The rise of China in global science

hello everyone and welcome to the oxford university department of education public seminar you're very welcome to be joining us and we're very pleased to have you here and this is a regular series of events um so you may have been um viewed viewed in before but if not i'll just give you a little bit of a talk through some of the housekeeping so we're using microsoft teams live events for this and some of you may be used to other forums or other platforms with this platform you will be muted and your cameras will be off throughout and that's the um both the advantage and the downside of this um so don't worry about muting yourself or turning your cameras on and off which might be a a welcome relief for many of us but you will have the opportunity to ask questions so what's really important is that there is an ask a question button with the blue background which you should be seeing on the right hand side of your screen and you will have the opportunity to use that to ask questions and i'll be monitoring that throughout the talk and i will then use that to pose questions to simon at the end of the day so uh and housekeeping terms uh that's the way that their meeting will run simon's going to talk to us for about 45 minutes and then we're going to have 15 minutes for questions and answers so it's going to be a pretty full hour so uh let me just not hesitate anymore i introduce simon to you so simon is a professor of higher education here at the university of oxford he's the director of the esrc the economic and social research council center for global and higher education which is a a partnership of 14 universities um six uk uh and international universities led out of the university of oxford with six million pounds in funding for multiple projects looking at global national and local aspects of higher education uh simon is also the editor in chief of the journal higher education and his scholarship is in this area of higher education is widely um published and cited so his h index is indeed over 70 which for those of us who who live by these things which is all of us academics really and that's a very impressive impressive statistic so um the title of simon's talk is going to be the rise of china in global science i'm very welcome to present to you simon martinson well thanks very much steve that's a very kind introduction and it's a great pleasure to be fronting the departmental um seminar today and great that we're connecting to a wider public in this way now i've got a few slides to show so let's get straight down to it now for the first four decades after world war ii science and technology were sustained mostly by a handful of countries in north america and western europe plus soviet russia and japan from the 1990s onwards it changed middle-income countries established self-reproducing science systems science networks exploded through the medium of the internet and in a process of exceptional dynamism conditioned by almost 40 years of high economic growth china built what is becoming the world's largest largest national science system china scientists have the largest paper output and the second largest aggregated citations after the us and are number one in a couple of disciplines in r d investment and published science the larger east asian or chinese civilizational region politically divided but with common cultural roots easily exceeds each of europe and north america and will equal all of europe and north america sometime in the 2030s if the world isn't ever living fire as heraclitus said fluctuating in intensity from time to time and from place to place the science of the east will soon burn as brightly as that of the west the rise of china and singapore which join concentrated national capability to international connections and the ranges heraclitus saw a world not a being but of becoming not a world of fixed qualities but a never finished process for him change was always qualitative opening all things to diversity heterogeneity with diversity and everything flows heraclitus has something in common with foundational thinkers in china for i will argue to understand east asian science we must grasp both its dynamism and its specificity national science in china and its global connections do not always follow euro american patterns china's science system is modern and in some respects western but it's also chinese and draws on a deep well of more than 2 200 years of statecraft scholarship and higher education in which government and intellectual life have always been tied together more closely than in europe and the americas the past is a lot closer to the present in china this deep well of statecraft and scholarship and confucian self-cultivation in education is an almost endless resource a source of many changes that are yet to come as martin jacques remarks as china becomes stronger it also becomes more chinese when most westerners look at china they think chinese communist party but today's party state is also the latest dynasty and one of the most successful in china's history none of the dynasties have been electoral democracies though there have been various forms of accountability and autonomy and no government has lasted long in china without regard for what the americans call public opinion china is different to the west it has its own traditions its own social logics and its own political culture today's combination of centralized state universities nested in the state and busy initiative on the ground is much older than the 21st century now this lecture aims to describe and explain the achievement and limits of science in china partly focusing on relations between the national science system and global science it reflects on r d investment the expansion of outputs and lifting of quality the balance between disciplines world-class universities citation quality national and global collaboration including relations with u.s science the paper draws on secondary data from the u.s national science board and the leiden ranking ultimately sourced from oecd scopus and web of science and from recent literature most of it in psymetrics now you might ask why talk about science in china well my first answer is mallory's answer when he was asked why he wanted to climb everest because it is there it's big because it is there china's science system is there and it's important like all big science it's world transforming it's also an epic achievement one we need to understand as remarkable as the soviet and american space race of the 1950s and 1960s or the creation of a networked world following the launch of the internet in 1990 or the worldwide eradication of epidemic diseases it's also an achievement of humans of scholars and students university managers ultimately science in china is not solely a state juggernaut nor solely a ranking score sheet it's it is knowledge and it's made by people who are people like us what do i mean by science system well it's a long conversation but arguably a science system is primarily four elements scientific researchers themselves organizations such as universities institution academies codified knowledge and governance there are also infrastructures and media of interaction communication and production by system i simply mean a set of elements and assemblage an interactive whole within defined borders my focus today is on science that is the natural science based fields my core inquiry is into globalization and here i'm interested in the interaction between china's national system of science and the global science system while some data on social science will appear most social science and all nearly all the humanities are outside the problematic i'm dealing with today they're conducted in national languages and outside global conversation social science in china where my colleague shinshu is the expert is another paper now a complicating factor in science is that there is not one science system but many first there is the global science network albeit differentiated by disciplines and by specialized networks second there are national science systems in each country which interact and partly overlap with the global system here the term global does not refer to the whole world and everything in it the global dimension is specific to activities and relations constituting a worldwide or planetary ontology that and towards the evolution of the world as an integrated meta system globalization in science refers to the combined processes of global convergence and integration for example the formation of a single pool of knowledge in the global language of science which is english so in this paper global science refers to only that part of science which enters into the common worldwide system of people institutions and published works plus the infrastructures and activities that sustain the cross-border conversations there's one very important difference between global system of science and national science systems in the global system scientists and scientific teams interact freely in the open space between institutions and between national systems while being subject to common professional norms their norms of self-management global science is largely bottom up operating through communication and publication there are intellectual leaders but no single controlling force this is different to national science systems they're funded by governments often for national advantage or survival and they're subject to law funding and policies that regulate scientific institutions and rules shaping researchers and their work yet these two different kinds of science system operate simultaneously overlap and provide conditions of possibility for each other there can be contention between them but there are also synergies as in the evolution of science in china as i'll explain scientists wear two hats disciplinary global and national and many of them are well aware of it china's great good fortune in science was timing the country set out to build a world competitive science system and open up to world science as a means of doing so at the same time the global science system really took off in the internet era science in in china rose on the crest of a wave of globalization and also contributed to that wave after the devastation of a cultural revolution don xiaoping set out to rebuild science as the key to modernisation he used internationalization to drive accelerated development not so as to borrow but to guide the creation of china's own capacity in original science he depoliticized science arguing that knowledge was universal subsequent policies encouraged the outward mobility of chinese students and researchers for training and collaboration fostered global publication and co-authorship with foreign scientists adapted system and institutional models from the west and systematically benchmark research academic units and institutions with high quality foreign comparators open sharing with international partners in the self-managed global disciplinary networks was encouraged at the same time china's science was as it still is nested in traditional science governance in which self-managed science is embedded inside the state and fulfills national policy agendas the national science system took root of the 1980s but output only really took off in the last 20 years or so china's number of science papers passed the us in 2016. china's growth of science has coincided with a great growth in the world science system as a whole at the rate of five percent per year and the pluralization of science producing countries many more countries produce science than was the case 30 years ago however on a disciplined basis there's not one global science system but there's several and the roles of east asia and china vary between them the region is exceptionally strong in the physical sciences stem cluster including mathematics and computing where it produced more than 40 percent of all papers in the world in 2018 and china's 355 000 papers dwarfed the 147 000 from the us between 2000 and 2018 china grew its world share of scopus papers and physical sciences stem from 9 to 28 in 2018 china had a long global lead in volume terms in chemistry material science and engineering and was also number one in computing science and more narrowly in physics papers in engineering grew from 14 000 in 2000 year 2000 to 135 000 only 18 years later in 2018. amid this growth the us global share of physical sciences stem fell from 24 to 12 the region was less east asia was less strong in biomedicine and health sciences as you can see from the pie chart just over 20 of papers though interestingly between 2018 china saw an especially sharp growth in biological sciences and biomedicine which multiplied by 13.5 times so this might be the early stages of an uplift in biomedicine however china and the rest of east asia have a minor presence in social science because a high proportion of papers in those disciplines are in national languages and english language social sciences scopus is likewise often focused on the local or nation-bound issues in the english-speaking countries this cluster is not really a global field an additional limitation in china is that the party state does not consistently welcome a freewheeling conversation of the western kind in the ssh disciplines in which terminology theories and public policies are all open to criticism questioning and diverse alternatives the ssh conversation in china oscillates between times of greater openness in times of greater constraint the last 30 years have seen major expansion in worldwide scientific capacity albeit uneven by nation between 1995 and 2018 of the 32 oecd countries for for which we have data r d as the share of gdp rose in 27 and declined in only five investment in r d has risen substantially throughout east asia except in japan is booming in china because it is funded to grow the gdp percentage is still increasing over the time scale of the graph r d in china multiplied by 10 times in real terms and in south korea by three times total r d investment in higher education in china in 2018 was 41 billion in current prices second only to the u.s at 74 billion china's science paper output the grey shading rose lockstep with the increase in funding there is a lag of up to five years between new investment and growth in physical science in public science the effects of the most recent increases in funding have yet to show as increased output and the party started decided last week to again increase the budget science and technology so covert 19 is not stopping the growth of science in china well that's science quantity what about quality the use of comparative citations as a proxy for paper quality is fraught as a long literature tells us although the same authors often use the comparative citation data anyway our citations expressions of cognitive debt or dependence or collaboration and mutual support or identity with the field or status building for the author citations cannot provide a single standardized currency or system for valuing knowledge or its creators but citation data are of interest as measures of connection and potential influence if they do not measure value they do measure recognition the most commonly used measures are average citation rates and incidence of high citation papers the latter is used here in china the proportion of all papers that were ranked in the top 1 of their field on the basis of citations rose from 0.33 in 1996 to 1.12 in 2016. but china reached the world average citation rate to one percent of its papers were in the top one percent in 2015. the citation rates of america's papers are discon discounted by the exceptionally low recognition by american authors of papers by chinese authors the citation rate of china's papers are discriminated by the exceptionally low recognition by american authors of papers by chinese authors china's papers are sourced at the higher rate by the rest of the world than they are by american authors so citation of china's authors is improving but from a low base this graph traces the longer term pattern in two disciplines chemistry and computing science disciplines where china's fairly strong china has now passed the eu countries in both disciplines in terms of the papers in the top 1 percent it remains well below the us in chemistry though it just might catch up to the us in computing research this graph looks more closely at the u.s and china's com on on a discipline by discipline basis china's research has produced a higher proportion of top 1 papers only in mathematics i mean the social science data can be ignored because there's low production in china in this category and much of it is second author work so the collaborators are carrying the site position but note that the graph also includes uk citations that's the blue balls and it will please some to see that the uk outperforms both the us and china in all fields except computing and materials science comparative citation performance in china is held back by a high volume of weaker papers fostered by international publishing act incentives china's science is stronger in comparative terms in the leading universities these have been fostered successively by the 2011 project the 985 project and the double world class project which focuses on disciplinary units as well as whole institutions table suggests that world-class university status has been unequivocally achieved in both china and singapore you can see the comparison with mit and eth zurich at the bottom compare those with the top couple of entries for china so how overall does china's top university performance compare with north america and europe well using the the the five percent papers measure and there are six world universities ahead of qinghua with its 1451 papers four of them are in the u.s one toronto in canada and one oxford in the uk over the nine years span ching hua has gone past cambridge in the uk and moving towards mit but we're the leading universities from china and singapore really stand out is in the annual rates of improvement in the last column the universities from china saw annual increases in high citation papers are between 13 and 25 that's every year the the highest citation science going up by between 13 and 25 and if these trends are sustained on this measure the top chinese universities will soon pass all u.s universities except harvard in terms of top five percent publications however it's important to keep in mind the skew towards physical sciences stem this graph presents the world top 100 universities in each of three discipline clusters two in the physical sciences stem and one in biomedical and health again we see that china holds up almost half the sky in physical sciences engineering computing and maths those strategic disciplines of the modern era however in biomedicine and health sciences there are only eight east asian universities in the world top 100 including six in china now this table looks more closely physical sciences stem cluster and on the basis of the number of 200 2015 to 2018 papers in the top five percent in citation terms qinghua is world leader in stem ahead of mit you add up the two columns world qinghua in fact heads both of them jaejang harbin it shanghai jiao tong xian zhao tong mongzhou ust and south china ut also appear on both sides of the table as do the two singaporean universities and stanford and berkeley in the u.s cambridge is the only uk university to appear in either table and it's on the left hand side remarkably china and singapore occupy 75 of these positions in the table researchers in mathematics and computing occupy the world's top seven places the top seven leading universities are from china remember all these researchers are working in their second language it's a different matter in biomedicine and health the top 25 universities in this group are all anglophone the massive paper output of harvard and others in biomedicine sustains their overall position in quantity measures of high citation science almost half of all u.s papers in scopus are in medicine and related life science fields china is skewed to stem the us is skewed to medicine we might ask why is it so at bottom i suspect the answer is not just political but cultural because the anglophone world and europe are much stronger than china and east asia in general in life sciences and earth sciences as well as in the social sciences and the humanities where the highest place china's institution is peaking university at number 112 there are just two chinese universities in the aggregate top 14 in this table so this includes all high citation work in all fields and you can see how gigantic the performance of harvard is there china's leading universities are building in all disciplines there are liberal arts programs in the major universities for example but at this time they did not exhibit the all-around intellectual strength of the leading american and european institutions the growth of global science since 1990 has seen a massive expansion of collaboration in science beyond the boundaries of single institutions in the form of co-authored papers collaboration entails both global networking and networking within single national systems between 1996 and 2018 the proportion of papers with authors from two or more nations increased from 12.4 to 22.5 the proportion of papers with authors from two or more institutions within one nation that's the middle color on the on the chart was much larger than the proportion of papers that involved international collaboration at the top in fact national collaborations grew by almost as much as international collaborations from 35 to 44 the dual trend growth in both international collaborations and national collaborations shows that national systems of science are expanding and developing at the same time as his network global activity however national systems vary in the balance between the growth of national networking and of international networking in the long-established science systems in north america and europe the pattern since 1990 has been ever more extensive international collaboration i mean two-thirds of papers produced at oxford involve international collaboration within europe network growth is primarily focused on the other european countries stimulated by the incentives for multi-country projects in european research funding in the u.s there's strong international collaborations across the world though national networks are still probably the most important as alichnika and college colleagues stated in the 2019 study of the global science system the contemporary global scientific network is woven around the us among emerging countries there are different patterns a group of smaller countries has focused primarily on international collaboration as the means of building research capacity a second group of emerging countries which includes several larger countries has pursued international collaboration but also pursued construction of a robust national science system this group includes china south korea iran india and brazil these countries do not behave like the periphery countries imagined incentive periphery theory nor do they behave like europe or north america they follow a more autonomous path they exhibit less intensive networking with the established research systems some of their best science is from nation only teams in natural sciences and engineering where china is strong international collaboration constitutes only a small minority of the total chinese output except in general physics where there's a highly collaborative worldwide network in a recent paper maric quick notes that papers involving national collaboration have a higher impact on global science than international collaborations in just five countries the us china france romania and poland yet this regardless of this building of national science to a high level china's science also uses international collaboration effectively and this same dual global and national logic is working both systems in the national interest has governed doctoral training in china between 2000 and 2015 the annual number of new doctoral graduates from china's universities multiplied by 4.43 meanwhile from 2000 to 2017 there were 67 000 new chinese doctoral graduates in science from u.s universities equivalent to another two full years of doctoral graduates from china at the 2015 level so large number of doctoral graduates from national graduation large number of doctoral graduates from offshore graduation as well the foreign trained doctoral students have sustained much of the international collaboration so with whom do china's scientists collaborate in national terms well the us national science board uses an index of collaboration which identifies the expected number of co-authored papers between two countries relative to the overall patterns of collaboration of authors in each country and when the index succeeds 1.00 that's when there's a bias in favor of collaboration to that country well china has such a bias towards regional singapore and taiwan it has a growing link with pakistan it has a strong link with anglophone australia and significantly also with scientists in the us another measure is the volume of co-authored papers between nations well as the table shows researchers in china published over 5 000 co-authored papers in 2018 with the us uk australia canada all anglophone germany japan singapore where almost a third of the collaborative papers are with china and france so the table shows that china's collaborations have grown rapidly in the case of china and singapore for example multiplied by 46 times the table also underlies lines the role of u.s china co-authorship which multiplied by 26 times over the period of the table and at 55 000 papers was much the largest such country to country pairing in world science uh pacquillon remarks that china's special relationship with the us in science has helped to propel it to the scientific frontier the china-u.s relationship has also become central to the open global science system it's predominantly bilateral in the three quarters of papers authored by scientists from china and the u.s involve only those nations china-u.s relations in science have been sustained by all of the cooperation between disciplinary researchers university to university collaboration and national policies in both countries the structure of the u.s china agreement on cooperation in science and technology has legitimated a larger volume of bottom-up passages transfers and activities bilateral collaboration is mostly focused on those disciplines where china is strong and has the most to contribute especially the physical sciences engineering computing and related fields u.s and chinese scientists have each become essential to each other on the china side us institutions personnel and knowledge have helped to drive modernization and catch up on the us side chinese doctoral students and post-doctoral researchers have contributed to american research and china has supplied funding and intellectual ballasts among the 500 high citation bilateral papers from 2014 to 18 that were studied by leigh and hawt 49 of these higher citation papers had lead authors primarily affiliated from china u.s college scholars led on 28 and the remaining 23 involved joint affiliations so the china china scholars were more prominent in first authorship than the americans in these highly cited joint papers at the same time um seven chinese funding agencies supported 114 thousand joint publications while three u.s funding agencies supported thirty three thousand so the bulk of the finance for these joint papers came from china the rise of east asia and china in science rests on high investment focused national system building the targeted deployment of international connections resources and standards and at the foundation of all the confucian ethic of self-cultivation and continuous self-improvement as deeply felt on an individual basis as on a collective basis there is a strong bias in funding to physical sciences stem where scientists from china excel national and global system development have been artfully combined in a world in which both science power and language power are ordered hierarchically internationalisation embodies potential tensions between american and scionic norms nevertheless scientists east and west share common disciplinary cultures based on free association and china's internationalisation is more adaptive than isomorphic national and local agencies clearly are strong the evolution of science in east asia and china has disturbed long-standing western beliefs about global relations in science prior to the 1990s the global science system functioned as a duopoly of north america and europe with settler state outliers such as australia and israel plus japan which networked into the duopoly and soviet russia which was an island largely decoupled from it and within the duopoly the us was overwhelmingly strong well after 1990 three things happened first scientists within the duopoly became ever more intensively networked second taking advantage of the ease of entry into the open networked global system a range of countries developed new national science systems that emphasized international collaboration as a primary means of capacity building scientists in most of these systems became attached to the duopoly systems especially the us these countries also exercised independent agency choi finds that the fastest growth in networking is between countries on the so-called periphery third though a more heterogeneous element emerged new semi-autonomous national systems less networked into the duopoly and building national capability prior to or at the same time as advancing open global connections the most successful nations have been those investing heavily in capacity building as in east asia these developments taken together are fostering a more complex multi-centered global order in science in the internet era china and the other semi-autonomous national systems do not follow the old norms of the global duopoly in science the strength of their science cannot be judged simply in terms of citation rates or the proportion of papers that are internationally co-authored or the ratio between global and national co-authorships or degree centrality measures at the same time they contribute significantly to global knowledge especially china however the evolution of science in china has been conditioned also by 40 years of close association with u.s science it remains to be seen whether if china u.s relations weaken china's science system will maintain its national trajectory and growing global impact in 2020 there are growing signs that a geopolitical rivalry and u.s security concerns will inhibit future collaboration including the doctoral education of chinese students in the u.s faculty mobility could be affected joint appointments are already already being dismembered and common projects and papers are in jeopardy special american hostility has been directed against the 1000 talent program which brings us-based chinese researchers back to china this program attracts concerns about intellectual property but perhaps the choice by some that to return to china challenges deeply felt notions of cultural superiority in the united hopped note st the potential of scientific nationalism which essentially views scientific research as a means to primarily advance the nation state can diminish scientific globalism which is the collaborative global research system arguably the china u s corporation in science aligned successfully scientific nationalism and scientific globalism the global science system and both national systems grew together the geopolitical conditions enabling that positive global national synergy in both countries have now changed arguably both science systems will lose from a partial decoupling but china's system is now larger and more robust than it was china's government will reposition national science and new developments are afoot its february 2020 decision to reduce the role of global publishing in national academic assessment suggests a shift in the balance between global and national valuation watch this space the southern dislocation of scientific collaboration triggered by the chinese u.s global standoff not to mention the effects of the covert 19 pandemic uneven as they are by country underline the wisdom of the sages of both ancient greece and ancient china as heraclitus said all things are in flux like a river do not expect ever to reach local or global equilibria there will be no state of rest for us science like the world is continually changing everything flows thanks steve first question the questions are open please uh everybody do type a question into the ask a question box and i can read those out to simon but taking uh taking advantage of my role of chair it's very really interested in the rise of um the strength of of chinese university through through science and i wonder what this means in terms of student flow i know that's not particularly the focus of your talk but is it um are we should we anticipate you know copy it aside fewer um university students flying from china to universities in the west as the strength of um of the chinese universities internal strength for them increasing the um global student market is not a conventional supply and demand market and the leading countries the uk us and the uk the number of students who come at least in the top half of the systems is not determined by the number of families that want to come it's determined by the number of visas that are issued and the number of places that universities provide um and there's all in fact there's a queue outside the gate not everyone gets in so in that situation there's quite a lot of room for growth um and um and we won't be as disadvantaged by covert 19 related phenomena as we might have feared uh at least uk and the us some of the other providers of international education it's a bit more of a struggle um but what that all means is that uh the growth of the elite sector and the strengthening of higher education at that level in china doesn't really cut into the potential flows abroad there's always some families that see an advantage in going abroad learning english language of global business and technology and science and research um and there's also prestige benefits in in the elite um western universities and in the case of the uk and us all the doctoral universities have some standing in that sense not just the top ones so um and you you look around at oxford for example and you see that we get very good students at d field level coming in from pku which is a great university and qingwar and places like that you know um where ching-war and oxford aren't really all that different in terms of their global standing but their advantages in having been a student at both and and i think those the mobility factor doesn't diminish just because the national system in china gets stronger it's the same with taiwan and korea i mean both of them have established world-class higher education systems but they continue to send large numbers of students to the u.s before cultural reasons and that doesn't seem to be a problem so i i don't think i don't think there's a there's a substitution effect um what's more likely to play in here is um the geopolitics and if it becomes uh if the chinese government decides it doesn't want people to go abroad or if or there's this sort of feeling that um chinese students will not be well received when they go abroad then the family patterns will change fascinating right i've got some questions coming in here and the first is from justin powell uh thanks for the fascinating talk simon you emphasized that scientific autonomy is limited in china and thus its contributions to life sciences and social sciences are less strong is there recognition uh in china of this problem will chinese scientists achieve more freedom in the near future do you believe nice to hear from you justin um as you know um our colleagues uh most of the time in china motor along just as we do you know operate in much the same way the difference is that when you go to a seminar as i did a number of seminars in june last year in pku and in qinghua there's a party second in the room and that person is part of the conversation and that's just taken for granted like having an another academic manager perhaps but there is that sense of linking to the whole apparatus of power so there is a difference but most of the time it's much the same as it is here um i i think in the case of the medicine and the related biological scientists i don't think that there's an academic freedom problem of the kind that there is with the social sciences social sciences directly challenge the party state in some ways because they are the western developed social sciences are about providing critical thought thinking for government are about providing information and instrumental knowledge for government but are also about suggesting alternatives and that kind of public sphere have a messian type function of the social scientists sciences is much harder to to to run in china without running into political obstacles and barriers my sense is that the um internal atmosphere has got somewhat more constrained i think there's been more political intervention in the universities in the last decade than there was in the previous 20 years perhaps the 1980s were the golden time after 10 are men things tightened up then they loosened up again towards the end of the 90s and into the 2000s but the last but since xi jinping arrived it has been getting harder to be critical um and uh there's at the moment anyway there's no letting up in that trend which seems to be getting tighter rather than more open traditionally china seems to oscillate you know right through the whole imperial period as well during periods of openness and periods of closure the regime opens up becomes more cosmopolitan lets the foreigners in let's a lot more descent into discussion internally and then the regime cracks down on difference cracks down on outsiders cracks down on internal critics and so on and this this this kind of oscillation occurs in long spans often five or ten years at a time so um so we wait for the next long trend back to back to relaxation of controls internally and then we'll probably see more debate and discussion about the big national and global political issues inside the system thank you hopefully that's provided a very comprehensive answer uh another question here from simon gurney uh could the chinese west relationship the deterioration in the relationship between the west and china have any impact on transnational undergraduate programmes universities such as zhang tong liverpool and the many transnational programs across china yes i i mean that's one thing that i'm a bit worried about to be honest i'm concerned that we may see the well you know almost weekly increase in sano western tensions play out in some negative way for uh you know for the new nimbu campus and the shion campus and so on and and the american um um uh sono sino foreign corporation campuses as well and i mean there's been tremendous some commitment by english language universities in china um particularly the americans who put a lot of bricks and mortar in um the major universities like stanford harvard um yale and so on have got major initiatives in china but also through nottingham and and and liverpool and so on so um i mean in that situation uh you know those long-term commitments aren't going to be thrown away they're not going to be rated likely and i don't think the chinese government wants to get rid of the foreigners at this point of time either it's just that when when when the negatives are sort of mounting then everyone starts to become become much more cautious do a lot more due diligence and risk assessment you know not not engaged in things that would have been engaged in before because of the risks um becomes in other words everyone becomes less open um and that could inhibit things i mean the providing um students still coming to the uk in large numbers though i think the the educational relationship won't change a lot um where we would have to start to worry would be if that flow of students onshore into the uk uh dried up if that was happening then that would be the sign of something uh negative occurring great thank you and a question from sybil urduan do you think the academic writing genre in humanities and social sciences is very different in china so the fact that these disciplines lagging behind as your talk showed might be beyond an issue of language and politics but more a matter of cultural norms about humanities and social which are very differently defined in china versus the west yeah i agree with that completely and i would emphasize that the comparative data across the disciplines don't tell us anything useful much about humanities and social science i mean i'm obliged to put the numbers up but honestly you know it wouldn't be correct to conclude um that china is underperforming in those disciplines from these numbers because there's an immense amount of work in chinese and i mean i read a very good doctoral thesis from hku um several months ago where the student can looked at um the chingua sociology department and compared their work in chinese and their work in english and their work in english was often to american topics they were doing an immense amount of work in chinese which was much more focused on local and and provincial and um probably much more useful uh so there's a lot of very useful instrumental social science going on it's about urbanization it's about ecology and it's fundamental issues about about improving life and and society um and uh you know so if you took all of that kind of work into account i think you'd have a different picture in terms of total output but you um there is that question though of intrinsic freedoms and the capacity to develop alternative models to government models and so on that that's i think there is that limitation in social science humanities is more problematic in some ways some of the most brilliant dissident scholars are in the humanities um not all of them some of them are in sciences as well but you know there's some very important heroic critics of the regime in the humanities and sometimes they probably pay the ultimate price um and that's a pattern which has gone back for a very long time in china um the notion of the scholar who calls out the government and then pays the price but their their sacrifice is never forgotten and their words were remembered and their ideas and criticisms matter um and and what a professor says in china matters more than a dozen in in in the uk or u.s i mean it really has a great deal of weight professors are very respected so when someone in the humanities does become a critic and does go out hard publicly um that really does count and that's one of the reasons why there is that the repression also occurs because it matters um so there's that whole that whole that drama is being played out in china you know every so often um and not something we do in the humanities where i think that um there's a gap is that china's failed to create a conversation in the humanities around the whole question of chinese characteristics which which is what might be fully um vibrant and enabling of national development in that way i mean i think you know intrinsically china becoming indigenous focusing on indigenous identity focusing on chinese characteristics must be the right way to go i mean there's such a wellspring of tradition to draw on and so much in the in the present too which is chinese modernization is very rich and different so there's so much to do there and you think the humanities you know above all the the just the disciplines which which focus on identity and and and meaning and um and sensitivity and and plurality and complexity um i mean those disciplines ought to be at the center of that conversation about chinese characteristics and i think they're being pushed to the margins precisely because the government sees them as dangerous a lot of young students want to study the humanities want to you know want to work in scholarship want to want to write poetry and make films i mean want to do those kinds of things and um but it's hard in china you know at certain times in the like the 1980s there's a tremendous flowering of the humanities but much of the time they're there's someone sitting on top of them thank you thank you another question here um along with the challenges to china u.s cooperation could you comment more on changes to china eu stroke uk cooperation particularly in relation to brexit and belton road initiative yeah there's a new book on this um which is called you probably can't see it because my light's a bit bright on the cover but it's um it's it's um called china and europe on the new silk road and it's just come out in last few days and it's edited by mark van der wende from utrecht in the netherlands and a group of other people um and it has about 20 chapters and it's much of it is about china europe and it was re i think prepared in a period where things were becoming more fraud if you like it at global level mainly because of american china china being pushed through into other western countries um but uh you know the europe eu's cautious and careful um about built-in road built-in road is enormously important development which will not go away it'll be there for decades and it will be influencing infrastructure and development in in countries all around china and beyond in into africa and eurasia and latin america um in europe there's a uh the belt and road money is pretty persuasive in a small economy and so eastern europe southern europe greece and so on are influenced by belton road diplomacy but the the larger economies like germany have been brought cautious and wary of being being drawn into um commitments through belton road that will be ongoing and and so on so at the moment anyway um it's i guess slowly slowly as slowly as we go in um eu china cooperation um the the possibility that europe would sort of be a third force between china and the us i don't think he's materializing i mean there's a sense in which europe is taking a position closer to the u.s and china and and on the whole um quite a lot you know quite concerned about some of the same issues like theft of intellectual property that is motivating us at the moment and um and raising those issues in china um but uh but not identical to the u.s position i mean i think if there is a biden government we'll see a more subtle diplomacy going on in which u.s will work quite hard to bring in europe on all of its foreign policy concerns and at that point we may see a united sort of nato position in relation to china but there'll always be economic reasons for the big european economies to run their own relationship with china mute yep sorry sorry that i don't know how i became music there um another questions come through um do you think maybe some chinese academic journals especially in the social sciences and humanities are somewhat devalued in a way because of the accessibility because of the language issue and a second question should there be universal or golden publication standards in the english dominated social science and humanities areas well i think you'd like to see um much more translation going on into english as well as out of english into other languages i mean a lot of the very best work we never see in english um my own small field of higher education studies which is the social science field the um there's a lot of really good scholarship in latin america arguably more of the sort of philosophically historically informed scholarship of high quality than we have in english we we see very little of that in english because it isn't translated uh or little only little is translated and yet i mean there must be similar kinds of problems in many disciplines and men arabic spanish portuguese not just chinese but you know chinese is a big it's a big family of work and we don't know what's being said in chinese we do know what chinese scholars take into english where they often have to work to a global conversation which may not be necessarily fully applicable in china and that is a constraint which many feel and talk about when they're interviewed on this topic no so i think gold standard gets in the way whereas the gold standard in physics makes sense gold standard maths makes sense but a gold standard in sociology is probably not a very good idea what you'd rather see is ways in which the global research system could bring forward plurality and i think that translation is a key to that in the social sciences and humanities yeah i suspect if the uh if the metrics were determined by your number of publications in the chinese language we wouldn't be there looking at quite the same rank ordering that you presented to us well the numbers have to be different i mean even the numbers in science in um chinese is enormous i mean um there's something like three and a half thousand chinese language journals in the physical sciences three and a half thousand um just in chinese so not everyone's working in english or the global language i'm sure a lot of that work isn't translated into english and we never see it that's absolutely fascinating we have uh reached six o'clock now we're trying to keep our meetings at uh at an hour to give people a sense of a breather um but this talk uh will be um available i think on the oxford university department of education youtube channel so simon has agreed that it can be publicly available so you will be able to look and reflect on that um and thank you again for for joining us everybody out there and thank you particularly to simon for giving such an interesting and such an engaging talk

Channel: Department of Education, University of Oxford

Views: 12,942

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Id: P4U0EWXlyLI

Length: 59min 46sec (3586 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 16 2020