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

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 encouraging “0-to-1” breakthroughs or even “1-to-100” incremental improvements, he caustically describes the system as tending towards “0-to-minus-1”—piling up resources to create impressive-looking “piles of rubbish”. Young scholars, in turn, become more focused on joining well-funded research teams than on pursuing breakthroughs in their own areas of expertise.

Complaints about the bureaucratisation of research are not new. In China’s medical profession, a relentless policy emphasis on publication output has made career advancement for young doctors contingent on meeting research quotas—fuelling paper mills that ghost-write the articles. In the humanities, the exemplar remains the Qing History Project, which marshalled enormous sums of funding and labour to produce a 3.2 million-character history of China’s last dynasty, only for officials to reject the draft in 2023—ostensibly for political incorrectness. The project is still humming along with reduced funding, but still enough to absorb the efforts of many scholars and graduate students.

Zhang is especially scathing about the role of superstar scholars returning to China from elite US universities. These remigrations are usually presented as a boon to Chinese research. Zhang, however, sees their effect as often malign: too frequently driven by vanity and personalised power over enormous budgets at newly formed institutes. The celebrated returnee AI scientist Song-Chun Zhu reportedly claimed that only China would offer him the resources to pursue his vision of AI. Of one such lavishly welcomed returnee scientist, Zhang cites a younger colleague’s bitter question: “How many young people will have to tighten their belts and be left without funding to do research?”

That, for him, is ...