As it turns out, if you make a well-funded and sustained effort at something, you can get good at it.
As an example, within my specialty: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0431-5
In this case you may have perceived fraud or lower quality in a specific area and you are generalizing it to entire Chinese academia when like everywhere in the world they have high quality and low quality institutions and equal incentives for fraud.
There has been multiple frauds in western academia [1], the Stanford experiments was the most recent discussed here, but no one uses these instances to paint the entire system as fraudulent, in social sciences there is a giant reproducibility crisis.[2]
And given they are developing its inevitable the quality will rise with more investments and resources and developing a culture and infrastructure of research that others already have for decades, more investments in science and advancements is better for humanity. It's not a competition.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientific_misconduct_...
The one mitigating factor is that the commercial sector is so savagely results driven that actual success really matters. That’s the one thing that stops the whole system devolving into a soviet style downward spiral of bureaucratic failure. Ruthless social and economic Darwinism has it’s costs, but at least it keeps some aspects if the system honest by pure necessity. I doubt state sponsored research and academia benefits much from this, but I don’t have any direct experience of that as none of my relatives are academics.
We have a family friend who is a university lecturer in CS. The one anecdote I can pass on is that, apparently, students there can graduate in CS on a course based on Java at his institution without ever having to demonstrate a program actually running. Apparently it’s all theoretical. I find it hard to believe or understand how that can be, or how prevalent that is but that’s what he said. This was 3 or 4 years ago.
That is absoluteley not limited to China. There are some CS grads that can't write code, and that doesn't mean they are idiots. I studied with some of them. Some are actually more inclined to abstract theoretical problems and are not very good at implementation. Others just learn by memorizing everything and never gotten the hang of analyzing and solving a problem.
>> Apparently it’s all theoretical
Well... yes, for me that is what CS really is about. You don't need a computer to do CS at all. All you need is a pen, a paper and some knowlegde of formal systems. In my opinion, a college/university is not the place to go to for learning how to code.
I am sympathetic to the idea that CS is not a vocational subject, but it is a practical discipline. Purely theoretical CS is like studying physics with without ever performing an experiment. There is a role for theoretical physicists, but to complement and inform the experimental side otherwise their theories could never be tested or confirmed. You need both to make it a complete discipline.
It's pretty clear China is progressing in the sciences substantially, so I don't want to discount that--no one should--but this progression is occurring in what I consider to be a crisis of academic integrity globally. The result is that metrics like publication rate and citation rate are much fuzzier to interpret, and something I distrust a lot because they are somewhat meaningless relative to replicability or something of that sort.
I generally feel like academics and industry at large is suffering from a kind of hype crisis or bubble. I think it's strongly related to income inequality (inflated attributed value of higher-income individuals relative to lower-income individuals) and all sorts of other societal problems at the moment. How this relates to China I'm not sure but overall it makes me skeptical of any attempt to measure or rank countries relative to one another (I'd say the same thing about the US or any other country for that matter).
Given this classification, you can weight an individuals impact factor by a factor representing how trendy vs deep the venues citations appear in.
The goal here is very much to beat the US at its own game [2]. The US and Western Europe have trapped the whole world in an extremely harsh intellectual property regime and China, rather than fighting this regime, intends to dominate it.
It's very sad because what's being ultimately being legitimized is just Feudalism 3.0. It's also very corrosive to China's real strength, it's entrepreneurial spirit, which, until very recently, gave fuck all about patents. Now many Asian VCs won't even talk to you unless you have some valuable IP. Many people view this rapid "IP enclosure" in China, where IP is becoming everything and often the only thing, to be a very bad thing.
[1] http://www.wipo.int/pressroom/en/articles/2018/article_0002....
[2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/world/china-watch/business/...
Thus scientific papers provide indirect benefits in the West, but direct benefits in China - encouraging the "paper mill."
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608266/the-truth-about-ch...
Academia is toxic because again it is being measured. If a university cannot determine the quality of faculty other than counting publications and impact factors, the university itself is seriously lacking quality, alas there is a plague of it.
I wonder if it is directly related to the bloom/infestation of university administration sizes and top salaries.
I'm of the opinion that a university ought to be something like what you'd think a temple to discovery and knowledge ought to be, instead of a mill for producing credentials for students and a shitty game for faculty advancement.
if I had a billion dollars... (to the tune of the Barenaked Ladies)
There will be another Einstein. There will be another Darwin. And they will change everything. It is only a matter of time.
But I doubt they will come from China. While many a genius may be born in China, they may as well have been born on Mars because it is not a country that rewards exceptionalism and original thinking.
Also... I'm still trying to imagine what Dijon Ketchup would taste like.
Nobody has time to read everyone's papers, or evaluate someone's knowledge thoroughly, so we fall back on things like degrees, impact factors or university prestige.
Once you realise academia is all about signalling - being able to quickly judge people - everything makes sense.
In any Western university there's people fighting for tenure, which tends to hinge on publishing high-impact papers. This is an enormous economic incentive. The difference between getting tenure or having to leave academia and starting an industry career at a disadvantage can be measured in dollars, and it's large. In fact, even without measuring anything, I think it's quite clear that the overwhelming majority of people in this situation would take tenure over a $10K cheque. So it's disingenous to say that the Chinese incentivize publishing more because they pay cash.
If anything I find that the system of paying cash is more transparent, and it may be somewhat more balanced than others. For example, in Spain people fighting for tenure have a very large incentive for the reason mentioned above (and a PhD has zero or even negative value for most industry job offers here, so the value of the incentive is really huge). Youngish tenured professors have a not so large, but significant incentive (there are salary supplements one can get linked to journal publishing in 6-year periods. They are not too large -around €100/mo- but each one you get is for life, so for professors in their 30s we can be talking about more than 30K for publishing a few papers. This is pretty much cash for papers too, but no one bats an eye because we are Western, I guess). A full professor 5-10 years away from retirement has practically no incentive at all, by the time they can get another of these supplements they will be retired or almost retired so they won't get much, if anything. So it is quite common to see professors in this situation just not doing research at all. The distribution of incentives would be more uniform with cash.
To sum up, I think the outrage many people in the West express about Chinese universities paying for papers is pure hypocrisy. Either giving economic incentives to paper publishing is a good idea or it isn't. If it is, I don't see anything wrong with the incentive being cash, and if it isn't, we should probably criticise our own systems as much as the Chinese's.
Eventually, I think the criticism of the Chinese way boils down to prejudice. The whole mysticism about cash is an excuse to not say "incentivizing publication in the West is good because we are going to publish good papers, incentivizing publication in China is bad because they are dishonest and are going to churn out lots of crap if they are incentivized to publish".
That tenure would come from earning grants. Now keeping the grant gravy-train running smoothly does require churning out papers, but it is not the papers themselves that would be so important.
I really hate to risk being the guy who says "they will never best us," until they do, but in my field and many others Chinese papers are known to be of a lower quality standard and a lot more mill-like. This may come as a surprise to many, but the simple fact is that integrity issues are common in Chinese academia - a pattern not specific to China, but repeated almost everywhere. Globally, a high-quality academia with a strong sense of integrity is the exception rather than the rule.