There is intense pressure to publish as many papers as possible at Chinese universities. This has led to a big problem of faked or just bad research papers coming out of China, so people are generally skeptical of them
As a non-Chinese scientist, I can attest that there is intense pressure to publish as many papers as possible pretty much everywhere, and this leads to a problem of bad research across the world.
China may be among the worst offenders in this respect, but the particular thing the OP is asking about doesn't strike me as a Chinese-specific thing at all. I see non-Chinese scientists rushing half-baked results to arXiv all the time.
https://qz.com/978037/china-publishes-more-science-research-...
I respectfully submit that you may be providing an anecdotal experience.
It’s so bad that China’s courts have called for the death penalty for scientific fraud.
https://www.statnews.com/2017/06/23/china-death-penalty-rese...
Goodness me.
To add some context, the death penalty is used much more widely in China than a Westerner might realize, so to them this idea is not quite as radical as it might seem. The PRC government is a bit tight lipped about exact policies, but it's known the death penalty gets employed for things like corruption and even major economic crimes like fraud or money counterfeiting. And of course drug offenses and the violent crimes.
The “death penalty” under discussion is for faking drug results and causing deaths of patients, which sounds reasonable.
Replication is just a nice term for it. It can just as well be a crisis of fraud with the failure of replicating fraudulent results as the consequence.
Scientific fraud and garbage results is a huge problem Everywhere. It's actually big enough to nearly invalidate the entire field of psychology.
If China has half the worlds academics-writing-papers, one would _expect_ them to be responsible for half the fabricated ones.
[1]: https://www.nature.com/nature-index/country-outputs/China [2]: https://www.nature.com/nature-index/country-outputs/United%2...
To be fair, according to TFA the death penalty is only for clinical trials where the drug or procedure, due to faked or doctored data, causes severe or fatal consequences.
It actually seems pretty reasonable to me. You develop a drug that actually kills people but fake your data to show it saves lives. Then you make money while people start dying, essentially killing people because your career was more important than reality. I’d call that murder.
One wonders: is the unearned time as an elite university president worth being humiliated by an 18 year old on the student newspaper and being forced to resign in disgrace?
For me that's an easy no, but others may have different preferences.
There is deluge of terrible papers from China that are just a mess, below any imaginable standard. Ones that labs in the EU/US/Russia/Japan/etc. don't put out. Yes, everyone has to publish, and there are bad papers out there, but the volume and low quality from China is unmatched.
I anecdotally feel religious or leftist western circles very much fall under the definition of face culture though.
Let's agree this is anecdotal at best, and move on. Facts need data to back them up. There's no data or links to research in this post.
if you're doubting the veracity of the poster's claims, just say so directly
e: recollection was slightly off but it is actually much worse! https://sci-hub.ru/10.1007/s11948-017-9939-6
china is truly in a league of its own with this stuff, by literal orders of magnitude
Yes, but official government stats have also been overstating the population a bit. I think it mostly affects the younger generation at present though.
The news mostly. But also this guy[1], who I guess is using the leaked data. But even the official data shows a huge drop in the 0-4 bucket.
> Why would the population be overstated?
As I understand it[2], the local governments are reliant on two sources for income: land sales and money from the central government. Both are influenced by demographic change, so there's incentives to adjust the numbers upwards to keep revenue coming in.
[1]: https://zeihan.com/new-chinese-demographic-data-population-c... [2]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-13/china-s-p...