The Bureaucratisation of Chinese Research: More Money and Less Innovation – by Zhang Hong, a Biologist at CAS

"The kind of research in China that relies on amassing manpower and resources is much like collecting stamps—the papers it produces are [ultimately] just a heap of rubbish."

The following is an account by Zhang Hong, a biologist at the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS), of a scientific culture being eroded by the infusion of centrally managed resources and overly bureaucratic assessments. Because most critiques of China’s scholarly trends come from the humanities and social sciences, this account by a scientist—successful in his field yet uninterested in “celebrity scientist” fame—is especially valuable in its provenance.

Zhang does not dispute that Chinese research is flourishing in quantitative terms. His concern is a deeper cultural decay produced by “resource-driven research”: the mass mobilisation of academic talent through hyper-bureaucratised funding and assessment, prestigious titles and shiny new institutes. Funding shapes research everywhere, but Zhang’s target is more specific: the concentrated channelling of resources into extravagant research projects controlled by powerful academic “oligarchies” and intellectually aloof committees.

Rather than …