36WWW.CEN-ONLINE.ORG DECEMBER 13, 2010

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

THE U.S.’S POSITION as the world’s sci-entific powerhouse is increasingly in peril, and China is positioning itself as usurper—such was the gloomy picture portrayed in “Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revis-ited,” the report published this fall by the National Academies (C&EN, Oct. 4, page 7). But can China really muster the Cat-egory 5 storm that report portends?

Now the world’s second-largest econo-my, China certainly has an ambitious agen-da. It wants to become an innovation-driv-en country by the end of 2015, according to Wan Gang, the minister of science and technology who declared the goal in several public speeches in China in October. And China’s ambition is not so far-fetched. In 2008, Chinese researchers published a total of 112,000 Thomson Reuters-indexed papers, making China, for the first time, the world’s second-largest producer of academic papers, according to a global research report published by Thomson Re-uters in 2009. China contributed nearly 17% of all papers in chemistry during 2004–08, nearly doubling its share from the pre-ceding five-year period, the report says. According to the American Chemical Soci-

ety’s Chemical Abstracts Service, China’s patent office is projected to publish nearly 100,000 chemical patent applications this year, more than twice as many as the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office.

Correspondingly, China has also expe-rienced phenomenal growth in research funding throughout the past decade. In 2008, China’s gross domestic spending on R&D reached $68.9 billion, a 24% increase from the previous year. In 2009, its central gov-ernment earmarked $3.3 billion for scien-tific and technologi-cal research, a 22% jump from 2008’s $2.7 billion. Accord-ing to government figures, research funding from the National Natural

Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and the Ministry of Science & Technol-ogy each increased at an annual rate of more than 20% over the past five years. With the drastic

boost in government funding, China has also launched a series of programs to lure established overseas scientists back home, in an effort to foster indigenous research innovation.

DESPITE CHINA’S now massive output of academic papers and its dramatic increase in research funds, some prominent local scientists warn that their country faces sig-nificant problems that could jeopardize its innovative potential.

“Much like our country’s economic growth, I think our scientific and techno-logical development has also reached a stage that calls for a shift in strategy,” says Song Gao, dean of the college of chemis-try and molecular engineering at Peking University, one of China’s top chemical research institutions. “We now have to focus more on the originality and depth of research, instead of just the quantity.”

He and other chemists that C&EN spoke with say China could promote research originality by ceasing to rely so heavily on the number of papers generated and the impact factors of the journals in which those papers are published when evaluat-

ing its scientists. Meanwhile, China

is seeking to boost its research original-ity by recruiting tal-ented scientists from overseas. Through a government-spon-sored project ambi-tiously titled the Thousand Talents Program, China has attracted more than 800 researchers and entrepreneurs since late 2008, offering them key positions at some of the nation’s top research univer-sities. And in the next five to 10 years, the official plan is to land another 1,200. Prior

MODEL TEAM Shuai (third from right, with book) and members of his lab model photovoltaic polymers at Tsinghua University, in Beijing.

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Papers published, thousands

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INTERNATIONAL OUTPUT Publishing by authors in China has zoomed up much faster than in other countries

NOTE: Annual production of papers featuring at least one author in a given country. SOURCE: Web of Science, Thomson Reuters

FOR GATHERING STORM, CLOUDS AHEAD

China must overcome significant challenges to become the INNOVATIVE SCIENTIFIC POWERHOUSE it wants to be

JESSIE JIANG, C&EN BEIJING

37WWW.CEN-ONLINE.ORG DECEMBER 13, 2010

to that, China had launched several similar programs on a smaller scale, including the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Hundred Talents Program, the Changjiang Scholars Program, and NSFC’s Distinguished Young Scholars program.

Despite its impressive recruitment figures, the Thousand Talents Program has not gone without criticism—mostly directed at its lack of a clear standard in the hiring process. One of the program’s first returnees, Yigong Shi, was a tenured profes-

sor at Princeton University and had to give up a coveted Howard Hughes Medical Insti-tute investigator position before returning to Beijing full-time as the dean of Tsinghua University’s School of Life Sciences. But in many other cases, those who returned as part of the national talent program have less convincing credentials, and some are still spending most of their time overseas while getting paid full-time salaries from Chi-nese institutions.

“This has triggered discontent among our domestic scientists because a lot of them are being paid a lot less for doing essentially the same level of research,” says Zhigang Shuai, professor of chem-istry at Tsinghua University and deputy secretary-general of the Chinese Chemical Society. Shuai adds that China needs to hire more creative individuals—those with cutting-edge ideas—and that oftentimes, those ideas come from younger, less distinguished researchers who might not qualify for the Thousand Talents Program

because of their lack of experience. Mean-while, he says, many of those who qualify for the program are past their prime or have priorities other than research.

Money is one reason China struggles to keep its best young chemists. “I am worried about the fact that our Ph.D. students and postdocs are paid way too little,” Shuai says. In Beijing, an average Ph.D. student makes about $150 per month, which, even when ad-justed for the cost of living, is significantly lower than what their counterparts in U.S. uni-versities make.

“So if given the chance of do-ing the same work abroad, it’s pretty clear what most people’s choice would be, from the most pragmatic perspective,” Shuai says. “I don’t blame them, but I don’t want to lose my most gifted students either.”

Those researchers that C&EN talked with also called for principal investigators to get more leeway in allocat-ing their grants, saying that it would lead to better administrative efficiency and there-fore the ability to carry out experiments more quickly. “The current policy is that if we want to buy a piece of lab equipment

that costs more than 50,000 renminbi ($7,600), we sometimes have to fill in an application that could take months to pro-cess,” Peking University’s Gao says. “There have to be more efficient ways than that.”

The same lack of efficiency also mani-fests in China’s grant application process. In a September editorial in Science, Tsing-hua University’s Shi and Yi Rao, dean of the School of Life Sciences at Peking Univer-sity, pointed out that when it comes to the funding of megaprojects, it is not uncom-mon for Chinese officials to use arbitrary “national needs” as an excuse for selecting intended grant recipients (DOI: 10.1126/science.1196916). The article was lauded by Chinese scientists, but it was dismissed last month by the Ministry of Science & Technology as “untruthful,” although the ministry didn’t respond to the “national needs” accusation.

POLICIES ASIDE, Gao and Shuai agree that the greatest threat facing Chinese in-novation in chemical research is the wan-ing passion for the subject. “I’ve had many undergraduate students express interest in working in my lab,” Shuai says. “But as soon as I told them it’s unlikely to have a paper published as an undergrad here, a lot of them backed out.”

It’s not surprising that Chinese students want to publish quickly to jump-start their careers, notes Yongjun Chen, deputy director of NSFC’s chemistry department. But he says their pervasive pragmatism is also a major impediment to the country’s advancement in original research. “I know a lot of them are not doing science purely for the sake of science,” Chen says. “And that’s a big problem we are having right now.”

“There are fewer and fewer students, or even scientists, who are truly content with doing basic research nowadays. More people think of research as a job, instead of a lifelong passion,” Gao says. “It’s pretty tough to be creative at something you have no passion for.” ■

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CHEMISTRY PATENT APPLICATIONS Surge from China’s patent office began in 2005

a Projected. WIPO = World Intellectual Property Organization. SOURCE: Chemical Abstracts Service

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RESEARCH FUNDING China’s NSFC has steadily increased investments in chemical sciences in the past decade

NOTE: Dollar amounts converted using average 2009 exchange rate of $1.00 U.S. = 6.8307 yuan.

SOURCE: National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC)

The greatest threat facing Chinese innovation in chemical research is the

waning passion for the subject.