New Delhi: Universities in southern China are reportedly underperforming when it comes to turning academic research into market application, putting at risk China’s ambition of becoming a tech superpower by the middle of the century, breaking US dominance.
An article published in the South China Morning Post (SCMP) Wednesday, cited the findings of an audit report by the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region for 2022, to claim that for nine universities in the region, the conversion rate from invention to market application was less than one percent.
Of these nine universities, one failed to get a single successful industrial application from a total of 862 implemented research projects, which had received a total funding of 131 million yuan, the report added.
The 15,000-word long audit report had been uploaded on the website of the Audit Office of Guanxi two weeks back, but was later removed from the website, according to SCMP. The news organisation claimed, however, that the key findings of the audit had been circulated online.
Quoting Liu Ruiming, professor at the National Development and Strategic Research Institute at Renmin University, the article said the audit findings essentially reflect “a nationwide issue… Researchers appear to be conducting basic theoretical research, but often they produce a large quantity of useless research output that is primarily focused on paper-centric assessments.”
Liu added: “These outputs are neither purely beneficial for advancing fundamental theories nor directly convertible into practical applications. Therefore, this represents a state of idle and less-effective research.”
The audit also highlighted a disparity between budgeted funds and actual expenditures for converting research into profitable projects.
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Gap in execution
According to the National Bureau of Statistics, SCMP wrote, China’s total research and development expenditures rank second in the world. The country had also boosted investments in the field of converting scientific research into profitable market applications, with a targeted state fund of 62.4 billion yuan by the end of 2022.
However, the Guangxi audit report found that there were unused funds worth 9.14 million yuan, as a result of the disparity between the budget and actual spending, reported SCMP.
According to media reports, the Institute for Scientific Information, a US-based research analysis organisation, has found that China generated 3.7 million publications in 2021, accounting for 23 percent of the world’s total output and behind only the US’s 4.4 million papers.
However, analysts have reportedly claimed that China’s outstanding productivity conceals structural inefficiencies and a background of alleged “subpar” and “dishonest” research.
According to a Financial Times (FT) article published in March 2023, researchers have also criticised the pressure to publish in order to land prestigious posts at research universities in China.
“To survive in Chinese academia, we have many KPIs [key performance indicators] to hit. So, when we publish, we focus on quantity over quality,” FT quoted a purported physics lecturer from a prominent Beijing university as saying. “When prospective employers look at our CVs, it is much easier for them to judge the quantity of our output over the quality of the research,” he had added.
Meanwhile talking about the findings of the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region audit, Liu told SCMP, “There are policy restrictions that need to be overcome, such as limitations on cross-domain trading, which hinders the construction of a unified national market. This is a significant constraint in China’s current situation.”
(Edited by Poulomi Banerjee)