PhD dropout’s exposé forces an academic fraud reckoning in China

A former doctoral scholar turned blogger has shaken China’s academic institution by publicly accusing distinguished college students of fabricating knowledge and manipulating papers, triggering investigations at a number of main establishments and drawing uncommon consideration from state media.

The most seen fallout got here at Tongji University, a number one Shanghai college, which eliminated the dean of its School of Life Science and Technology after discovering academic misconduct in a Nature paper the blogger had challenged. Nankai University, Sun Yat-sen University, and Shanghai University have additionally opened investigations into students he questioned.

The blogger, identified on-line as “Geng Tongxue Tells Stories,” is a former doctoral candidate at Beihang University in Beijing. He left the programme in 2025, citing rising disillusionment with a publish-or-perish analysis tradition that, as he put it, rewarded flashy papers greater than significant science.

From April 9 to May 12, Geng publicly questioned papers involving 5 distinguished students at 4 universities. Some of these named maintain a few of China’s most coveted academic titles, together with recipients of the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars.

The movies shortly unfold far past academic circles. By 14 May, his Bilibili account had greater than 1.8 million followers and about 230 million whole views, whereas his Douyin [China’s equivalent of TikTok] account had 1.34 million followers. What would possibly as soon as have remained a slender dispute over figures, photos, and laboratory knowledge has turn out to be a public reckoning over how Chinese academia rewards papers, grants, titles, and institutional status.

The controversy has since reached China’s state media, an indication that the difficulty has moved past a handful of disputed papers and is more and more being handled as a symptom of deeper issues in the academic system. Xinhua News Agency, China’s official information company, gave Geng a platform, publishing an interview that appeared supportive of his efforts to reveal academic misconduct. People’s Daily Online additionally weighed in, pointing to weaknesses in academic oversight, strain from rankings, challenge targets, opaque overview procedures, and a few establishments’ tendency to guard their very own reputations.

In China’s academic system, papers, journal rankings, and grants usually resolve who wins elite labels equivalent to Distinguished Young Scholar or Cheung Kong Scholar, with election to the Chinese Academy of Sciences or the Chinese Academy of Engineering standing on the prime of the hierarchy. Those “talent hats” can then carry bigger laboratories, extra public funding, higher institutional standing, and wider management over academic assets—however usually, too, much less scrutiny.

The identical concern has echoed in the Chinese public debate. One influential expression of that view got here from Wang Mingyuan, a researcher on the Beijing Reform and Development Research Association, who published a commentary on 21 May on the WeChat account Fuchengmen No. 6 Courtyard (阜成门六号院). In Wang’s view, as soon as universities are run like manufacturing facility manufacturing strains, academic life is decreased to a bureaucratic ledger of papers, initiatives, grants, and titles—a system that compacts the soil of academic life and drains it of the nourishment wanted for originality.

Lastly, an replace on Geng Tongxue. In a video launched on 27 May, he made contemporary allegations of misconduct involving papers by distinguished teachers, amongst them Distinguished Young Scholar recipients, college deans, and a candidate for membership in the Chinese Academy of Engineering. He mentioned he had reviewed solely about one-tenth of Distinguished Young Scholar recipients and had already discovered, in his phrases, a “bumper harvest” of issues. But he additionally mentioned he would cease reporting alleged misconduct on to the students’ establishments, citing considerations over his household’s security.

—Yuxuan Jia

Strip away the thick froth of inflated academic rankings, and a more durable reality emerges: regardless of China’s extraordinary progress over the previous 20 years, the nation nonetheless trails the United States by a large margin in fundamental analysis, frontier applied sciences, and top-tier scientific achievements. In many respects, China stays in the second tier of world science, alongside nations equivalent to Britain, Germany, and Japan.

The biggest worth of academic and mental work lies in originality, not in the sheer quantity of output. By nature, it resists exact measurement and is particularly ill-served by fastened quantitative indicators. An overly bureaucratic, metric-driven analysis regime dangers compacting the soil of academic life, stripping it of the vitamins wanted for mental development.

The blogger “Geng Tongxue Tells Stories” has criticised distinguished professors at elite universities, together with recipients of the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars, for padding papers and fabricating knowledge. His criticism exposes academic corruption and the “Great Leap Forward” in paper manufacturing. Judging from shut statement of individuals round me, in addition to from my broader evaluation of China’s science and know-how knowledge over the previous two years, these considerations really feel deeply acquainted.

Over the previous two or three a long time, treating academia like a manufacturing facility manufacturing line and lowering scholarship to the manufacture of papers has turn out to be a typical malaise in world greater training. In 1990, the world produced roughly 620,000 SCI-indexed papers. By 2024, that determine had risen to greater than 2.3 million. The variety of papers revealed over the previous fifteen years exceeds the entire output of the earlier 5 thousand years of human civilisation. The variety of papers included in Nature Index journals rose from round 56,000 in 2014 to about 100,000 in 2024, practically doubling in only a decade.

Needless to say, this doesn’t imply that science and know-how have superior dramatically in such a brief interval, or that humanity has all of the sudden found way more truths and created way more data. It means, moderately, that the academic manufacturing facility has produced extra standardised components to bureaucratic specs, lots of them with little actual novelty. Indeed, genuinely unique and intellectually substantive work could have turn out to be a lot much less frequent. The assaults on universities by American conservative politicians, together with repeated calls by some entrepreneurs to cast off universities, particularly the humanities, are in half a response to the corruption and declining high quality of world academia.

In China, this distortion has reached an excessive. During the Cultural Revolution, the nation swung to the alternative pole, denouncing academic publishing as a part of the “bourgeois white expert line”—a label used to assault technically competent however politically unreliable intellectuals. Most academic journals in the nation had been shut down, and China went an complete decade with out publishing a single worldwide paper. After reform and opening up, China turned acutely conscious that it had fallen behind. To enhance college rankings, it started actively encouraging college members to publish papers. Over time, this become publishing for the sake of publishing and rating for the sake of rating. Backed by China’s huge pool of human assets, the variety of papers then expanded explosively.

Take SCI-indexed journal articles. In 1992, China revealed simply over 6,200 of them. By 2024, the determine had reached 867,000, an nearly 140-fold improve, far outpacing GDP development. To be honest, China’s publication output was unusually low in the early reform interval, and a part of this rise mirrored a real strategy of catch-up, till round 2010. But by 2015, China was already publishing 229,700 SCI papers a 12 months. In the following 9 years, that determine practically tripled, including about 640,000 papers, roughly equal to the complete annual publication output of Europe. This doesn’t imply that the analysis capability of Chinese universities tripled, nor that China produced, in simply 9 years, scientific progress equal to the output of the entire European analysis system.

In the CWTS Leiden Ranking Traditional Edition, Chinese universities take 16 of the world’s prime 20 spots when establishments are ranked by the variety of publications among the many prime 50 per cent most cited in their discipline and 12 months. This is an unparalleled quantitative benefit, even higher than the dominance loved by American universities in the second half of the 20th century. Zhengzhou University, for instance, already ranks twenty fifth globally by publication quantity, forward of Stanford and Oxford. And this rating is predicated on knowledge from 2020 to 2023. If the most recent knowledge had been used, China’s benefit would probably seem much more pronounced.

The identical rating additionally reveals that Jiangsu University, hardly considered one among China’s elite universities, has already surpassed long-established world establishments such because the University of Chicago, McGill University, Purdue University, and the University of Hong Kong in phrases of publication quantity. Jinan University, little identified even in Shandong Province, ranks just one place under the Chinese University of Hong Kong internationally. One would possibly ask whether or not these top-scoring college students from Shandong who selected to review in Hong Kong ought to now remorse their choice.

Looking on the Nature Index, which tracks higher-quality papers, from 2014 to 2024, China’s publication rely rose from 5,022 to 32,122. In 2024, 892 universities in the Chinese mainland revealed papers included in Nature Index journals, accounting for 17 per cent of all establishments globally and greater than 30 per cent of whole papers. Among the world’s prime 100 universities in the Nature Index, 42 had been from the Chinese mainland. The rankings produce revolutionary scenes: Sichuan University ranks above Stanford, Jilin University above MIT, South China University of Technology above Oxford, and Nantong University seems broadly corresponding to National Taiwan University and Northeastern University in the United States.

Global college rating organisations and main academic publishers have additionally profited handsomely from the Chinese market. Web of Science established a consulting firm in China, Clarivate Analytics Information Services (Beijing) Co., Ltd. Nature has arrange a devoted Chinese-language website. In the primary half of 2025 alone, Chinese authors reportedly paid round RMB 140 million in article processing prices to Nature Communications. China has turn out to be each probably the most obedient participant in this academic analysis system and its richest market.

Yet if one adjusts the parameters in scientific publication databases even barely, the true high quality behind China’s supposed standing because the “world’s No. 1 research power” turns into a lot clearer. Measured by the proportion of SCI papers ranked in the worldwide prime 10 per cent by quotation impression, the highest 5 establishments are all American universities. Among the worldwide prime 20, 11 are American and 4 are British. From the Chinese-speaking world, solely Hong Kong Polytechnic University and City University of Hong Kong enter the worldwide prime 50, whereas the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology rank between fiftieth and sixtieth. Tsinghua University ranks 73rd globally, whereas Peking University ranks 164th. This can be one purpose many excellent college students nonetheless select to review in Hong Kong.

If the usual is made stricter nonetheless, and solely papers in the worldwide prime 1 per cent are counted, Chinese universities and analysis establishments stay far behind their American and European counterparts. Between 2020 and 2023, the Chinese Academy of Sciences revealed greater than 100,000 SCI papers, however just one,525 entered the worldwide prime 1 per cent, a fee of simply 1.4 per cent. Stanford University, against this, had a top-1-per cent fee of three.8 per cent. Although Stanford revealed solely 47,168 papers in whole, 1,813 of them reached the worldwide prime 1 per cent. Among the world’s prime 20 establishments by the variety of top-1-per-cent papers, 11 are American and 4 are British.

Measured by the proportion of top-1-per cent papers, the efficiency of Chinese universities and analysis establishments turns into much more sobering. Only Bohai University enters the worldwide prime 100, however that is largely on account of statistical distortion. Bohai University publishes comparatively few papers general, rating exterior China’s prime 350 establishments, and its small base artificially raises the chance of a excessive top-1-per cent ratio. In sensible phrases, the highest-ranked establishment from the Chinese-speaking world is the Chinese University of Hong Kong, which ranks 109th globally with a fee of two.7 per cent. Tsinghua ranks 204th, Peking University 327th, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences—the world’s largest producer of papers—ranks solely 765th.

Among the worldwide prime 20 by this metric, 10 are American universities and 5 are British. The prime three are MIT, Stanford, and Princeton.

Take papers revealed in Nature itself. To generate business worth, Springer Nature has in latest years promoted the so-called Nature Index, an expanded rating system in which China’s place has risen quickly. China’s Nature Index rating has now exceeded 60 per cent of the U.S. degree and is roughly 4 occasions that of the United Kingdom. But if one appears to be like solely at Nature itself, China nonetheless trails far behind the United States and stays under Britain. Last 12 months, U.S. researchers revealed 1,431 papers in Nature, in contrast with 506 by British researchers and 471 by Chinese researchers, solely barely forward of Germany’s 422.

Strip away the thick froth of inflated academic rankings, and a more durable reality emerges: regardless of China’s extraordinary progress over the previous 20 years, the nation nonetheless trails the United States by a large margin in fundamental analysis, frontier applied sciences, and top-tier scientific achievements. In many respects, China stays in the second tier of world science, alongside nations equivalent to Britain, Germany, and Japan.

The fundamental construction of world scientific competitiveness has not basically modified. That is a actuality China ought to confront with extra sobriety.

Over the previous couple of years, some students and consultants have repeatedly claimed that the worldwide centre of science and know-how has shifted from the United States to China. The declare doesn’t stand as much as actuality. Thanks to its huge market and dynamic know-how corporations, China has certainly turn out to be one of many world’s main centres for industrial R&D and technological utility. But in science and know-how analysis, the hole with developed nations stays giant. Industrial rise depends upon economic-system reform, which China has managed remarkably in the previous. The rise of fundamental analysis and unique innovation, nevertheless, depends upon reforming the training system and the governance establishments of scientific analysis. On that entrance, China has made little progress over the previous 20 years.

No nation in historical past has possessed scientific human assets on the dimensions that China does in the present day. In 2025, China admitted greater than 170,000 new doctoral college students, roughly equal to the mixed whole of the United States, the European Union, and Japan—about 60,000, 100,000, and 12,000, respectively. To basically overcome technological chokepoints, China should reform its college hiring programs, analysis mechanisms, and scholar coaching fashions to genuinely encourage originality.

Academic and mental work, by nature, resists exact measurement and is particularly ill-served by fastened quantitative indicators. Laozi produced the roughly 5,000 characters of the Tao Te Ching over a lifetime. Goethe spent forty years finishing Faust. Several Japanese Nobel laureates over the previous decade didn’t communicate English fluently and had not revealed papers in worldwide journals. Under in the present day’s academic analysis system, they might all have been filtered out.

The deepest worth of academic and mental work lies in even the smallest measure of originality, not in piles of standardised papers and monographs. But originality wants unhurried time, impartial thought, and an open mental and social setting in which it will possibly take root.

If academia is managed like a manufacturing facility meeting line or a bank-teller system, with bureaucratic indicators protecting challenge rankings, funding, publication counts, titles, and numerous different metrics, the result’s a profound distortion of scholarship and a critical insult to mental creativity. Applied to lecturers, researchers, and graduate college students, such a box-ticking, metric-driven analysis regime dangers compacting the soil of academic life, stripping it of the vitamins wanted for mental development.

The present analysis and coaching system will solely cut back the effectivity with which China makes use of its mental assets. China could practice greater than thrice as many PhDs because the United States, however its capability for analysis, invention, and unique creation will hardly rise by something like the identical a number of. Such a system solely produces “professional practitioners of academic and research activities”—folks expert at managing relationships, chasing analysis grants, profitable nationwide initiatives, and accumulating titles. It doesn’t assist really gifted minds emerge. Under such a system, figures equivalent to Qian Sanqiang [father of the Chinese nuclear programme] and Chen Jingrun [Chinese mathematician] would very probably have been buried.