Is Nature receiving any Chinese propaganda money? In today's world it is worth being skeptical.
In the top 50, Chinese universities are at 12, 13, 36 and 47 in this list
this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2025
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Hope this reduces cheating in Chinese scientific literature because China overtaking US academia is a pretty bad sign when to comes to trust academia otherwise.
in the us they have same problem, as publishing too many low-quality papers as well. especially when they are trying to get jobs in academia, when i went to one of those "talks, orientation" one researcher at to write 40+papers before even looked at by a university employer. they care more about quantity over quality, basically they see the amount you have written equal to quality of research.(not a PHD myself), also that many in the phd are abandoing thier fields, because of the above issues, plus job prospects. why chinese research isnt trusted, was probably because of thier quality of reasearch, plus they fudge thier results alot too, and they have issue of industrial and research espionage going on blatantly.
Are we great again, yet?
Trump just scrapped the commie department of education so free market capitalism can once again save Americs. Education will trickle down from above.
Please, oh please do or do not research in Chinese. I'm too old to give a flying fuck. But it would be hilarious if suddenly the world had to learn Chinese to be able to use the research results.
I'd like to learn Chinese (which one though?), but I'm afraid I never will. LLMs may help with translation, though.
Mandarin is the most accessible and widely spoken, Cantonese is good if you want to spend a lot of time in the south. Good luck if you want to learn one of the hundreds of other dialects, maybe make a friend from one of the places and have them help you.
I thought they were identical written languages but different spoken. Surely if you were learning to read research papers it wouldn't matter.
Gee, who could have seen this coming
Americans at least the ones on YouTube (not a fair Demographic I admit) seem in utter denial about China surpassing them in things.
Its Taiwan I feel bad for as I don't think the US is even capable of saving it anymore and it looks like China may have noticed.
The US was still #1 in manufacturing but China was getting close to overtaking us. I'm certain they will now.
One of the issues here is that being a Chinese paper in any field is still the most correlated with the paper being faked in some way. So while china is producing a lot of science and good science its also the world leader in garbage fake science too and it needs to get a handle on the problem.
i rarely hear good research papers out of china, unless its something like botany, or plants,animals that require cooperation with other universities all over the globe. plants because china has a megadivesity of flowers specifically.
As if that’s not the same for western papers lmao.
not at the rate of china, and fake papers are usually scrutinized more in the us, and they do produce alot of low quality papers, mainly its because PHDs have a hard time getitng jobs, so they have to write dozens of papers before even being noticed by a employer, most of the time its academic employers. it will be hard to get past some scrutiniy, since your papers have to get published on a well respected journal eventually, like nature,,,,etc. other journals journal of new england medicine, lancet, science journal.
I'm gonna be real here, just Realpolitik-wise from the perspective of "the West" sans the USA - China is currently proving that they are simply more reliable in geopolitics and even economically, and that is just damn important, even in an adversarial relationship. It isn't even because they are a de-facto dictatorship, Russia is one too, and Russia is a mad dog. They just managed to keep their shit mostly together so far, still riding out their massive growth spurt. Even human rights abuses outside of Realpolitik don't seem as the argument they were: internationally, the US has always had a more greyish record anyhow. But now, considering the US is quickly doing its best to catch up in domestic tyranny, that argument seems to be going fast, too.
Sadly, I don't have huge hopes for China to be a proper "better" hegemon globally, if that should be what ultimately happens - they are facing crises of their own, and have been dabbling in their own brands of economic imperialism, and at least the way their military is gearing up contains a lot of stuff usually used for military imperialism as well.
The US has been a brutal empire to anyone outside the supplicant, mostly white European, nations of the West.
The kicker is the US has no one to blame for it's decline but itself. It has descended into a techno-military industrial oligarchy addicted to Eurodollar deficit spending and cheap credit. It burned up the global order it created in pointless wars in the Middle East and supporting it's genocidal settler colony in Palestine.
Once countries transition away from using the dollar it is really fucked.
Quick, send another billion dollars to israel!
And deport all the PHDs who criticize it. That'll get us back in the top spot academically.
I think you can remove “in research” from that headline.
Just don’t research or publish anything that might make the CCP look bad!
I know a lot of western researchers working in China and it's an easy problem to avoid if you're studying STEM stuff. For humanities there are basically zero westerners there because it's an absolute minefield to navigate even if you'd like to study pro-chinese fields like Chinese art or even something relatively neutral like music production. I wouldn't trust any paper from China in that regard.
Trump unilaterally declared certain words in research papers would get funding for your research (and even university) revoked.
Gift link to the list of words compiled by The NY Times.
Both governments can be terrible yknow
Yeah, but the US is actially starting to be worse in this regard than China
Tell me that when the US throws up a Great Firewall that blocks all non-approved media and internet
As if the NSA was not suveilling the whole internet through a dragnet.
Look, I'm not saying China is perfect or even good. I'm saying that it's starting to look like there is no moral or values based argument to buy Apple instead of Huawei or Tesla instead of BYD.
honestly I don't care, what the US is doing is what on all fronts. people on China for the most part genuinely approve of their government.
Where are you getting info on the CCPs approval?
The Ash Center Research Team found that approval for the CPC surpasses 90%. Crucially, the study acknowledges the state control of media and propaganda, but points to the actual dramatic rise in living conditions over the decades that has made the most impact:
While the CCP is seemingly under no imminent threat of popular upheaval, it cannot take the support of its people for granted. Although state censorship and propaganda are widespread, our survey reveals that citizen perceptions of governmental performance respond most to real, measurable changes in individuals’ material well-being. For government leaders, this is a double-edged sword, as citizens who have grown accustomed to increases in living standards will expect such improvements to continue, and citizens who praise government officials for effective policies may indeed blame them when such policy failures affect them or their family members directly. While our survey reinforces narratives of CCP resilience, our data also point to specific areas in which citizen satisfaction could decline in today’s era of slowing economic growth and continued environmental degradation.
This is reflected in increased upward mobility, manifesting in increasing feelings of the country being "headed in the right direction," a stark contrast with the direction the US is moving:
One thing I find interesting in that is that Chinese citizens have low trust in local government but high trust in the federal side. But as the study points out, it’s the opposite in the US with high trust locally but low federal.
The US places a much greater emphasis on individualism, while the PRC's economic system is much more focused on central planning and a common, collectivist culture. Holdovers from the Cultural Revolution, where citizens were encouraged to always look upon their local officials critically, led to less trust in the local governments. The central government, on the other hand, has had sweeping and targeted programs focused on rural development in recent years, as the CPC has acknowledged the stark division between the highly developed urban areas and the underdeveloped rural areas.
China is pretty complicated, and getting a good picture of how they are today requires analyzing what the CPC takes issue with and what it approves of in how they performed under Mao, the Gang of Four, Deng Xiaoping, and now Xi Jinping. There have been other leaders, but these really represent 4 different "eras" for the economic makeup as a whole, and has most Chinese very hopeful for the future.
thx for the share
We don't have room to make these jokes, anymore.