Elite researchers in China say they had 'no choice' but to commit misconduct

Goodhart’s law at work.

No. They just loose their funding and job.

Western academics get the pressure too. That largely explains some of Fauci’s lies, as I understand he was concerned that being transparent about the source of the virus would antagonise chinese authorities, who would cut scientific cooperation on covid in retaliation.

Yeah, but "publish or perish" is a thing in the West too. A lot of our academics also end up trying to fudge the numbers or cherry-pick the data to bring more significance to their work. Maybe they won't be outright disappeared into a labor camp if they don't, but their careers still depend on it. A thorough and sober analysis quietly refuting some flawed methodology is unlikely to get anywhere near the same amount of public attention compared to a sensationalist study with sometimes-true data optimally massaged for hype.

Wikipedia has a looooooong list of scientific misconduct incidents, many of them in the West: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientific_misconduct_...

I think a few years ago I read a metastudy on the prevalence of scientific misconduct in China vs the West, but I can't remember or find it right now :( But it's certainly not a problem unique to China.

Science in the West is heavily industry-driven, and the incentives are so muddy and often expressly designed to act against the public interest such that some local optimum could be pursued in the lead-up to some new product or service being capitalized. This sort of profit-first science is great for pursuing some things (fossil fuel developments, new cars, pharma, etc.) but not so good at dealing with difficult-to-monetize social ills (poverty and drug abuse, climate science, traffic and transit, nutrition, exercise, etc.). The monied interests are impossible to remove from the ocean of papers and severely lower the signal to noise ratio.

I don't know that China has any better answer to that, but their market system is somewhat different. Their scientists on the ground still have to feed themselves the same as ours do, but their overall societal incentives (and the forms of corruption it tends to breed) are still different.

It'll be interesting to see how all this plays out in the new few decades... (AI cold war?)