Eleanor Alcott, Humza Jiliani and Andrew Jack:
Some of this research has translated into technological breakthroughs that have turbocharged Chinese industrial competitiveness — from labs that developed powerful battery technologies later used by leading companies in the electric vehicle sector, including CATL and BYD, to biotech companies such as BGI Genomics, which originated as a government-funded research institute working on human genomics.
As China has climbed the rankings, many critics have pointed to the industrial scale of fraudulent or poor-quality research, driven in part by incentives that reward publication volume in tenure and promotion decisions. Even metrics designed to measure a piece of research’s impact, such as citations, have at times been distorted by Chinese-authored papers being unnecessarily cited by fellow academics to boost their rating.
Ivan Oransky, co-founder of Retraction Watch, which tracks publication trends, says: “China’s government has been intensively gaming those metrics using incentives that have led to widespread misconduct, including paper mill activity.” Paper mills are companies paid to create fake academic studies.
In 2024, he recorded nearly 3,000 retractions of Chinese-authored papers from journals, compared with 177 for US authors.
But Bethany Allen, head of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s China investigations programme, cautions against dismissing Chinese universities by focusing on the volume of low-quality papers.