back to article China is beating the world at scientific research, think tank finds

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) has released an update to its Critical Technology Tracker, claiming that China leads the way in 89 percent of the technologies it tracks, at least in terms of research and development. According to ASPI, the think tank's tracker "provides a leading indicator of a country's …

  1. DS999 Silver badge

    They're using a flawed metric

    They are determining most impactful research by how much it is cited. That's easy to game on the scale of a country, in the same way SEOs gamed PageRank.

    Now maybe their conclusion is true, but I wouldn't buy it based on the evidence they're presenting here.

    1. Andy 73 Silver badge

      Re: They're using a flawed metric

      Indeed, "China leads in semiconductor chip fabrication"???? Really?

      1. pavlecom
        IT Angle

        Re: They're using a flawed metric

        ""China leads in semiconductor chip fabrication"???? Really?"

        The lithography tech is only a 30% of full production of the semiconductor, aching, packaging & testing machines are big part of it.

        China's AMEC have a 80% of the global share of that machines. They are on leading edge in semiconductor tech.

        Other is a materials, chemicals etc.

      2. Alan Brown Silver badge

        Re: They're using a flawed metric

        Yes really, They may not have the most advanced (by some measures) lithography but they simply dwarf the rest of the world in production of all but a few specialised devices

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: They're using a flawed metric

      I’ve lost count of the number of PHd theses I’ve been on asked to review - from China - where all the user in question has done is load up Ansys or COMSOL; a 3d mesh, and attached a few pre existing physics models.

      There are absolutely uses for this, hell, I’ve done that workflow myself. But it’s not generally considered original thinking of itself. The hard part to build the tool was done elsewhere.

      On the other foot, I also see large numbers of Chinese students do their degree/masters/post grad studies here and take that learning back home. There is no question they are benefitting from the influx of ideas.

      The list of Brit students taking STEM beyond a level is woefully bad. Despite maths being one of the more common a-levels to pick.

      1. Like a badger

        Re: They're using a flawed metric

        "The list of Brit students taking STEM beyond a level is woefully bad. Despite maths being one of the more common a-levels to pick."

        Well, where are the well paid, highly respected jobs that would encourage UK students to choose STEM degrees? Where's the role models for STEM? Dyson, perhaps, but the list of current, living, famous British scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians is not a long one. Meanwhile, the morons of the media sector are busy offering "Love Island" as role models, and social media busy promoting gobshite "influencers" as career models.

        Then there's the jobs themselves. For maths, there's some well paid roles in banking and actuarial work (leeches!), but where's the industry or tech sector to use the rest of STEM? Working for the scumbag accountancy or consultancy shysters is well paid, but creates no wealth for the economy.

        We could do a massive change in tuition fees, so that the dossers degrees* are far more costly to study than quality subjects, and the dosser's student loan repayments start at lower salaries. That would hopefully discourage the Mickey Mouse degrees, but wouldn't necessarily mean more students taking up quality subjects.

        * management studies, sports science, journalism, history, marketing, media studies, criminology, politics, philosophy (and PPE), arts, farts, theatre, "design" etc etc. And arguably psychology, and computer science.

        1. sgp

          Re: They're using a flawed metric

          History? Really? You don't want any historians?

          1. HuBo
            Coffee/keyboard

            Re: They're using a flawed metric

            And competent journalists, rather than CSIRO's Cosmos Magazine nauseating AI nonsense-bots!

          2. Like a badger

            Re: They're using a flawed metric

            "History? Really? You don't want any historians?"

            Well, as a species do we learn anything from history? I'd argue generally not.

            However I wasn't suggesting every one my harshly-labelled MM degree list was eradicated - we probably do need a few historians, pyschologists, archaeologists, environmental scientists etc, just not the number we currently educate to degree level. And certainly not the masses of business studies, media studies, and politics graduates.

            1. Alan Brown Silver badge

              Re: They're using a flawed metric

              Just make sure you don't load _all_ the telephone sanitizers onto the Ark

          3. Alan Brown Silver badge

            Re: They're using a flawed metric

            We need a society where STEM subject graduates are valued, not treated as inferior to an oik with a classics degree who can't keep track of how many children he has

        2. O'Reg Inalsin

          Re: They're using a flawed metric

          Yikes. Speaking of history, do you consider several thousand years of human artistic, philosophical, religious, sports, etc activity all dossing? What would there be for AI to borrow if humans didn't do that kind of stuff?

          I think the real source of the problem, at least with the US and the UK, is the government deficit spending which gets funneled into the financial industries under the false assumption that a high stock market equates to success. Over the past 40 years that has lead to ever greater oscillations in the stock markets and ever greater deficits. There is little point in investing in long term industrial ventures, because keeping the money liquid in order the catch the next tranche of government funded easy-credit bubble is the most profitable thing to do, and that's a job for investment bankers and hedge funds. Cryptocurrency, and NFT, and even Language-AI-overhype being exceptions because they include strong bubble components that investment bankers and hedge funds can ride and make remarkable short term profit.

        3. Alan Brown Silver badge

          Re: They're using a flawed metric

          The problem is/was entirely prodictable. As sooon as fees for "hard" subjects started being jacked up, people switched to the "easy/cheap" ones

          I saw this happening 40 years ago in New Zealand and it wasn't a new phenomenon then. Pointing out what would happen to UK fees and student bodies when this started happening in the 2000s was laughed off as "can't happen here, we're BRITISH"

          (Similar parallels can be drawn between the way NZ's NHS was virtually destroyed and the steps now being taken here)

      2. Alan Brown Silver badge

        Re: They're using a flawed metric

        > On the other foot, I also see large numbers of Chinese students do their degree/masters/post grad studies here and take that learning back home

        Yup - and working in that environment it was painfully obvious who the PLA stooges were and that their mission was to keep those students under a tight leash via fear

    3. Craig 2
      Trollface

      Re: They're using a flawed metric

      Apparently, they don't track how much is completely made up....

  2. harrys

    100% agree ...

    China ... hey Jim its all propoganda .... but not as we know it :)

    PS smells like a call for more tax payers monies to be allocated to defence spending ... check out the background of the so called think tank ......

  3. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    the Australian Strategic Policy Institute

    Is this actually a PR group for China ?

    They can't stop talking about China. Don't they have anything else to think about ?

    1. collinsl Silver badge

      Re: the Australian Strategic Policy Institute

      Well when all your friends are half a world away and China is very close to you & has a massive role in your economy you tend to get focused

      1. Alan Brown Silver badge

        Re: the Australian Strategic Policy Institute

        Particularly when the last Prime Minister managed to spectacularly piss the Chinese off, resulting in them not only taking tens of billions of dollars in export business elsewhere, but taking active steps to setup mines and obtain crucial raw materials (iron ore, coal) from countries which are falling all over themselves to take hundreds of billions of dollars in Chinese trade money

        China is not a captive customer, as several industries have discovered to their woe when national governments have tried to use them as pawns

    2. Yorick Hunt Silver badge

      Re: the Australian Strategic Policy Institute

      It's a PR group for the CIA; the naming merely reflects which region it's supposed to influence.

      Don't believe me? Check their web site.

    3. St.Altair

      Re: the Australian Strategic Policy Institute

      A country of 1.5 billion is advancing rapidly. Makes sense they focus on it, specially if it's their adversary.

  4. Paul Crawford Silver badge

    Maybe China is spending a lot on STEM related education and research, something other govs have depreciated in favour of "business studies" and similar?

  5. PhilipN Silver badge

    Read the Acknowledgments

    which include “Patent Analytics Hub, IP Australia” which is where the datasets and analyses were cribbed from.

    The researchers then just began with the assumption that the most hits means being in the lead.

    1. Alan Brown Silver badge

      Re: Read the Acknowledgments

      This isn't new

      99.9% of all PhDs are crap - seriously. That applies whether the awarding university is in the top 10 or one of the also-rans

      There are landfill volumes of PhDs theses sitting on departmental shelves which have never been opened since the degree was awarded. They can't be disposed of and just take up space - which causes its own sets of problems when offices are repurposed and new homes for this stuff needs to be found

      For every "ancient" PhD which turns out to be relevant to modern research there are 10,000 which may as well be named "andrex"

  6. amanfromMars 1 Silver badge

    A TS/SCI/NOFORN Look behind the Bamboo Curtain

    Laura, Hi,

    A country’s performance based on the amount of high-impact research it generates – as measured by the number of publications its institutions produced in the top ten percent of cited papers in their respective fields, will always be a great deal less than is true whenever so reported/suspected, by virtue of high-impact research and development in disruptive fields recognised as being too sensitive for papers publishing for they are peer opposition and competition leading and overwhelming and therefore deemed best to remain, for as long as it be possible or decided, Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information/No Foreign Dissemination.

    And such a country will be a veritable magnet for foreigners with such high-impact research to share and further develop to naturally exclusive, mutually agreeable, positively reinforcing advantage ...... which be studiously ignored and dismissed for engagement at home.

  7. Tron Silver badge

    Blame Western politicians.

    We used to attract top notch Chinese talent to our unis, get them settled, get them a job, they could bring their families, and lo - we'd nicked the CCP's talent.

    Western politicians blocked this. So now China's talent stays at home and the CCP get to benefit from their abilities.

    1. Casca Silver badge

      Re: Blame Western politicians.

      Sure, they didnt report home everything they did....

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Blame Western politicians.

        They did. Every. Single. Thing.

        Chinese big business are now world leaders in Buzzword Bingo, and Australia is threatened by a yawning Buzzword Gap unless they urgently put more MBAs through business school.

  8. yesnaught

    "as measured by the number of publications its institutions produced in the top ten percent of cited papers in their respective fields."

    Okay, but how many of those publications and citations were actually any good or useful? Were they even written by a human? Or were they ChatGPT'd? How much palm greasing was going on? Trick question, it's China, it's all palm grease. "If you aren't cheating, you aren't trying" is their national motto.

    I wager if you look at the actual technologies China has in the fields it's supposedly leading in, you'll find things curiously similar to those found in other nations, except with a useless or poorly tested layer of changes on top that claim to be innovative, but still struggle to match foreign technologies for performance, as they learn the hard way.

    1. Alan Brown Silver badge

      And yet, almost all 5G/6G patents used in western equipment are licensed from Chinese entities

      The "Chinesium" mantra is as pervasive and corrosive as the "Jap Crap" one was in the 1960s

      China is BIG (In area, population and GDP). The Chinese economy is on par with the USA one (slightly exceeding it in some years) and has a potential to double in size without much effort. By contrast the USA economy has barely expanded a few percent since 1990

      "When the USA sneezes, the world catches cold" no longer applies

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    In quantity? Sure. In quality? Not so much. They also lead the world in cheap plastic crap.

  10. Anomalous Cowshed

    Beaullocks

    I'm afraid that this article was...see title.

  11. O'Reg Inalsin

    FT article - Huawei’s bug-ridden software hampers China’s efforts to replace Nvidia in AI

    Yeah, but this is what caught my eye - According to the company [Huawei], more than 50 per cent of its 207,000 employees work in research and development, including the engineers dispatched to install technology for customers.

    For comparison, in the case of NVidia: In 2023, of 26,196 employees, 19,532 employees were engaged in R&D (74.5% of the total workforce).

    It's not the academic papers I see as the biggest indicator of rising competition. While I'm sure many of Huawei's R&D employees are of the caliber the US would relegated to outsourcing - keeping that support on the inside instead of outsourcing increases communication and loyalty, allowing clear lines of communication between the Research vs. Development sides.

    1. Alan Brown Silver badge

      Re: FT article - Huawei’s bug-ridden software hampers China’s efforts to replace Nvidia in AI

      I'd agree with the headline, having beaten heads against various Huawei R&D staff

      HOWEVER they're still easier to deal with than the average American company

  12. Alan Brown Silver badge

    It's interesting to look at the number of posters here who think that this is some sort of Chinese propaganda

    China LED THE WORLD financially/intellectually for over 3500 years and stumbled less than 200 years ago. They're catching back up to where they were

    Just as one example, the vast majority of 5&6G patents are held by Chinese researchers/companies - this amongst a bunch of other areas where China is the world leader is what put the USA into panic protectionism mode and to cook up "military threats" in order to try and hem China in. China responded by reviving the Silk Routes, which only paniced the USA even further and now that posturing has resulted in the Chinese posturing back.

    It's unlikely to end well, but I can't see the Chinese using wars when commerce is a vastly more effective weapon with which to nobble your opponent (USA sanctions are backfiring horribly, but instead of revisiting things, the country is doubling down on a losing proposition and increasingly alienating its long-time allies as a result)

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