Sino-Science

I recall being told just yesterday how many Chinese scientists were being trained, as opposed to USAian scientists.  Vastly more.  Hugely more.   We are doomed.  The Chinese scientists are going to come over here and pick our dead, bleached bones for the useful bits of DNA.

Though, as The Humanist points out, Chinese science is corrupt, politicized, and riddled with plagiarism and superstition.   Some might have a hard time seeing this as a threat.

“What is the definition of a good person?” Wang Jisi, dean of the School of International Studies at Peking University, asked at a graduation address in July. His answer: “He does not cheat in exams, or plagiarise another scholar’s work, or cut corners in construction projects, or sell fake goods or accept bribes.” All fairly uncontroversial, you might think, especially considering the occasion. But, in fact, Wang was bravely addressing an issue that surfaces almost every day in the Chinese media. He was taking a stand in the continuing battle between those who uphold academic and scientific values and those others who can still achieve high status and rewards in China from peddling pseudoscience.

The article goes on to document scientific fraud, including fraudsters challenging their critics to duels, suing them for libel, and hiring hit men to whack them on the public street.   (And we think that academic politics in the States is vicious!)

This publish-or-perish culture has led to unrealistic targets at Chinese universities – and as a predictable consequence, rampant plagiarism. In January, the peer-reviewed international journal Acta Crystallographica Section E announced the retraction of more than 70 papers by Chinese scientists who had falsified data. Three months later, the same publication announced the removal of another 39 articles “as a result of problems with the data sets or incorrect atom assignments”, 37 of which were entirely produced in Chinese universities. The New Jersey-based Centenary College closed its affiliated Chinese business school programme in July after a review “revealed evidence of widespread plagiarism, among other issues, at a level that ordinarily would have resulted in students’ immediate dismissal from the college.” A government study, cited by Nature, found that about one-third of over 6,000 scientists surveyed at six top Chinese institutions had practised “plagiarism, falsification or fabrication”.

But it’s not only the emphasis on quantity that damages scientific quality in China. Publication bias – the tendency to privilege the results of studies that show a significant finding, rather than inconclusive results – is notoriously pervasive. One systematic review of acupuncture studies from 1998, published in Controlled Clinical Trials, found that every single clinical trial originating in China was positive – in other words, no trial published in China had found a treatment to be ineffective. Moreover, a nationalistic and defensive approach to discredited methods keeps superstition alive in the academies and government.

I once sat through an invited lecture at Beijing’s prestigious People’s University, delivered by an bespectacled professor in a white lab coat, which linked the science of genetic modification to crop circles and the teachings of the Vietnamese guru Supreme Master Ching Hai (author of The Dogs in My Life and The Birds in My Life).

(But there are no crop circles in China!  The Chinese are stealing our crop circle science!  And Supreme Master Ching Hai has stolen Goldie Hawn’s hair!  This must stop!)

Y’know, if we’re afraid of China competing with the US in science and engineering, we should just bombard them with more of this stuff.  Send them Scientology!  Biorhythms!  Creation science!  The works of Velikovsky!  The Shaver Mystery!

We are the foremost purveyors of pseudoscience in the world!  We will bury them!