I was totally flattered when I saw the name of my country so deliberately and immensely mentioned in a issue of Nature magazine. As a mainland Chinese my impression of this country is full of scary, I call, dangers, without any hilarious pictures as plotted everywhere in this issue of Nature. Of all the long articles under the China topic, I found the one on a black background the most in common with my feeling of China, Stoking The Fire (Nature, 2008, 454, 388. DOI: 10.1038/454388a). I was also reminded with an earlier editorial in Nature, Diversionary Tactics (Nature, 2005, 436, 152. DOI: 10.1038/436152a), which complained about the Neurasthenia of the Chinese authorities against good critiques. This time Nature has provoked a much larger scale of critical reasoning on the hidden dangers lies in the future development of China. In fear of any blockage, I immediately downloaded all full texts of this issue in a secured folder.

People always say that China has witnessed the fastest increase in something, but in my opinion the only thing in which China has witnessed so significant an increase is danger. Soar in GDP and in all that related to money was unwillingly pushed by the great potential depressed but accumulating since as early as the late 50s, and the resultant moles of problems and even dangers were, in fact, mostly expected in advanced. The later appearance widely deemed as unprepared, inexperienced, unwise and rude, was mostly due to ineffective education, execution and extension of policies, compared with the rapid change of the society. Each year the government declares the goal of GDP rise at around 8%; it is not pulling but being pushed. Lowering the speed must cause economic problems, and after the potential has been exhausted, the problems caused therefrom may also, worse, leave an abyss. This day will come definitely before the long-term effect of basic research comes out. Bursting almost exclusively the applied research based on current innovative strength of the nation and, more importantly, results by researchers from other countries, may be the only strategy to broaden the future bottle-neck. That’s why Chinese companies are widely recognized as good copiers (which is a miserable fact) why Chinese research papers are less in originality, and why Chinese postdocs are, as mentioned in the News Features, nothing more than ‘hardworking’.

However, these should not lead to a conclusion that basic research be strangled. The reason why basic research is actually strangled, or, to be less cynic, hindered, is the fear of free expression, the fear of bad things happening from free expression, exactly. Bad things may happen, indeed, but they can and should prevented by democracy in evaluation and judgment, which is weak in Chinese academia. One representation is the standard of a good researcher based on number of SCI papers published, which attaches no importance to the quality and leads to ‘deeply ingrained misconceptions at an institutional level about how science works – misconceptions that stifle risk-taking and promote narrow conformity’ (line 4 paragraph 5, Nature 2008, 454, 367. DOI: 10.1038/454367a), therefore rendering China a better soil to produce Woo-Suk-Hwang disappointment than Korea. Other representations of weak democracy in Chinese academia was mentioned in detail in the commentary on p398 (Nature 2008, 454, 398. DOI: 10.1038/454398a).

(The articles and quotes cited above are what I think touched the real problem of China in the whole special issue of Nature.)

UPDATE: An article on Nobel Intent titled China’s impact on science continues to grow responded to the Nature News Feature of China, with a astonishingly positive tone. The comments posted below the article not only pointed out, again, the vital danger from environmental pollution in the future development of China, but also explained why Chinese research have been lower than the average recognition.