Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon: Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World by Zhao Yong

Author:Zhao, Yong [Zhao, Yong]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781118487136
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2014-08-14T04:00:00+00:00

China's research publications have the same problem, when tested for quality. Nature reported that a 2010 survey commissioned by the Chinese Ministry of Science found that “roughly one-third of more than 6,000 surveyed across six top institutions admitted to plagiarism, falsification or fabrication.”30 In 2008, Helen Zhang, editor of the prestigious Journal of Zhejiang University-Science, pioneered the use of software to spot plagiarism in submissions. “In almost two years, we find about 31 percent of papers with unreasonable copy[ing] and plagiarism,” she told NPR in 2011.31 In another astonishing case, a medical research paper published in 1997 was found to have been plagiarized six times by twenty-five coauthors at sixteen institutions in 2010.32 Despite significant advances in medical technology, the plagiarists continued to report similar results using virtually identical language.

Fraud aside, the overall lower quality of China's research papers is also indicated by another figure: the average number of times a paper has been referenced by other papers. Although the overall number of citations of Chinese papers has increased significantly, the average remains much lower than the world's average: 6.92 times compared to 10.69 times.33

In short, the quantity of China's scientific and technological output looks more than impressive, but the quality of its patents and research publications is abysmal. China still trails many developed countries when it comes to real innovation and significant patents. In other words, while the grand wish of the government has been realized in terms of quantity, the government has not gotten what it really wants. The trillions of dollars China has spent on its scientific and technological Great Leap Forward has had an outcome almost identical to the previous Great Leap: lots of steel without much value and rampant cheating.

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