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China Will Lead World Scientific Research By 2020
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.
But I wouldn't want to live in either.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
"... 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."
Translation: Chinese academics and scientists working in the West are, for all intents and purposes, spys.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Since the PRC accounts for about 25% of the human race, while the US accounts for about 5%!
Let the Chinese steal from us and then start innovating on their own. We'll then just start stealing from each other.
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).
Maybe things wouldn't be this way if people in the U.S. started fighting the stigma of becoming a "nerd," gave college research priority over athletics programs, and provided students incentive to be hard-working and inquisitive.
When it comes to the race to develop new technologies, I'm always reminded of the (easily missed) quote at the beginning of Deus Ex: "Their... 'ethical inflexibility' has allowed us to make progress in areas they refuse to consider." For example China does not have the ethical hangups about stem cell research that we do here in the west. Perhaps they will be developing new medicines and cures based on their research--and we will end up using it in the end as well.
"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." George Bernard Shaw
Forget for a moment the nationalistic and economic competition between USA and China. What this means to me is that with China, Russia, Brazil and India increasing their research output, the rate of scientific progress will probably double from what we had 10 years ago.
That and the fact that I prefer (for moral reasons) a non starving Chinese population, means this is good to me. The current boom in biotechnology together with an aging population, means that scientific knowledge improves quality of life for all of us.
By the way, China is investing heavily and making fast progress in stem cell development, a research area where the religious lobby in the USA has delayed progress. The USA has it's own political problems.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
Things are seriously backwards here when some of the most educated people in the world are paid so poorly.
Most post-docs doing basic research get paid between 30-40K. Perhaps if we paid scientists what they are worth there would be less brain drain.
and you could find this exact same article, just substitute China for Japan. And yet 25 years later very few Japanese have won nobel prizes, Japan is a leader in a few select fields, but is a far cry from what people were saying it would be by now. This despite spending massive amounts of money on R&D and whatnot. Time will tell if this holds true for China as well, but I think it's important not to extrapolate too much on a very limited data set.
Monstar L
Every time I point out how China will replace the US as the dominant force in the world, I get modded troll. Well, America, I understand. My mother is British, and consequently I have a British passport. I understand the denial that's happening - the way you feel is just like the British felt from the mid 1800's up until the middle of last century. The decline of the British Empire took 100 years. But nowadays things happen a lot faster.
Let's look at China:
They have all the industry they need - so much, that they are rapidly becoming the worlds biggest exporter of everything.
They have a huge population.
They have a strong leadership.
They have a real military. Uh this isn't Iraq, right? Their submarines are good enough to sneak up on US carriers, and they have demonstrated that they can shoot down satellites. Now I ask myself where the US will be with carriers on the bottom of the oceans and no satellites to coordinate communications for combined arms or provide overhead intelligence. They've chosen a very smart, asymmetric warfare route. They don't need to have ultra high tech main battle tanks capable of taking direct hits from M1's. They don't need hundred million dollar stealth aircraft. They just need lots and lots of reasonably good anti aircraft and anti tank missiles.
They are becoming scientific leaders, which will even take away the US technology edge.
They have a space program. They also have nuclear weapons. Combine the two and that means they can put a nuclear bomb anywhere on the planet with an ICBM. What's not known is their accuracy, but who needs accuracy if you have a multi-megaton device?
Everything they can't innovate (yet), they can copy. Adherence to patents and intellectual property laws is only given by consent.
They are the single largest holder of US debt, outside the US government.
Ohhhh, it's going to be ugly. I certainly wouldn't want to live in Taiwan in the next 20 years, for a start. Forget the argument that the US is China's biggest customer, that's irrelevant. Wars often start between the best trading partners. The US and the UK circa 1800. The US and Japan WW2. France and Prussia/Germany, quite often in the 19th century. The only hope I have is that China has not shown any expansionist tendencies in recent history. They've been content with defending their borders. But if suddenly they decide to play the imperialism game - watch out!
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Maybe things wouldn't be this way if people in the U.S. started fighting the stigma of becoming a "nerd," gave college research priority over athletics programs, and provided students incentive to be hard-working and inquisitive.
The the real priority that is clearly disparate between Western countries and China is purely what percent of our GDP we dump into science versus defense on a federal level. Do a budget comparison between the United States and China for defense spending. I think you'll find that that leaves China with much more resources to dump into education, their growing economy, building infrastructure and science.
In the United States, military spending does foster more science and education but still not as much as dumping that new joint strike fighter contract into college educations for everyone. It ain't going to change but it's a very real difference that can be felt.
My work here is dung.
At least in my field (Mobile Robotics), Chinese papers are everywhere but none of the ones I found were some kind of breakthrough.
China is all about volume simply bc they are HUGE.
And also... I'm still waiting to see a major civil war there sometime..
rival 'emerging' nations such as India, Russia, and Brazil.
It was 18th century when Russia was "emerging" in scientific research.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
so i don't believe any chinese researchers will be making amazing breakthroughs as long as they live in a country which is fundamentally opposed to the idea of the free exchange of ideas. the free exchange of ideas is not some cute tweak on the product of scientific research, it is a preceding requirement for quality research to even be done in the first place
a society which does not allow a free exchange if ideas does not result in minds flexible enough to grasp important patterns quickly out of a morass of data. which is the essence of science. a society which carefully controls information results in minds weakened by an artificially placid media environment, where all information is carefully chosen for its adherence to an official point of view. but the truth is often ugly, and when "harmony" is artificially imposed, you breed flimsy minds which can only be spoonfed ideas which aren't too challenging to them
a truly keen scientific mind is bred in an environment where it is constantly challenged by ideas contrary to established belief. the mind is a muscle: challenge it, and it grows strong. put it in artificially serene environment free of opposing ideas, and it grows weak. the information environment that china supports therefore is contrary to the production of good scientific minds, and therefore contrary to the production of good science
in science, you question everything. and therefore, you get the best scientific theories. but in china, you never question, you only behave and adhere to the official party line. and so china is not building the social environment in which high quality minds can exist and high quality science can be done. china is breeding a generation of minds that are made of cotton candy and fluff with their desire for "harmony" over ugly truths. it takes an adherence to freedom of expression to get minds that are free in thought, and therefore make good science
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
When I was taking stats, my stat professor told me that he saw the far east eventually becoming the technology center of the world because of the increased amount of technological manufacturing and R/D coming from that region of the world.
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.
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.
My own experience as a researcher is that Asian countries in general (with the possible exception of Japan) have a long way to go before they match the impact of Western researchers. There are exceptions, such as the MD5 collision found by Wang et al., but in general most of the major breakthroughs occur in the West.
It's also not clear whether research produced by overseas Chinese is included in the total. Some of the very best mathematicians in the world are Chinese, but almost all of them are based at Western institutions. In any case, as good as they are, the number of overseas Chinese is so small that they don't represent anything close to a majority.
They have a one child policy. And lots of parents have sex selection abortion to avoid having their only child be a girl.
So you are going to have a population that will decline in number that has a bunch of young men with no hope of being married. Say what you will, the drive to take care of your family is important to society.
That's not a recipe for long-term success.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
An astonishing fraction of research "results" from China are just plain made up. No wonder they're so prolific! I don't doubt that they will eventually make significant scientific contributions as a nation -- they're 20% of the world's population, after all -- but they're going to have to clean up their act before the global scientific community starts to take them seriously.
Cantankerous old coot since 1957.
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...
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.
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.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."