The post here last week about faked papers prompts me to mention this recent publication (which I learned about in Nature): an anonymous survey from inside several Chinese universities. It's quite interesting from that standpoint, and it shows that the Chinese institutions and authorities are indeed becoming worried about the increasing flood of low- (or zero-) quality papers that come from all sorts of Chinese sources. As everyone would have figured, this is a consequence of pressure to Publish, Publish, Publish, and Publish Some More:
. . .this article focuses on China’s plan to build world-class universities and disciplines, titled the World First-Class University and First-Class Academic Discipline Construction (known as the Double First-Class Initiative). The initiative offers significant incentives for individual researchers in elite Chinese universities to produce a rapidly increasing number of articles in top international journals, which has resulted in a swift rise in their world university rankings. On the other hand, the initiative provides ‘organisational reasons’ for wrongdoing, such as unethical research practices. . .
Airing this sort of dirty laundry is not something that any country or any institution ever likes to do, so the bluntness of this article is quite something to see. It takes what it terms "rampant research misconduct" in Chinese science as a given, and then goes on to ask how this spread and what can be done about it. And the authors state that they are not interested in telling tales of individual bad actors who somehow lost their way, as if that was the whole explanation, but rather are trying to link national policies and institutional pressures to all these individual cases. Both authors are from Hong Kong, but remember that the Chinese government has spent years now tightening the clamps there on political expression (but note the statement in a quote below about being from outside mainland China still). That makes it quite refreshing to see things stated as they are:
Most universities in China, including all those listed in the Double First-Class Initiative, are government funded, with their presidents and party chiefs appointed directly by central and local governments. The Communist Party of China has established party units at various levels within universities, such as at the university level, the faculty level and the department level, and the administrative heads of the various levels (e.g. presidents, deans, department heads) typically serve as deputy heads of the corresponding party unit. Through this political design, the Chinese government can ensure that universities strictly implement public policies, serve political demands, and become a part of the Chinese bureaucracy.
It is also refreshing, and a bit startling, to see the authors go on to analyze the situation with reference to the literature on institutional malfeasance and organized crime. A key part of this is the decoupling of goals and means: goals are set with no particular attention paid to the means by which they're accomplished. This is a basic invitation to misconduct - you see it in corporations when managers say (for example) "Make your numbers this quarter or I'll find someone who will". In this situation the numbers to be made were publications, ideally in the highest-impact journals possible. And there was a cascading effect through the bureaucracy (cengceng jiama, as the authors render it in Chinese) as lower-level functionaries each set their own subordinates to exceed the original goals that came down to them. By the time this gets down to the people who are actually going to have to implement these goals (i.e., crank out these manuscripts), there can be no legitimate way to make things work.
The authors actually were able to interview scientists who had gone through this, although it wasn't easy:
Our focus on researchers from the discipline of natural sciences was due to the feasibility of obtaining interview data. We initially attempted to approach social science researchers at elite universities, but most of the potential interviewees we approached declined our interview invitations. This may be because their research topics were more relevant to Chinese policy and society, and they were very reluctant to accept invitations from researchers outside mainland China. We eventually noticed that researchers in the discipline of natural sciences were comparatively more willing to accept our interview invitations, perhaps because their research topics were less sensitive and unrelated to policy and politics. We began by utilising our local connections to interview several researchers in faculties of natural sciences, who then introduced us to colleagues and friends whom we could also interview.
They also note that they conducted further informal interviews with PhD students, who were said to be eager to share details about research misconduct among professors (!) That was because, being at the lowest level of the process, they were the most ill-treated of all. The professors themselves describe having their backs against the wall: there was no way to generate the amount of work (and the amount of papers from it) that they were being asked to provide, so it was fake stuff or be disciplined/fired. Meanwhile, department heads and the like were completely aware that this sort of thing was going on, but did not want to derail the plans that they were being ordered to follow. A quote from an interview:
As leaders, we are well aware of academic misconduct within the faculty. Apart from a few senior professors, most of the younger generation engage in various forms of misconduct with differing severity levels. They do so because they face difficulties meeting promotion criteria, and we do not want to complicate matters. As long as they publish their articles [in SCI journals], that is all the university and faculty need.
Who needs anything more than that, honestly? Why "complicate matters", indeed? Anyone who tries to do such a thing might find themselves being made the scapegoat to protect others on the faculty. The authors note that the usual technique is to minimize the big problems while making a big showy deal out of little ones (dashi huaxiao, xiaoshi hualiao) as a way of keeping up appearances.
It's a fascinating paper, I have to say, and part of that fascination is the recognition that all of us have seen such behaviors in various situations and in various institutions. This is not a China-specific problem - the English language has plenty of phrases that bear on this, e.g. CYA, lipstick on a pig, manage upwards, turn a blind eye, keep the boss happy. . .you can add plenty of others. What I think is particularly Chinese about this situation is the degree of central control and organization in setting such goals, coupled with an immediate, simultaneous willingness to completely ignore how they might be achieved. Because that's your problem. It's a larger and more comprehensive scale for this behavior than you can usually attain in other countries, and I would guess that generations of having to adapt to sometimes capricious demands made with all the force of a centralized state behind them has made this all too common.
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