China’s rise in science grabs media attention

With stirring music, the Chinese government’s brief video “Amazing China ” glorifies a huge new passenger jet. “A nation, to grow stronger, must implement a range of science and technology projects, which embody its strategic intentions,” the clip declares. The statement echoes Chinese president Xi Jinping’s recent science-based call for—as Asia’s Straits Times put it —"more efforts to turn China into a country of innovators.” Journalists worldwide are examining China’s burgeoning ambitions in science and technology.

Media reports on that ambitiousness regularly use the word superpower. The political publication The Hill reports that during China’s recent 19th Party Congress, Xi called for building the country “into a ‘science and technology superpower,’ particularly as an ‘aerospace superpower’ and ‘cyber superpower.’” In July, Nature and Scientific American portrayed China’s efforts to become a “space science superpower.” The 13 October New York Times front page prominently highlighted “China’s dream of becoming a science superpower.”

Judging by the most recent Nature Index , the science-superpower dream is coming true. The index calls itself “a database of author affiliation information collated from research articles published in an independently selected group of 68 high-quality science journals.” Its current ranking of 500 research institutions lists the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) first, just ahead of Harvard University, the Max Planck Society, the French National Centre for Scientific Research, Stanford University, MIT, and Oxford University.

Some of the coverage cautions about competitiveness concerns for the West. At the New York Times, the article atop the 8 November business section front page carried the headline “China vs. the world.” It briefly contrasted China’s science research funding increase with the US decrease, but mainly focused on worry in Washington and among “major global companies” about Beijing’s designs to dominate technologies like advanced microchips, artificial intelligence, and electric cars.

Advancing on many fronts

China’s chip production and AI efforts have been getting lots of ink. The Verge, echoed by Wired , reported in 2016 that without using US chips, China has more of the world’s fastest supercomputers. The South China Morning Post (SCMP) calls it world AI dominance. CNBC emphasizes that China aspires to achieve that dominance within 15 years.

An official Chinese English-language daily newspaper reports that China’s “elite science ship” has begun a global circumnavigation for oceanic and polar research. Thailand’s The Nation says Chinese engineers are developing the first large delivery drone. The July Nature article told of China’s latest orbiting space lab, four missions for astrophysics and other purposes that have been launched into orbit in the past two years, and the $100 million Quantum Experiments at Space Scale (QUESS) program, with its remarkable advance toward exploiting quantum entanglement for secure communicating.

The article also reported on the $300 million Dark Matter Particle Explorer (DAMPE), which launched in 2015. The high-energy cosmic-ray detector is designed to follow up on observations made by the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) aboard the International Space Station. Nature noted that the US is “notably absent from China’s current list of collaborators”—despite past precedents like AMS.

China also envisions world supercollider leadership with the planned Circular Electron Positron Collider —which has inspired a Cornell University physicist to publish the essay “The future of particle physics will live and die in China: China’s next-generation supercollider will unlock secrets of the universe—and destroy the ideals of the scientists running it.” Author Yangyang Cheng declares, “Here’s the first problem with the Chinese plan: Authoritarian states breed a parochial national pride antithetical to the cosmopolitan ideals of big science.”

“Festering problem of systemic fraud”

That prediction calls to mind questions about fraud and censorship in China’s science culture—questions being examined in the general coverage of China’s science ambitions.

A Nature editorial in 2016 urged China to “strengthen its scientific foundations.” But although the free flow of information is fundamental to science, Science magazine found itself opening an August 2017 news article by charging that China “is tightening the screws on internet access, again”—in a “crackdown” that “could seriously erode scientists’ ability to stay connected with peers abroad.”

Concerning China’s demands for censorship complicity from elsewhere, the new science magazine Undark—joined by the Financial Times , the Washington Post , and others —told this month about the response of Springer Nature, which publishes Scientific American and Nature. Springer blocked access in China to at least 1000 politics-related articles, arguing that refusal would have brought on even worse censorship. The Financial Times noted that in a similar incident, Cambridge University Press acceded to China’s demands, encountered “an intense backlash against its surrender of academic freedom,” then reversed its decision.

There’s also the fraud problem. In 2010, it got front-page treatment from the New York Times. This year, a July SCMP headline asked , “Are China’s scientists more interested in cash than the search for truth?” A Science article opened this way: “A massive peer-review fraud has triggered a tough response from the Chinese government. Officials last week announced that more than 400 researchers listed as authors on some 100 now-retracted papers will face disciplinary action because their misconduct has seriously damaged China’s scientific reputation.”

By 13 October, the fraud problem was back on the New York Times front page, under the headline “China tarnished by science fraud.” The online version’s headline said, “Fraud scandals sap China’s dream of becoming a science superpower.” Citing the blog Retraction Watch, the Times reported that since 2012, China has matched the entire world in the number of its paper retractions resulting from faked peer review. Scandals over “questionable or discredited research,” the article declared, show that for China to realize its technoscience ambitions, it must “overcome a festering problem of systemic fraud.”

The long view

The Times followed up with a letter to the editor from longtime observer of Chinese science Samuel Waxman, founder of the cancer research foundation bearing his name. Despite the problems, he sees in China a new “superpower of government-supported, world-class science productivity.” Citing the gradual return to China of the “brain trust trained here” in the West, he conjectures that a complete reversal is possible—a “shift in science from West to East and the creation of an American brain trust in China.”

In framing China’s science rise historically, as Waxman does, science observer Ross Andersen takes the long view—nearly four millennia long. He also adds literary framing. A Chinese government news site sees the country’s scientific achievements fostering a “golden age” in the country’s science fiction. In the December Atlantic, Andersen’s long article opens this way: “Last January, the Chinese Academy of Sciences invited Liu Cixin, China’s preeminent science-fiction writer, to visit its new state-of-the-art radio dish in the country’s southwest. Almost twice as wide as the dish at America’s Arecibo Observatory, in the Puerto Rican jungle, the new Chinese dish is the largest in the world.” Andersen calls this huge scientific instrument “custom-built to listen for a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence.” In depth, he engages Liu’s thoughts about that scientific mission. In the process, Andersen observes that no Earthly civilization “has a longer continuous tradition of astronomy than China, whose earliest emperors drew their political legitimacy from the sky, in the form of a ‘mandate of heaven.’”

Apparently Chinese astronomers share Andersen’s preference for that long view. Andersen reports that for their first use of their new dish, they “pointed it at the fading radio glow of a supernova, or ‘guest star,’ as Chinese astronomers had called it when they recorded the unusual brightness of its initial explosion almost 1,000 years earlier.”

Steven T. Corneliussen is Physics Today‘s media analyst. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.