Is this also common for EU/USA? Do we say "UK developers new method for ..." or "Researchers at Cambridge"?
I swear I'm not making any political statements, just wondering why we treat it as a homogeneous entity.
these would be completely normal headlines, in my experience.
All the time. Just search for "UK/British scientists/engineers invent/develop" (with quotes). There are lots of headlines like that.
E.g. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/05/10/british-scientis...
It's more that you don't really get any headlines out of China that aren't from or laundered through Chinese English-language media first. Whereas in the West, universities send their PR pieces to the Western media directly. No normal journalist is trolling Arxiv or Nature or whatever for juicy papers, and certainly not Chinese-language journals: they're just rehashing the media release, usually uncritically. Which is why you hear about every time someone sneezes near a new battery chemistry that "may revolutionise energy storage" but "needs more research into mass production methods" at MIT but almost never at Tsinghua, unless it's done the rounds first and caused a stir in the domain-specific publications.
Communist in name. Lots of private businesses though.
China does thing literally applies here, asoth entities are Chinese-state educational and research institutions.
Not really a big deal, though I'd have... you know... linked to the actual paper or maybe mentioned the professor's name more prominently.
I think most stuff I read emphasizes institute and researchers more heavily, but I can see why anyone doing public research might want to expand the scope of credit.
I guess when you're inside a country which produces the news, the actual location inside that country matters more than for people outside that country ...
E.g. for the US what's commonly called Americentrism - I guess a similar term exists for China.