China has seen increasing international enrolments as its universities grow in stature, but this has also brought challenges.Credit: Yang Bo/China News Service/VCG via Getty
In 2018, I argued that China’s meteoric growth in research output masked deeper structural issues, including inconsistent research quality and a ‘publish or perish’ academic culture. Seven years on, that picture has changed.
Research quality in China has improved: in 2023, it overtook the United States as the leading country in the Nature Index, which tracks output in high-quality natural- and health-sciences journals. Since then, the gap between the two countries has only widened.
These gains reflect deliberate policy interventions, including the Chinese government’s Double First-Class Initiative, launched in 2017 to cultivate world-class universities and disciplines by awarding different levels of funding on the basis of performance and strategic goals, with a focus on quality over quantity.
At the institutional level, performance evaluations now place greater weight on originality, quality and international visibility, rather than raw output. Since 2020, in response to a national policy that aimed to address the pervasive focus on research output, rather than quality, some universities have reduced or abolished cash rewards for sheer numbers of publications, replacing them with recognition tied to global impact and peer esteem.
But structural challenges remain. Some universities are using pay bumps, rather than cash payments for papers, as a more indirect way to reward prolific authors1. Progress has been uneven: improvements are concentrated in a small cluster of elite universities and disciplines. Political sensitivities continue to constrain academic openness and freedom.
Earlier this year, I interviewed 10 university administrators and academics and 12 international postgraduate students at two Chinese research universities to gain an understanding of how the country’s increasingly cautious approach to global collaborations is affecting their work.
Changing landscape
One of the biggest changes the interviewees described is the shift away from US and UK collaborations, especially in politically sensitive areas, such as artificial intelligence (AI), aerospace and cybersecurity. Many universities now encourage partnerships with researchers in South and southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa and continental Europe — regions with which China aims to strengthen trade and economic ties through its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Some universities are using planning tools to manage international partnerships more carefully. A few interviewees mentioned a system that ranks potential research partners by geopolitical and reputational risk — green for low risk, amber for moderate and red for high, which needs approval from senior university leaders. It “has become a routine part of proposal review — even for conference participation or faculty exchanges”, one academic-affairs supervisor said.
... continue reading