Which Chinese institutions, studying what subject? And, for that matter, who is "we" here? Is your institution a top destination for overseas visits by Chinese scholars?

I would like to see these claims motivated by statistics from the Nature Publishing Group's journals.

Mentioning Nature (the place of publication of the thread-opening commentary) is worthwhile. It appears that Nature has had some submissions from China recently that have had to be withdrawn because the peer review process was compromised.[1]

[1] "'Compromised' peer review hits three papers from Nature Publishing Group" (18 December 2015)

http://retractionwatch.com/2015/12/18/compromised-peer-revie...

I have an American degree and I've heard the phrase "Fourier transform" before, but I couldn't have possibly told you anything about it until I googled it just now. I wouldn't have expected any random Chinese academic to know either, no matter how good their institution was. I write software in a variety of languages every day at my full-time job, and while I've seen MATLAB code and could certainly teach myself to write it, I wouldn't bother if I could just have somebody else do it. Why would you expect some arbitrary group of Chinese scholars to share very specific skills and knowledge? If you gathered up a gaggle of researchers from anywhere else, you'd have to get pretty lucky to land a group where everybody was familiar with both one specific area of mathematics and one specific programming language.

I find it difficult to believe that a graduate of Tsinghua or Peking wouldn't know what a Fourier transform was assuming they did a course where they learnt that?

China is also EXTREMELY hierarchical. So, it is quite possible that a scholar (researcher, professor) with a very strong CV isn't doing much of the real work at all, instead it is pawned off to undergrad and grad students.

In China, you'll often have one professor for around 50 students with three tiers (undergrads, masters/entry PhD/high-level PhDs). So not only is the professor not programming, but neither is the upper-level PhD student! Everything is just eventually being done by undergrads who will ship off to the states/west anyways.

On top of this many professors are often basically running sweatshops for their side businesses (since their university provided salary can be around 10K RMB/month).