China–US research collaborations are in decline – this is bad news for everyone | Hacker News Reader

China–US research collaborations are in decline – this is bad news for everyone

nature.com

27 pointspseudolus7 comments

It might also be a great thing.

Lots of systems and nature have competing frameworks. The left and right hemisphere of the brain, muscle systems, multipole organisms, etc.

The far worst risk to the US is financial incentives in place by government policy that push companies to do less and less basic research.

It would be a mistake to put Chinese paper mill science into the same category as western science. I mean this is a country where Government and private sector have no boundaries. China is purposely attempting to dillute actual science with partisan science.

Information that come from authoritarian regimes have no value. China is wasting its time on research that has no merit outside China.

This is a country that mixes radioactive thorium powder into products like coffee mugs. https://youtu.be/A-bR1-dm1Tg?si=zxOUPqBf1dZRjkXq

There has been plenty of groundbreaking science from China, look no further than ResNet, which was a great example of US-China research collaboration. [1]

[1]https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...

> Information that come from authoritarian regimes have no value. China is wasting its time on research that has no merit outside China.

This just shows that you do not read recent research papers.

On all the Internet forums, there are a lot of postings from naive Americans who claim that the Chinese are not creative and they only copy the results of research from USA or other countries.

All these people are completely delusional and it is extremely dangerous to underestimate so much a possible enemy.

While there are plenty of Chinese research papers that are just garbage, that is also true for many research papers published by US organizations. However, in the last two-three years, I have seen a far greater number of original and creative research papers coming from China, than from USA.

In general, nowadays the research teams from USA seem much more unwilling to take risks than the Chinese, i.e. to try research directions that seem unlikely to produce successful results, even if a few of those directions may produce far greater advances than the incremental advances of the less risky directions.

For example, it is enough to look at the research papers that I have seen this morning and I see a paper like "A microsized optical spectrometer based on an organic photodetector with an electrically tunable spectral response", published by a Chinese team, which has a very innovative way of making a spectrometer, using a single photodetector whose spectral response can be tuned by a voltage, instead of the much larger kinds of spectrometers that could be made until now, which had to use either a very large number of photodetectors or some big optical components that had to be moved by motors.

I see such examples almost every week. While the US research continues to produce small improvements continuously, at a decent rate, there has passed a very long time since I have last seen any US research result that has impressed me as being something novel and unexpected.

Writing off Chinese science as a "paper mill" is incredibly ignorant. These days, China is among the top contributors (solidly in the same league as the US and EU) to scientific research.

The simplest metric to judge the overall amount of quality research output is to look at the number of papers accepted into top journals like Nature, which are anything but a paper mills. China already leads by that metric: https://www.nature.com/nature-index/country-outputs/generate....

> This is a country that mixes radioactive thorium powder into products like coffee mugs.

They still have to learn from US how to do experiments on their own citizens.

"Zhang says that ongoing geopolitical tensions between the United States and China have also fuelled the decline. “This is especially worrying for researchers,” says Zhang."

Unfortunately, this is nothing new, scientists left Nazi Germany in droves as its authoritarianism ramped up.

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