CHINESE ACADEMIC CRAP

"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.

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 studies."

The ascent of China’s universities

Decades of investment by Beijing have transformed the country’s academic institutions despite lingering questions about research quality and intellectual freedom.

Tsinghua University, ranked 17th in the world, is one of a small group of elite institutions singled out by Beijing for progressively larger budgets over time

By Eleanor Olcott, Humza Jilani and Andrew Jack Data visualisation by Amy Borrett, Steven Bernard and Ian Bott

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In a field in rural Pakistan, the fruits of Chinese educational expansion are ripening. Waqas Ahmad, an agricultural engineer in Faisalabad, checks an app on his smartphone that monitors the health of his fields, using satellite data to identify which areas need more water or fertiliser.

“This app can save you lots of rupees wasted on excess water, diesel and manpower,” he says.

The app, which features an AI-generated Urdu voice, was developed at a nearby university as part of a partnership with a research institution from southern China — one of a growing number of such institutes extending the reach of China’s tertiary education system beyond its borders.

Across Asia, Africa and the Middle East, hundreds of international offshoots and collaborations have been established by Chinese universities in the past decade. These outposts are capitalising on the rising prestige of China’s universities, which have undergone a three-decade transformation in both scale and quality.

In 2010, only one mainland Chinese institution ranked in the top 50 of the QS World University Rankings, a closely watched global league table. By 2025, that number had risen to five, and they were positioned higher up the table.

“Chinese universities’ climbing in global rankings is real. It’s not a ‘mystery bounce’ but the result of three decades of sustained, targeted investment,” says Denis Simon, an American academic who previously served as executive vice-chancellor of Duke Kunshan University in Jiangsu province.

China’s ascent — underpinned by heavy spending on science and technology — contrasts sharply with the Trump administration’s attacks on research funding at leading US campuses. Against that backdrop, and amid rising anti-Chinese sentiment in the US, Chinese universities have increasingly succeeded in attracting prominent academics back home.

While lingering questions remain about the quality of much of the research, overall levels of student satisfaction and the limits of their global appeal, experts say their rising stature and influence on the country’s technology sector cannot be denied.

“China has been training many more scientists and engineers than we do, filing more patents, publishing many scientific papers,” says Joanne Carney, chief government relations officer at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“We’ve been seeing the ascension of China investing as a percentage of its GDP, so it’s not surprising to see that they are at our heels if not surpassing us in some areas.”

China’s investment in higher education began in earnest in the 1980s under Deng Xiaoping, who recognised how far China had fallen behind the west and Japan during the Mao era. Successive leaders — Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping — each introduced policies to strengthen the competitiveness of China’s universities.

The Ministry of Education has explicitly sought to raise the stature of its universities by raising their position in the international rankings. The investments have had clear results, as Chinese universities have steadily climbed the rankings over the past two decades, largely due to the scale of their research output. The education ministry has singled out a small group of elite institutions, led by Peking and Tsinghua universities, for progressively larger budgets over time.

A report by the US-based Center for Security and Emerging Technology found that in 2019, a group of 10 elite Chinese universities each had a budget exceeding $5bn a year. Among those universities were Peking and Tsinghua, both in Beijing, which are placed 14th and 17th respectively in the latest QS World University Rankings. Still, the top 10 remains dominated by Oxbridge and elite US schools such as MIT and Harvard.

China is not alone in trying to use investment in tertiary education to improve economic productivity and move up the manufacturing value chain, but experts say it stands out in the consistency of its spending.

“China has invested consistently, year after year for three decades,” says Arnout Jacobs, president of Springer Nature Group’s Greater China operations.

“Many countries, when the economy is doing well, make one-off commitments to fund research. Five years later, those in power forget about the pledge. In China, policymakers have doubled down, and investment continues to grow.

Evidence of rising quality can be seen in Chinese representation in leading journals such as Science, Nature and Cell. Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals, says 14 per cent of papers accepted in Science in 2025 were from China, the secondlargest share after the US, at 45 per cent.

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.

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 Chineseauthored papers being unnecessarily cited by fellow academics.

In 2025, 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 lowquality papers. “Chinese universities are dramatically increasing their highquality output, even when you take into account how the numbers are inflated. Focusing only on misconduct is not seeing the forest for the trees,” she says.

Experts say that high rankings do not necessarily translate into a better overall undergraduate experience.

“Rising rank is a strong signal of research capacity and visibility but not a complete verdict on overall institutional quality,” says Simon, the American academic.

Research from Stanford University in 2021 found Chinese undergraduates in Stem subjects showed a decline in critical thinking skills during the final two years of their degrees. By contrast, US students entered university with similar levels of critical thinking but made significant gains by graduation.

Peter Hessler, a writer and former creative writing teacher at Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute (SUPI) from 2019-21, says the findings match his experience. “Chinese students work much harder in gaozhong [high school] than they do at university, which is the opposite of the US,” he says.

Part of the explanation lies in the gaokao, the highly competitive university entrance exam taken at 18, which can determine students’ life trajectories. “The American system is creating students at the university. In China, the students have already been created by the time they arrive,” says Hessler.

China’s growing academic clout is crystallising at a time when many British and American universities are cutting research spending.

The Trump administration has sought to stem funding to universities overall and to restrict international students coming to the US. “The damage being done to the research enterprise across our top US universities stands in marked contrast to the systematic efforts in China to support major scientific initiatives,” says Nick Dirks, president and chief executive of the New York Academy of Sciences. “There are already signs that in some areas of research and development, the US is falling behind.”

Against an increasingly uncertain background in the west, China’s promise of stable funding has become a competitive advantage in recruiting talent.

“China is increasingly able to keep and attract top domestic talent and recruit internationally — helped by improved pay packages, facilities and prestige feedback loops,” says Simon.

Beijing has targeted scholars in strategically important fields such as physics, computer science and biology through initiatives including the Thousand Talents Programme.

One foreign academic at a leading Beijing university who previously worked at a British university says they received a generous relocation package and substantial research funding. “I have a lot more time for research than I would at a British university, where financial constraints create more pressure to teach. I also have a more abundant supply of PhD students to work on my projects,” says the academic, who declined to be named due to the university’s ban on media interviews.

Some high-profile Chinese-born academics have returned home from the US in recent years, drawn by funding opportunities, recruitment efforts, proximity to ageing relatives and, in some cases, concerns about hostility towards foreign researchers and visa holders in the US.

Yu Xie, Junming Huang and colleagues at Princeton University’s Paul and Marcia Wythes Center on Contemporary China have tracked 80 to 90 professors returning annually from the US to China in recent years.

While most of the migrating academics are Chinese nationals, its universities have also recruited prominent foreign scholars. Caucher Birkar, a Fields Medal-winning Iranian-Kurdish mathematician, joined Tsinghua University in 2021 to co-found a research lab focused on geometry.

China is close to surpassing the US in total expenditure on R&D, with China spending $781bn and the US $823bn in 2023, according to data from the OECD. By contrast in 2007, China spent $136bn compared with $462bn by the US.

The OECD also calculates that China spends, on average, $305,000 on R&D costs per researcher, which is more than the European average of $268,000. This larger budget can also go further in China, where lab equipment and labour costs are often lower.

In the past, Chinese universities have struggled to retain their international talent. Many foreign academics tend to stay in China for short tenures, either because of the lack of diversity at their institutions or because of political sensitivities that complicate integration.

Hessler’s contract at SUPI was not renewed despite his courses’ popularity with students. His tenure was marked by anonymous, unsubstantiated claims on social media that he had insulted the Chinese government. He says that it remains unclear why the university did not renew his contract, but the backdrop of rising tensions with the US and heightened censorship during the pandemic is likely to have played a role.

Reflecting on his experience at SUPI, Hessler says it is difficult for foreign faculty members to integrate into Chinese universities and to navigate the myriad political sensitivities that could land them in trouble. Students are encouraged to report on their classmates and teachers who speak out of line on politics, while many classrooms are equipped with monitoring devices.

“It creates a lack of trust. Students and teachers have to be careful for fear of beingreported. It’s hard to quantify the cost, but it does limit development and makes it harder for outsiders to integrate,” he says.

The predominance of Mandarin and limited professional opportunities for foreigners in China have long constrained the universities’ global appeal. The Covid-19 pandemic also depleted China’s international student body.

Such constraints may ultimately limit how far Chinese campuses can become international melting pots. But that may matter less as they expand their international footprint.

Beijing has long sought to build universities with global reach as a means to project its own power and to export its technologies, says Allen of Australia’s Strategic Policy Institute. “China has seen how having globally leading universities, particularly in science and technology, has given the US enormous sway. But Chinese universities, due to language, cultural and political reasons, tend to be exceedingly poor places for international students,” she says.

Instead of trying to match western institutions in the diversity of their student bodies, they are increasingly going abroad themselves, particularly in Asia, the Middle East and Africa, to establish institutes and research partnerships aimed at training the next generation of foreign talent.

At Faisalabad’s University of Agriculture, partnerships with Chinese institutions are providing generous scholarships and research opportunities. The number of Mandarin language learners there has doubled to almost 1,000 in just two years, teachers say, as they seek to join the 29,000 Pakistanis studying in China. Such partnerships also provide a conduit for Chinese companies to export their technology, such as the farmers’ app, to friendly countries.

Chinese research partners in Pakistan are working with local universities to deploy facial recognition, surveillance and drone technology to aid security services.

“China wants to reduce US hegemonic influence in education, science and technology. It can do this by offering itself as an alternative — by striking partnerships around the world and becoming the place countries turn to when they need things,” Allen says.

The ascent of China’s uni­versit­ies

Dec­ades of invest­ment by Beijing have trans­formed the coun­try’s aca­demic insti­tu­tions des­pite linger­ing ques­tions about research qual­ity and intel­lec­tual free­dom.

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