Fraud Scandals Sap China’s Dream of Becoming a Science Superpower
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Whatever changes they plan to enact to stop this cheating will take several generations to eradicate.
South China Morning Post has an article on academic cheating:
http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1974986/...
Sometimes the tests are given not by the teacher himself but by the state/school or some other third party and the teacher has a feeling of “In it together” with the students by helping them out a bit. They understand that its not the most important subject in the lives of the students and rotte memorization will not help them that much anyway.
There’s also a saying that cheating encourages teamwork. I’ve had a biolagy teacher (In a programming-oriented school) actually assign us into teams for the exams where we were encouraged to specialize and devide our learning so we could better “solve” the exam. She knew that people were not there for her subject anyway, and wanted us to learn actual practical skills - and in so doing had made such a strong connection with all of her students that we actually learned much more about biolagy from her than my peers from other schools.
And sometimes teachers just dont care - they are graded by their students’ academic sucesses somewhat. They will not be given promotions if students all have top grades, but will be “talked to” if they perform poorly. Such a feedback mechanism practically begs teacher sponsered cheating.
But yeah having a degree is way overvalued for historical reasons. Though companies have started to “wisen up” a bit not really accepting college degrees at face value as they previously did.
Obviously it may depend on the particular institution -- with new, for-profit, private universities (milking rich foreigners who've come to Prague for the beer and fun) having much worse reputation than the public venerable ones like the Charles University (est. 1348). Saying students are "expected" to plagiarise is simply insulting.
I know that in China, there's plenty of "under the table" IP "sharing" happening amongst tech companies too.
Soviet education and propaganda both nurtured collaboration over competition. “Individualsist” was definitely a bad label to have in my Soviet childhood. Egoism was and still is considered one of the worst qualities of all.
I feel that pre-Soviet fables and other lore had similar moral message.
Togetherness and group benefit are definitely valued higher than individual profit, needs of the many outweigh needs of the few and so on.
That is one reason you see very less innovation from here. Not because of actual lack of skills but original work is not much valued as much as if you can make money even if by copying existing work..
It will definitely change when the economic disparity neutrkises to some extend and people value original work more
Was the depiction of this phenomenon in the movie 'Three Idiots' (where the professor demanded students regurgitate dictionary definitions) accurate?
It's more like chew and pour. Cram and pass. Photocopy.
>'Three Idiots' Where silencer says, "I don't care what it means. I'll memorize it." Describes Nigerian, Ghanaian and Indian school system.
This is what results when lecturers also crammed and passed without understanding. Since they don't know what's important, they favor trivial parts of their subjects.
For instance on an Excel course, the lecturer asked us to draw the exercises in drawing books after every class.
When most exam questions are patterned after "Who wants to be a millionaire?" The only way to get good grades is to cram.
But these issues are Child's play compared to the real issue: In public schools what you know doesn't matter. If you've not "sorted" the lecturer, it's an automatic E, F, or D.
When a lecturer tells you on your first day that A is for alpha and omega. B is for the lecturer. And C is for bright students...
I've not made anything up.
Basically, the bribery in developing or underdeveloped countries is simply a reflection of what goes on in schools.
There was a very funny movie (it was a comedy of course) called "Kung Fu Mahjong II" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Fu_Mahjong_2) in which a central theme was that everyone was cheating at the game and they all knew it. So at that point it isn't really "cheating" if the cheating is part of the game.
What is interesting is that science itself is not amenable to cheating, only the reporting of it is. And to the extent that reporting is a good proxy for the science, cheating there works. But failure to produce the actual science is like having someone else take your driving test, it puts your own life (and those driving around you) in danger.
As I mentioned earlier, China is very relation based and Chinese themselves know that. To counter that performance evaluation tends to be very quantified. You could say there is a number fetish. College admission used to be based on one score. Introducing flexibility causes a lot of anxiety about "hou men" (backdoor or favoritism). GDP growth needs to be above 6.5%. I just read a policeman commenting that they have numerical targets for the number of arrests they make.
Anyway because of the emphasis on relationship there is actually a heavy price to pay if you are thought of a cheater in private social networks. It is another story though dealing with strangers/abstract public interests/intrusive governments so there is a degree of split personality there.
My son is graduating from a US high school this year. He is an academic star. On his brag sheet he lists what he is most proud of himself as doing all his work honestly. Not all those academic achievements that he worked hard for. It goes to show what he thinks of academic honesty here. It does not make him like his classmates less though. It does not make me think cheating endemic to the US either. There is always grayness. I am proud of his integrity but I wouldn't automatically think a lot less of a kid because he cuts some corners once in a while.
China is to a very large degree a relation based society. How to temper favoritism in academic evaluations is a real issue. It seems many organizations in China have outsourced this function to SCI publications. While quantification is a lesser evil their trust in SCI seems misplaced. There are for profit publishers out there who are happy to accommodate this demand for publications and these publishers are not necessarily Chinese.
BTW "neng pian jiu pian" is a derogatory term for cheaters not something people take pride in.
Giving heavy weight to publishing is actually a good thing in the Chinese context. I hope they can fix the process instead of throwing out the baby with the bath water.
In China medical education for most doctors is a post-secondary one instead of post-graduate. For a doctor to be able to write a proper paper, it shows at least a few qualities many others do not possess including abilities to read and write in English, keep up-to-date with medical research in one's specialty, and do some quantitative analysis etc. This is regardless of the originality or importance of the findings. Yes it is a low bar but it is still better than alternatives.
The hospitals have a need to outsource evaluations to outside experts. SCI journals are the wrong targets to outsource to and the hospitals individually do not have resources to come up with alternatives. However regulators and funding agencies can. They should black list journals that are known to publish trash for profit. They should work with publishers to come up with alternative formats that de-emphasize impact factors but instead focus on the rigor of reporting: to publish your research does not need to be original as long as it is adding independent and verifiable data points to our knowledge base; you do need to be up-to-date on your methodology and rigorous in documenting the quality of your data, however. Indeed to ease the English writing difficulty, they can provide standardized templates that could actually ease the collection of machine readable data. This way while each publication may be low value, in aggregate they can provide real value. They could treat this as a "continuing medical education" issue.
Of course this does not prevent real geniuses from publishing ground-breaking research in reputable journals. They need to be realistic in that most people are simply not qualified or lucky enough to come up with ground breaking research in their career, esp. when their main job is clinical rather than research.
One of my roommates in college was from China.
We had a lot of foreign exchange students from there, many of whom I found out in labs had very poor writing skills.
I asked my roommate how so many Chinese students found their way to this college and why the writing seemed so bad.
He explained to me there was literally a whole industry in China dedicated to faking the scores and documents required to get Chinese kids into good schools in the US.
This included all sorts of College apps, essays, and probably some of the tests like the ACT.
He said wealthy families in China valued education as a status symbol and would pay top dollar to get their kid into Harvard or so on to make them look good, himself included
When bribing is involved, those who receive bribes start factoring regular bribes as a line item in their monthly or yearly revenue. In other words, next time they interact with someone and they don't get a bribe, they will go out of their way to ensure they fail to get what they want until the customer "gets the message". Someone refusing to pay the bribe is seen as taking the bread away from their kids' table.
Eventually becomes part of the culture, the common sense, so to speak. You're simply expected to cheat or to bribe in any kind of governmental, business, educational or other institutional transaction. It starts from birth in the hospital to the burial in the cemetery. It is not called a bribe anymore just a "gift" or "help" or something like that. Someone who doesn't understand or participate in this corruption is seen as goofy or stupid ("How can you expect to get anything done, what planet did you come from, of course you have to pay").
Also in the US, I feel like if I don't offer "help" to subsidize the work that a waiter does then I am essentially taking money away (they get paid sub minimum wage).
I feel that "help" should only be offered after the work is done, and well done.
Are bribes in other cultures almost considered more like tips are considered in the US?
Western Europe seems to be a low tip, low bribe culture. What are the opinions / standards coming from there?
Yeah that's the nice thing for all the criticism people have for US it still has a relatively well functioning justice system compared to those other country. People simply have no idea what it is like to live with pervasive corruption on all levels of society.
Handing money to a police officer was expected and sometimes even asked for blatantly. It is still illegal just that nobody cares. It never called a bribe but something like "Maybe we can come to an understanding..."
> I don't offer "help" to subsidize the work that a waiter does then I am essentially taking money away
That's a good way to understanding it. Except you'd pay "tips" ahead of time, they'd be large, and would be for random things like kids getting good grades, or doctor not messing the surgery up, and the judge to get off murder.
A particularly evil case, was a neighbor I had who knew the guy who worked in a DNA testing lab. That guy had a huge house, cars and lived the good life. Why? He offered falsifying DNA results for criminal and paternity tests as a service.
Just thinking about the damage that one person did, and I am sure he wasn't the only one.
> What are the opinions / standards coming from there?
I have mostly been in Eastern Europe. It's much, much worse. US might have high level corruption - nepotism, lobbying, regulatory capture but it is still doing pretty well compared to many other places.
How can a nation which censors the internet in order to avoid critique, ever expect to become world-class in something that’s essentially founded on well-argued critique?
Imagine a Chinese scientist rising to fame, because of a revolutionary new theory in some area, and then imagine a fellow countryman finding holes in this theory — literally ripping it apart by showing why it can’t be true. That’s scientific progress. How would China handle a case like this? Would Chinese people even dare act this way, or would they be afraid of the consequences? Does their culture even allow it?
China wants a lot of things that come out of personal freedom — e.g. a healthy financial market, higher living standards, innovation — but it always ends up building something fragile and corrupt because of its top-down approach, robbing individuals from expressing themselves freely and building something unsupervised.
To me, it’s no wonder if cheating is rampant in a society where the government instates rules with the sole purpose of protecting itself. Cheating (i.e. getting around these rules) is the only sensible action for human beings living under such conditions.
You guys are delusional and brain washed about the impact of the internet in producing constructive progress. Look at Japan or South Korea - they have the best internet in the world and have turned their society into a bunch of mindless zombies overoptimizing everything for the sake of overoptimization and producing no science whatsoever.
China, on the other hand, has a problem of culture in their way.
“Since 2012, the country has retracted more scientific papers because of faked peer reviews than all other countries and territories put together, according to Retraction Watch”
Along with the entire rest of the article filled with quotes and stats.
I helped run a large international conference recently, with 900 published papers. Of these 66 (7.3%) were from China, and 280 (31%) from the US. Germany had 104 (12%). The numbers will vary by field, of course, but I've no reason to believe that this meeting was an outlier.
I don't hold a belief, I haven't seen data that you seemed to be using to make conclusions. Or you're making somewhat large assumptions based on a few pieces of information. A little is different than a lot, both could have a little or a lot though.
> I've no reason to believe that this meeting was an outlier
Here's one, it was presumably run across the Pacific ocean from China.
China is big, but not bigger than everyone else put together. Less than one person in six is Chinese.
And your presumption happens to be accurate, but 1 in 3 editions of the conference happen in Asia including China and China is still out-published by the USA by 4 to 1 or so even when the event is held in China. Chinese outnumber Americans five to one. Americans outpublish Chinese people many times over. As an aside, Swiss people outpublish Americans 8 to 1.
So, while skepticism is noble, when a country of 1/6 the people in the world has a retraction rate higher than everyone else put together, you need extraordinary data to decide that they are not in a mess. And “I don’t have data” is no such argument.
Looking for retraction watch's numbers gave me a study that shows the US having the most retractions.[1] So again, if rates are what is important, you need data showing the rates.
Then there are the great leaps, usually possible due to breakthroughs or other wild recombination of existing ideas. These are feared- for as they offer bright rewards at the end of the road- they contain unknown problems, as in sub-problems that need often a combination of further break-throughs and/or incremental research. Fusion research is a great example here.
Some great leaps also turn into great very expensive wild goose chases.
Such risks make no buisness sense, but a central government can overcome the captialistic shortsigthedness - and attempt this research anyway and actually be better at it.
But if you can cheat (avoid risk) then cheat(avoid risk). Let others feed the crocodiles first - so chinese companys research will be as risk shy as western companys research.
finally, imagine that the rest of the world's people, though not researchers themselves, had access to all of the research journals.
does that arrangement in and of itself determine which country or countries will have the highest per-capita GDP?
Scientists and engineers, in my experience, cross-pollinate. As much as the dream of distance-less communication abounds, this cross-pollination exhibits geographic clustering. Defense research spending in Massachussetts and the Bay Area spawned Route 128 and the Silicon Valley, respectively.
The sad thing is, while most of the world remains the way it is, they WILL need a military to safeguard them, and sooner or later, whoever provides their protection will get to dictate what they research and that research's applications.
Maybe if such a establishment was founded on the Moon, or even Mars, and can grow their own food etc.?
In the US, they just don't call it a scandal, they call it the "reproducibility crisis." But that crisis reflects a just barely more sophisticated response to the same skewed incentives.
[0] http://making-of-a-fly.me/files/pdf/lt_2011_02_24_31.pdf
Encouraging innovation in China is a much easier problem than this, yet both have the same pragmatic solution.
Also, isn't this just a what aboutism anyways?
This is just classic what aboutism.
Retraction Watch gives a fairly good overview of the issue: http://retractionwatch.com/
A first step would be to move to a preprint model and require full disclosure of data sets, turn in of source code, and pre-registration of clinical studies. In turn reviewers must be required to publish their reviews and sign them with their name.
This would help keeping the business honest on both sides of peer review.
As of now, journals decide who gets to be published, and the scientific community (or in an indirect sense, the public) decides which journals get read.
So the scientific community has to come to a global consensus, or all countries must come to a consensus and enforce it legally (whereas we can't even agree that nukes are bad).
Once all that's done, we still need trust. Researchers can remove data selectively, use altered versions of published code, etc.
To say nothing of countries who would pretend to adopt the law without enforcing it, with or without malicious intent.
We need trust, and trust is built on a case-by-case basis, it requires judgment. We as a community simply need to be more critical with new research.
The scientific community isn't homogenous. Some communities are better organized than others. This is visible in their varying quality and journals' openness (e.g. arXiv).
The communities with strong nexuses with industry, e.g. oncology, would stand to enforce reproducibility the best. A grand bargain whereby pharmaceutical companies (and others who would commercially benefit from more-reproducible research), or even just the NIH, include reasonable standards as part of their grant requirements would move the needle forward. It would also help us troubleshoot what works and what doesn't.
However, I don't think our first priority should be trust.
Our first priority should be public availability of data and reviews. With this information, we get reproducibility and accountability for wrongdoing. In the long run, this will be worth more than trust.
I think the NYT and others keep clawing at China simply because China has an agenda which diverges from the globalist vision of the NYT. They care for themselves and will do it by themselves by their own philosophy which happens to be less introspective. This means that while it can bring great value to Chinese, they may not feel like redistributing their largesse in any way with the rest of the world.
If there's 4 times as much fraud in China, then good Chinese researchers have to sift through 4 times as much bullshit, and are much less likely to trust and expand upon any new research, which slows down progress.
If anything, I expect that the country the most hurt by Chinese research fraud is China itself.
China is evil, they are exploiting 3rd world mineral reserves in the most unjust and environmentally destructive manner possible. Their democracy is even more of a joke than that of the US. But they aren't stupid or incompetent, and how well the west trusts their scientific results means nothing to nobody.
We should stop trying to convince ourselves that China is failing and start trying to understand what it means to have a non-democratic sci-fi dystopia in charge of the world and how we can escape that totalitarian fate.
Abstract, orthogonal concerns are often easier to discuss than the particulars of the articles we're talking about. Anyone can have an opinion about the relative merits of "superpowers", whether or not they've read the article. So even when the root orthogonal comment is well-intentioned and informed, the subsequent comments may not be, and will end up crowding out informed discussion.
It's a frustrating recurring pattern on HN and one we'd do well to push back on. And I think all we have to do to accomplish that is to tie our abstract concerns back in some way to the actual article.
So to the point. I don't think that international credibility is a metric that means much to China. They have never sought it. They have had a quality problem for a very long time and done nothing to improve their image in manufacturing. However, all would agree that they have become a manufacturing powerhouse. This is because it matters more that they can deliver a good to the hands of consumers than what the consumers think of the manufacturer. If they invent a way to instantaneously communicate over long distances [1] or to make meta-materials with surprising properties [2] , they can exploit these results. Whether "the West" beleives those results or not is probably not of much interest to them. Indeed, it might be in China's interest that we don't beleive in Chinese science. Perhaps, China will become a magician to us, a box which produces goods which we do not understand. An alien civlization. Would that not be in their interest? They already do medical research which the west does not have the stomach to discuss. Genetic research on live subjects and fetuses. We don't even have a framework for replicating that research and medical students in "the West" do not learn from the results. But someday rich people will fly to China and beg for their magical cures. "Oh yes. Mr. Jobs, we have nanobots that can cure your cancer. Just give us a stake in Apple." And we won't even understand the medicine, we won't consider it to be real science. We'll call it "Eastern medicine". But it will work. And people will pay their life savings for it.
I think that the NYT is writing to an audience what the audience wants to hear. Their headline is tabloidesque, which is odd for The Times which prides itself with measured professionality. And their reasons for publishing this article seem to have more to do with my overall claim than actual newsworthiness.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/teleportation-china-earth-orb... [2] https://phys.org/news/2009-10-chinese-scientists-metamateria...
I have a feeling this upvote system might need some work.
I feel like I'm contributing to this problem right now.
That said, Chinese academia has a massive credibility problem for a good reason. I know a PhD working in materials science and organic chemistry, and after being burned multiple times by unreproducible papers that PhD doesn't even bother to spend time trying out methods reported by Chinese researchers. Yes, this is anecdotal but it correlates strongly with the wider reporting on the issue. I'm sure there are many good researchers in China - part of the problem is that their work won't be disseminated because it will be written off.
I lived in China for over 3 years, in Korea a few years prior to that, and while the culture has a rich history and it's a fascinating and generally friendly place, we're talking about people who are often one generation from living like it is still the 18th century. A place where black rhino horn has medicinal properties despite chemically being identical to my toenails and eating dog imparts sexual prowess, especially when the dog is beaten to death. These aren't niche beliefs, these are pretty mainstream attitudes, though it's definitely changing with the younger crowd.
The Cultural Revolution certainly didn't help -- essentially created a generation of people fearful of too much independent thinking. In 1965, there were over 400 technical journals in China. In 1969 -- 20.
You also have the very real problem of the government setting research agendas. It's not far from Lysenkoism. In fact, Lysenko contributed substantially to the 1959-61 famine that killed 30 million Chinese.
Chinese research, in my experience, has rarely been field-leading. It's generally derivative, rarely novel -- or at least if it is novel, it is rarely repeatable. There are a few exceptions, but compared to US, Korea, British, Japanese, German innovation, they aren't even close.
https://www.jove.com/blog/2012/05/03/studies-show-only-10-of...
Despite IP laws being useless in the international arena it's not too far fetched that even the Chinese, despite being so large, are aided by the whole global scientific community reviewing and replicating their results. It makes progress all that much faster and easier.
Or it simply could be corruption.
By 1988 Japan had surpassed the US in GDP per capita. The US is now ~53% ahead. That's no discredit to Japan, they're a very advanced industrial nation. The US simply happens to be the greatest economic train in history, one that has rarely stopped expanding in the last two centuries.
Maybe China will manage a century of mostly unbroken growth. We'll see what they do now that the easy growth - filling in their vast economic slack and correcting particularly extreme inefficiencies - has long since ended (which is why they took on tens of trillions in debt post 2007).
I find this graph is a better representation of the current state of the world
Puts things in perspective I think a bit better
Stats like the one you posted do offer some psychological relief though
About what? Nobody's shouting down actual Chinese achievements in science. We've learned from experience to be dubious about any scientific announcements out of China, because so very frequently, they turn out to be bogus. They make the western reproducibility crisis look like a few un-dotted i' s in comparison. I can't think of the last discovery out of China I heard of that didn't get retracted or turn out to be fraudulent.
Right now, science is not a field I'm even slightly afraid of China taking a lead on, any time soon. Maybe in a generation or two, after a lot of reform. (Space, now, maybe. You can use decades-old, already-done science to get into space. You just need money.)
My POV about China, there are two points:
- a history of low grade copy: this is not how you discover or get attention/credibility
- a booming growth: as the article says, they "want" to become a science leading country, but you can't rush it, skipping steps now may cause implosion later on (as the amount of paper retraction shows).
Other than that, nobody says China or any country cannot do science, but it needs proper dedication to the method and patience...
This Zak Slayback article (which itself is summarizing Peter Thiel) explains it exceptionally well. https://zakslayback.com/2014/10/07/pessimism-optimism-defini...
>Their democracy is even more of a joke than that of the US.
Really? You're actually going to make that statement? Calling China a democracy is beyond ridiculous.
I can only imagine that the Chinese middle-class feel the same way towards the USA.
>Their democracy is even more of a joke than that of the US
I never understood the idea that democracy was a superior form of government. If, in the future, China (or some other nation) becomes the next world power, with superior scientific innovation, larger industry, higher standards of living, etc, will you still prefer Democracy to what they have?
It seems incredibly naive to assume the present state of the west is somehow the final and ultimate condition we can hope to obtain. If this is as good as it gets, I think I want to move to China.
Well, there's plenty of middle class in the US who think the Republican party and Trump is evil, so that sounds plausible.
> I never understood the idea that democracy was a superior form of government.
Winston Churchill quotes might be cliche, but still warranted. Democracy is superior in the sense that it provides a release valve for replacing incompetent or malicious government less catastrophic than peasant uprisings or Coup d'états.
Fortunately, it's still an open question whether repressive regimes can become superior. Or whether repressive regimes will continue their repression as the population thrives.
> I think I want to move to China.
Voting with your feet -- What a very democratic idea!
Well of course I would. Would you rather be married to a rich man who beats you?
> It seems incredibly naive to assume the present state of the west is somehow the final and ultimate condition we can hope to obtain. If this is as good as it gets, I think I want to move to China.
I am extremely sceptical of American "democracy" but I see Chinese totalitarianism to be a step in the wrong direction.
Is that why their kids go to US grad schools? For the evil?
What democracy?
and even if it did mean anything, it wouldn't mean anything to most US residents -- except an opportunity to join the world's largest military machine.