China Will Lead World Scientific Research By 2020 387
Hugh Pickens writes "An analysis of papers published in 10,500 academic journals across the world shows that, in terms of academic papers published, China is now second only to the US, and will take first place by 2020. Chinese scientists are increasing their output at a far faster rate than counterparts in rival 'emerging' nations such as India, Russia, and Brazil. The number of peer-reviewed papers published by Chinese researchers rose 64-fold over the past 30 years. 'China is out on its own, far ahead of the pack,' says James Wilsdon, of the Royal Society in London. 'If anything, China's recent research performance has exceeded even the high expectations of four or five years ago.' According to Wilsdon, three main factors are driving Chinese research. First is the government's enormous investment, with funding increases far above the rate of inflation, at all levels of the system from schools to postgraduate research. Second is the organized flow of knowledge from basic science to commercial applications. And third is the efficient and flexible way in which China is tapping the expertise of its extensive scientific diaspora in North America and Europe, tempting back mid-career scientists with deals that allow them to spend part of the year working in the West and part in China." Here's the Financial Times's original article.
Re:More than just those three reasons (Score:3, Interesting)
If anyone could cite a single therapy to come from embryonic stem cell research your comment might have some force.
Unfortunately, solving that is equivalent to figuring out cancer (and that's essentially what you get when you put embryonic (undifferentiated) stem cells in animals); this is basic research pretending to be applied. Look at e.g. the recent equivocations of the California state organization that's administering their effort.
It's part of a trend. (Score:2, Interesting)
On the other hand, he said, the United States is pretty unmatched in agricultural exports because of the natural resources at its disposal. China seems to be the biggest importer of agricultural goods from the U.S. All of that is to say, we might eventually see an increase in the value of raw commodities some time in the near future because of their increased export value.
Since Slashdot is all about unsubstantiated rumors, is now an appropriate time to say I don't have any references for this?
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My signature is ill and couldn't be with us today.
New Super Power (Score:3, Interesting)
It really is quite interesting to see a new Super Power being born. This is made a bit more interesting as I'm an American and "I" have been the Super Power for my entire life. To be witnessing the handover/taking of that torch is, admittedly a little unsettling, but hey, lets be honest, the US is no barometer of "good". We're pretty shady in our own right.
That being said, I have a feeling if there isn't a massive overhaul of the Chinese government, it may be a short lived stay at the top. As their populace inevitably feels the benefits of being at the top, they are going to want a better standard of living. As more and more of their populace starts wanting more, wanting "better", and becoming more educated, the corruption, censoring, etc, is going to get more and more obvious. I can easily see their population eventually standing up and demanding something better.
Hopefully they don't have the same growing pains we did (civil war, etc), although, we did come out better for it and it didn't kill us as a nation.
It will be an interesting show to watch, even if it is a bit unnerving.
Not held back by pesky "ethics" (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Quantity != Quality (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Let me take you back 25 years (Score:4, Interesting)
No I didn't, Japan didn't stop growing because it ran out of people(though that certainly is a risk in the future), it stopped growing because it's economic model, the EXACT same model China is using, works really well you are playing catch-up, but tends to fall apart really quickly once you are about equal with your competitors. China is heading for a crash much like Japan in the near future. Also, although China's population is 10x that of Japan, they are actually facing a very similar demographic challenge, the average age of the Chinese is increasing and the one-child per family policy is going to come back to bite them in the ass eventually when there are more retirees than there are workers.
In addition, China is facing a demographic challenge that the Japanese are not facing, namely a shortage of women. By 2020 there will be massive social unrest in China as thousands of men who cannot find brides start becoming really aggressive. What I find hilarious about the situation is the fact that China actively discourages homosexuality. Hell, if I were running a country where there were on average 120 males to every 100 females, I would be out there promoting homosexuality like crazy, if more men were gay then they wouldn't riot about not being able to find a woman
Re:And yet (Score:3, Interesting)
Lots of Fords to sell. Lots of deals to be done.
Japan had its own ideas of empire.
Japan had no real natural supplies for the 20th century.
They did the math and took form China.
The US added sanctions and Japan re did the math. They had one shot and removing the US or it was all over.
They rolled the dice before the real shortages set in.
true and not-true (Score:5, Interesting)
Let me bust some myths here...
1. By publication numbers, YES! China or even any Asian institution can easily knock down a Western institution. But once you bring in "Impact Factor", Asian institutions sink in to the bottom of the pacific!!
Maybe Westerners don't know much about what I'm about to tell. In general, researchers in Asia (especially of Chinese descent) loves to publish barrage of papers every year. Most institutions in this part of the world gives you incentives/bonuses based on the "number" of publications.
How do I know this? Because I'm a PhD student in an university in south-east Asia. When I entered this department, head of research was a mainland Chinese. His first rule was "publish at least 1 journal + 1 conference paper every year. Without 2 journal papers, I won't even read your thesis".
As a consequence of this rat-race, people here are just publishing every crap they can and they don't respect the quality or adherence to ethics of sciences. Even one time, a chinese-descent researcher asked me to fake/make-up data and publish (in fact, that's how she get really amazing data for publications). Here people may call it "scientific discovery", but for a proper trained eyes (like myself), its nothing but "scientific fraud".
Personally, I'm very disappointed with how research departments operate here. Hence I applied to US grad schools last month.
2. Can China improve ? I'm not sure. But certainly I have met several extremely talented mainland Chinese researchers, but all of them reside in some other country (e.g. Australia, Singapore).
Then again, I was asked to review a conference paper, written by *post-doc* students from a non-popular rural university in China. Literally, it was unreadable. It seems they have heavily used the thesaurus or used a translator altogether. Lets forget about the language (even I am happy to help them re-write the paper). That particular paper I read, it didn't prove anything significant nor important, knowledge contribution wise.. NULL. Undergrads in my university report much better research outcomes.
So it is hard to predict... but surely, western institutions still have the mojo.
3. Despite what we see and read, I strongly believe they (Chinese) have a proper R&D knowledge sphere hidden out somewhere. Otherwise, they won't be able to progress in nuclear, military and other technology fronts. Also not to forget, they have journals and other publications in *chinese*.... which I believe are out of reach to us, as we can't read Chinese and those material hardly get translated to English and reach to science databases in west.
As of 2010, it is safe to say... US/UK/EU institutions have the monopoly in Research.. and Asia is nothing but spammers to periodicals. Just my $0.02...
Re:I should hope so (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Quantity != Quality (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was still in grad school, it was also the same in certain web technology research areas. I've read a bunch of conference submission papers from Chinese students and nearly all of it was non-original, improperly cited, and poorly researched. The problem they are having is that it takes time to boot strap a research program. You need to build a research culture, nurture experts in the sciences and have the free flow of ideas going. The last one is going to be a challenge for China and I sometimes wonder if they will be able to make it over that hump given their extreme censorship policies.
As an aside, I find it interesting how culture effects research. When I was going to conferences US and even researchers from the EU would often present ideas that achieved a goal around a free market mechanism. Chinese researchers nearly always spoke of centralized control, even when the scale of the idea was really too big to make it work.
Re:Let me take you back 25 years (Score:4, Interesting)
Second, nobody expects China's population to outproduce Americans on a per-capita basis anytime soon. Their standard of living won't match ours anytime soon (that's not even possible until we move past the coal/oil-based economy, and even then would require China to take more land from other countries). But per-capita standard of living isn't the whole point; size does matter. They can outcompete is scientifically, militarily, and for natural resources overall, even with lower per-capita productivity.
All nations have to deal with aging demographics. The population pyramid scheme can't continue forever, it simply gets too crowded. China is dealing with it; Americans still seem confused by it and think maybe the solution is massive immigration, or that it's just something wrong with how Social Security is managed.
Not to start out with (Score:2, Interesting)
Russia's nuke research was greatly helped/jump started by industrial espionage during the WW2 lend-lease program, partly facilitated and financed by short term profits centered traders and compromised governmental functionaries inside the US and Canada. Nuke secrets and actual hardware, including uranium salts and more refined metals, were loaded on planes in the US and shipped there through Alaska into Siberia. They were able to bypass decades of research that way. After that, ya, good at it, but it was that jump start that kicked them into high gear.
Fast forward to today, and it is exactly what China has been doing now in a way for the last twenty years. Just the level of scientific and engineering help is much larger. They have been acquiring just mega loads of already developed tech to start with and work from, at firesale prices or free, heck, they get paid to just take it, that they can turn around and clone and refine and further develop, without doing much of the preliminary steps.
It has been a huge global market advantage for them, simply an enormous advantage, as is obvious looking at global finance today. The west has been giving them every possible industrial advantage, all so that the market traders and labor arbitragers can rake in huge short term profits. Of course China would take that deal, and has, free stuff, then work from there. They got bootstrapped a hundred years in technological development in 20.
China isn't the real problem with the decline of western economies, and it was predictable, and was. It has been the west's own business people in collaboration with some politicians basically selling them out and taking a fat skim in the middle. It's like those corporate raiders who do a hostile take over of some company, sell off all the juicy bits fast for huge short term profits, gut the companies, vote themselves a golden parachute then move on to their next victim/target. Except this has been on entire national scales. We let the looters..loot.
That's why so many of these western nations now have to bailout banks, watch their hard industries collapse, watch their trade deficits soar, watch their internal debt load soar, watch their unemployment levels soar, and resort to desperation governmental accounting tricks with their currencies, etc, to make it appear that things are better than they really are.
Re:Quantity != Quality (Score:1, Interesting)
Same in evolutionary biology. Again, like you say, there are some excellent Chinese researchers based in the west, as well as some trained in the west currently based in China, but very little work of value from China-trained, China-based groups.
Re:Quantity != Quality (Score:5, Interesting)
As a researcher in the physical sciences, I have noticed that nearly all the Chinese groups working my area publish complete crap of no value to other researchers. There are quite a few good Chinese researchers at American universities, but I have not once found a reason to actually cite a group based in China. They have a long way to go still before they reach the same level of impact as any western country (or hell, even its neighbors Korea and Japan).
It's the same in polymer physics and every field. Read this, which puts "leading the world in science" in perspective: http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/will-china-achieve-science-supremacy/?ref=science [nytimes.com] In short, China tells people they have to publish or perish on a much greater scale than in other countries. As a result, there is a huge amount of published crap.
Re:Quantity != Quality (Score:5, Interesting)
I am a computer scientist. Asian.
The research condition in China is extremely unhealthy. There are plenty of professors in high places who shamelessly rip off the younger researchers, and cronyism is rampant. Many professors will force the younger members in their group to put their names as first name authors in papers which they do not even read -- because the government's grant committee will only recognize papers with you as the first author. The worst is that the rampant cronyism means that younger researchers have no choice but to comply. That is, professors routinely give great reviews to papers written by buddies, no matter how crap. The same paper (or slightly altered) is published over and over again in different venues.
There is no sense of value whatsoever with these researchers. No pride. No integrity. They exist just to make a living by crushing their opponents doing whatever they can. This is the Wall Street of research. God saves us all.
Causes of wars (Score:4, Interesting)
China consists of a strange mix: two First World territories (Hong Kong and Taiwan), an emergent country (mainly the seaboard) and a large Third World country. In order to become the dominant power, the emergent bit has to become First World and the Third World bit has to become emergent. This is unlike Europe (where the emergent bit is the poorest part) or the US, where the emergent and Third World parts are relatively small and mixed in with the First World part.
On this analysis, China needs to look inwards before it looks outwards. An aggressive war would result in the destruction of the most advanced parts of China, leaving the rest back near the iron age. Europe and the US would be badly damaged but would survive and retain First World capabilities. It is simply not in the Chinese interest to damage its most valuable assets. Just like Mao, they would let the peasants starve first.
* The War of 1812 does not figure in glorious US victories. A coalition of French Canadians, native Americans and the British successfully defended Canada and burned the White House, then the British went on to defeat Napoleon and weaken US power in the Caribbean for many years. The US turned Westwards. So much for Imperialist wars.
Re:Let me take you back 25 years (Score:3, Interesting)
A few notes on your excellent analysis:
China's demographic problems are starting to hit now, much earlier in the game than Japan, due to the forced One Child Per Family problem. For the aging, it's called e.g. the 4-2-1 problem, 4 grandparents have 2 parent have 1 child, who all of the parents realize is going to have to provide for all of them. So they save like mad instead of consume at levels that would build up their domestic market, a critical part of Japan's success.
And the 2020 problem is going to be 10s of millions of men who can't find wives, not thousands. 22 million if I recall, but I'm not sure if that matches the 2020 date, but it will be soon.
Finally, there's the big problem that this model is likely to work less well for China because of scale (10 times Japan's population) and Japan not having the countries it exported to be what in what looks to be a long term Great Recession (or worse). Probably the worse period for Japan that way was the 1970s, and what they did then (e.g. export early small not so high quality cars) worked well, enough that they were going like gangbusters in the 1980s, when they were predicted to take over the world. As we know, that ended in tears. I suspect it'll be a lot more messy in the much less cohesive PRC.
Re:Except... (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been to China a few times, and my in-laws lived there for 3 years, teaching at a high tech university.
There is definitely a class struggle in China where a contingent of highly educated, highly skilled workers feel that the peasant masses are holding them back. The large population is both a blessing and a curse to China.
Even so, the well educated portion of the population if China is still quite large, and we will see their influence continue to grow.
Re:Quantity != Quality (Score:3, Interesting)
Same in Engineering. I have an old professor friend, who is a journal editor. They send the same crap to hundreds of journal, and even though it has no scientific value it will pass the filter by chance. It's much easier to accept than deny, because you don't have to reason. You just don't have the energy and the manpower to politely deny all. And even if you deny, he sends it again next week with very little modification.
But that's not their fault. Science is benchmarked by publications, no matter what is behind them. They just specializing to reach maximum in impact factor and not in real research. It's the same with the TOEFL and GRE. They achieve the maximum score without problems, but it doesn't mean they can speak English at all.
Re:science relies on the free exchange of ideas (Score:3, Interesting)
China is more free then you would think. Yes, there are some things they hide from their people(Case in point.. I talked to a nuclear engineering grad student in China who was complaining about how China has no nuke reactors because the west won't let them, when they have had reactors since 1994, and have 11 on the mainland and a few in Hong Kong, with more on the way.) but for the most part they realize technical information must be free-flowing to increase their economy. This is why thet have internet access, but pictures of the Tienanmen Square massacre are filtered. All inforation is free, except that which hurts the party.
This seems to be most damaging to them in biology, history, and political sciance, and much less so in engineering, physics, and the like. China wants badly to make money, and knows science is a good way to get there.
The flip side is that the culture does encourage saving face and helping your peers to the point of cheating, which has influenced even some of their best scientists and institutions to fake results and plagiarize as a matter of course. Yes, this is a problem all over the world, but it has more institutional support in China, at least the part of China that I am familiar with.
Re:Quantity != Quality (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a sad state of affairs, really... because those Chinese scientists who do solid work and publish worthwhile papers have their credibility reduced because of the larger number of sloppy papers published by other Chinese scientists.
If they truly want to be a driver of science and technology, and not just win a meaningless "# of pubs" game, they need to establish better priorities and better reward schemes. Of course this doesn't just apply to China: using publication count to measure productivity is tempting and is happening in many countries and funding agencies. This is why so many scientists are pushing for more emphasis on measuring impact, and not just raw output. (E.g. using things like h-index [wikipedia.org] instead of publication count (yes, h-index has its own set of problems).)
Re:And yet (Score:2, Interesting)
My mother is also British, and I also have a British passport. So I believe we have matching credentials on this matter.
Are you saying that China is going to conquer the world? Are they going to build some kind of empire?
I'm just going to point out, as you are probably aware, that after the decline the British Empire, England did not cease to exist. It wasn't swallowed up into the US. Moreover, while the US does have tremendous influence throughout the world, the British haven't lost all of theirs (even if it's diminshed).
England is leading a quite pleasant existence as a little island off the coast of Europe. And island that I've considered moving to on multiple occasions. I doubt either of us would have bothered to get our UK passport if there wasn't some value in having it.
I supposed my point is that you're predicting some sort of doom. But what that doom is, is unclear. Considering your mention of ICBM and large armies, I imagine you expect some kind of violent demise for the US.
Now the slightly off-topic part:
Ironically, my parents would both probably agree with this doom concept. Except they're willing to say that the doom is China and India taking away the jobs of all the engineers and other tech related fields in the US. While I believe that many jobs will move overseas, I'm fairly sceptical of the situation becoming as dire as some predict. All you have to do is look at the previously doomed empire of the UK or anywhere else in Europe to see millions of engineers (and IT) working quite happily.
The fact is that in both the US and Europe there is a shortage of engineers, and demographics don't point to this getting better anytime soon. This is good news for people who are already engineers. This is also means that the US and Europe are going to have to outsource some engineering, and much of the research that goes with it. Is this a bad strategy long-term? Not sure. Do we have a choice? Not really. However, I can tell you that outsourcing engineering projects to places like India and China has been happening for decades now in the developing world, but even here in the US.
For example, in the US, the designs of many chemical plants often use the same components. Ultimately, there may be one new step in manufacture of a new material, but the other 10 are old news. Often time the old news is outsourced, and the new (proprietary) part is done in-house. This can be seen as an efficient way of doing things. However, many times the outsourced work is done incorrectly. Sometimes this is because of poor design. Other times this is because of poor assembly instructions. Either way the blame generally falls back on the fact that the work was outsourced.
So you end up realizing that while you saved money outsourcing your work, in the end it didn't work because it was outsourced. You might have outsourced to an amazing team of engineers, but because they weren't there to oversee assembly to communicate with the engineers who were, everything went wrong. Which really leads me to my final point. There is no substitute for having experienced and knowledgeable engineers/techies/staff at the scene of a complex problem.