Laura Spinney for The Guardian. Read the original article here.
It started badly, with gag orders, cover-ups and ignored offers of help from overseas, but then the Chinese government seized the narrative. It reined in the burgeoning epidemic of Covid-19 at home and started exporting its rapidly accumulating scientific knowledge of the disease to the rest of the world. Chinese science has often been marginalised and even mistrusted in the west. But will the pandemic change its standing in the world?
“China has moved from student to teacher,” says Kate Mason, an anthropologist at Brown University in Rhode Island and author of Infectious Change, an account of how the 2002-3 epidemic of a severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) in China transformed the way the country managed public health. After Sars, she says, western experts went to China to help it put in place an evidence-based health system that was informed by international research. That system now exists, with its most visible symbol being the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing, and this time it has been Chinese experts giving instruction abroad. “It has been a good year for China,” Mason says.
But China has long held a goal to lead the world in science, and it was already well on its way to achieving it before the pandemic. Five years ago, it didn’t appear in the top 10 countries for university rankings; this year, it’s joint sixth. It is second in the world for output of science and engineering publications, behind the European Union but ahead of the United States, and the impact of Chinese research – as measured by the proportion of articles that are highly cited – doubled between 2000 and 2016, growing much faster than that of the US and the EU, which increased by around 10% and 30% respectively over the same period.
This turbo-charged performance reflects a long-term policy of rebuilding Chinese research and education in the post-Mao Zedong era, says political scientist and China watcher Anna Ahlers of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin. Starting from the 1980s, the Chinese government began investing heavily in infrastructure, mass education, and the training of a cadre of sophisticated researchers across all Stem disciplines. Then, 20 years ago, its focus shifted outward – to achieving global prominence.
Among the initiatives that were devised in this new phase were programmes for recruiting talent from abroad, such as the Thousand Talents Plan, and, domestically, a system of incentives for scientists to publish. These bore fruit, as reflected in the rankings, but they also had negative consequences. The pressure to publish – with large cash bonuses paid to scientists for papers appearing in top scientific journals – resulted in an increase in academic fraud. Meanwhile, the Thousand Talents Plan has been criticised by the US, Canada and others as a vehicle for espionage and intellectual property theft – criticisms that have been lent credence by cases such as that of Harvard nanotechnology expert Charles Lieber, who was arrested earlier this year for allegedly lying about his involvement in the programme.
These tensions reflect a deep ambivalence in the rest of the world with regard to China’s emergence as a scientific superpower that the pandemic has only accentuated by highlighting that neither viruses nor science can be contained within national borders. On the one hand, there is clear recognition that far less would be understood about Covid-19 and the virus that causes it without Chinese research. On the other, there are well-founded concerns about engaging with an authoritarian, one-party regime with a proven disregard for human rights. Muddying an already complex picture are national interests, and a US-China trade war.
The Thousand Talents Plan distils these tensions. Many wealthy countries have lured talent from abroad – in fact, it was the UK’s Royal Society that coined the term “brain drain” to describe the exodus of British talent to the US and Canada in the 1950s and 60s. But questions have been raised about how China uses that talent, and the technology that comes with it.
“The main concern is how the Chinese Communist party uses technology for the oppression of its people,” says James Jin Kang, a cybersecurity expert at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia. He adds that anyone buying technology developed in China should worry about data privacy, and that the pandemic has made it easier for China to recruit scientists who are working from home and hence subjected to less institutional oversight than usual.
China’s approach to ethics has drawn attention in a different way, now that there is a very real prospect of it being the first country to approve a vaccine against Covid-19, and perhaps also to develop effective treatments for the disease. “China’s very good at speed,” says Mason. “If the game is speed, they’re going to win.” There seems little doubt that the party is pushing its scientists to hand it that propaganda coup, causing some to ask what shortcuts are being taken in the process.
Ethical rules do exist in Chinese academia, Ahlers says, though their enforcement is sometimes lax – as illustrated by the case of He Jiankui, the scientist who in 2018 announced that he had edited the genes of human babies for the first time (he was punished later, though, with a prison sentence). There is also greater emphasis on the collective good than in western countries so that testing an experimental Covid-19 vaccine on military personnel – which might be considered unacceptable in Europe or the US – is more acceptable there.
Yangyang Cheng, a physicist at Cornell University in New York and sometime critic of the Chinese regime, has written about how loyalty to the party overrides ethical considerations in China – with troubling implications for research. But she points out that debates about what is ethical with respect to a vaccine have raged in the US, too, and that westerners need to ask themselves what they are really concerned about when they look east. “Are they concerned because it is being done unethically, or because it is being done in China?” she asks. “I think these two things are often conflated.”