyou, a pharmacologist, became the first scientist to win a Nobel prize for work carried out in China, the state media’s reaction was not to celebrate her ground-breaking medicinal chemistry. Rather, they claimed that the award was a recognition of traditional Chinese medicine—something she said had little to do with the work that won her the award.

This week Xi Jinping, China’s president, fell into the opposite trap, of overconfidence. Addressing a sea of scientists at a joint meeting in Beijing of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Chinese Academy of Engineering and the China Association for Science and Technology (see picture above), he repeated his government’s aim that China should become a leading scientific innovator by 2030 and a dominant scientific country by 2049 (a date chosen because it is the 100th anniversary of the communist takeover).

China already spends lavishly on research and development, and publishes reams of scientific papers. Spending on R&D has more than doubled as a share of the economy since 2000, reaching 2.1% of GDP in 2014, just below the rich-world average, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an inter-governmental think-tank. Meanwhile, GDP itself has trebled. The OECD thus says China will be the world’s largest R&D spender by 2019. In terms of scientific papers published in English, the country is second only to the United States, and its output is rising by 20% a year.

But much of the published work is insubstantial, and a worrying amount is fraudulent. The process of selecting which projects should benefit from the vast pool of money available is often bureaucratic and wasteful. That, at least, is a widespread view of China’s scientific establishment outside China. Much of the criticism is justified, though becoming less so.

Mine’s bigger than yours

China should be about to reap some rewards from its massive investment in big—indeed, colossal—science. The world’s largest single-aperture radio telescope, being built in Guizhou province, is due to open in September. The Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (Tianyan, in Chinese) dwarfs all other such instruments; the next-largest has a diameter of 305 metres. China is also building an underground neutrino observatory, its second, in Guangdong province. And it is expanding 25-fold its dark-matter-investigating Jinping underground laboratory, in Sichuan province, making that the world’s largest subterranean lab.

As the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe has shown, in some areas of science size matters. The enormous collecting area of Tianyan, for example, means that it will be able to pick up signals from deeper areas of space. Naturally, China is talking about building an even larger particle collider than the LHC.

There is evidence, too, that the quality of Chinese scientists’ work is improving. Nature, one of the world’s foremost scientific journals, keeps track of the number of articles published in 68 respected periodicals. It takes into account the relative contribution of each author and makes adjustments for the over-representation of papers on astronomy and astrophysics in its sample journals. The result is an index of a country’s or an institution’s production of high-quality research papers.

According to Nature, China’s score in this index rose by 44% between 2012 and 2015, leaving it second behind America, whose score fell by 8% in that period. Among institutions, the Chinese Academy of Sciences had by far the highest score, almost double that of second-ranked Harvard University, though this is partly because the academy, with 68,000 employees and 104 institutions, is so large. China’s research output is dominated by chemistry and the physical sciences. Over 60% of China’s index number is accounted for by articles on chemistry.

These findings are consistent with a study from 2014 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, by Yu Xie of Peking University and others. Dr Yu found that Chinese scientific papers are being cited more often. In 2011 American scientists had about three times more articles in the 1% of most frequently cited papers than Chinese scientists did. That is a big improvement for China: in 2001 the Americans had 15 times as many.

But as President Xi admitted to the assembled academicians this week, science and technology remains “a bottleneck” for economic growth in China. The biggest problems are fraud and the academies of science and engineering themselves.

In 2014 China’s anti-corruption watchdog said it had “uncovered fraud in research grants managed by China’s Ministry of Science and Technology”. In April the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology retracted an article by scientists from Dalian University, in Liaoning province, because it suspected the peer-review process had been subverted. In 2015 BioMed Central retracted more than 40 papers submitted by Chinese researchers.

The prevalence of fraud reflects poor oversight and a dodgy research culture. Both are rooted in problems in the academies, which are dominated by bureaucrats rather than research scientists. In 2010 two Chinese university deans wrote in Nature’s rival Science that “to obtain major grants in China, it is an open secret that doing good research is not as important as schmoozing with powerful bureaucrats and their favourite experts”.

That is starting to change. The Academy of Sciences altered its criteria for membership in 2014, requiring prospective members to be nominated by other academicians or academic institutions and to be elected by all members. Previously, nominations could come from ministries, the Communist Party, the army and even from companies; the electorate was restricted and thus easier to influence.

But the system remains hierarchical and politicised. Even Ms Tu fell foul of it. Having begun her career in the Cultural Revolution, when scientists were deemed one of “nine black categories”, she does not have a doctorate and did not study abroad. She has been turned down by the Academy of Sciences four times. Chinese science has a way to go before it can lead the world in quality, as well as quantity.