science 2008-2009: 14: China

Who was a typical scientist in 2009? A case can be made for it being a technician working in a contract research organisation in China.

The numbers are certainly impressive. In 1949, China had 50,000 people that could be broadly categorised as working in science and technology in a total population of half a billion. By 1985, just before Deng Xiaoping relaunched Chinese science, the figures were 10 million in a billion. In 2006 China devoted 1.6% of its GDP to research and development, and its leaders announced a target of raising this figure to 2.5%. (Reaching this figure would mean that China was spending proportionately more on research and development that any European nation, would be roughly equal to the United States, and was approaching the scale of Japan’s investment.) Furthermore, with the increase in funds, the output of Chinese science was also increasing: second only to the United States in overall number of journal articles published, growing from 1% of the world’s total in 1994 to 6% in 2006. Like India, China has launched high profile space missions, including a spacewalk in 2008.

Such growth is revealing some interesting issues and tensions.

Starting with journals, large numbers of papers is not the same as large numbers of good papers. ‘the average impact’ of Chinese articles, noted journalist David Cyranoski in Nature, ‘was below average even in China’s strongest fields of materials science, physics and chemistry’. Furthermore, researchers at the best institutions are encouraged to publish in journals listed in the Science Citation Index. These are predominantly English-language journals. An ‘unintended consequence’, notes science policy analyst Lan Xue, has been to ‘threaten to obviate the roughly 8,000 national scientific journals published in Chinese’.

Indeed, there is an unresolved tensio between western and native sciences. Lan Xue cites the case of earthquake prediction. In the 1960s and 1970s ‘China set up a network of popular earthquake-prediction stations, using simple instruments and local knowledge’. This network was decommissioned in favour of a high-tech system. But when the new system failed to predict the Sichuan earthwuake of 2008, it was claimed that the indigenous stations would have. Lan Xue argues that a one-science-fits-all approach should be rejected: ‘one should tolerate or even encourage such indigenous research efforts in developing countries even if they do not fit the recognized international scientific paradigm’.

The tension is not just with indigenous traditional but also with the brute political fact that China has a slow-moving one-party system of rule overseeing a fast-moving economy including an expanding science sector. In 2009, the editors of Nature, reflecting on the obstacles in the way of setting up a national stem-cell science society, urged the political authorities to ease the severe restrictions on forming groups. The problem was that the Chinese authorities, in the absence of democratic legitimation, had an ‘aversion to congregations’, seeing groups, not least Falun Gong, as the seeds of political challenge. Furthermore, the established scientific organisations are more concerned about the maintenance of hierarchy and status than the encouragement of critical debate. ‘Most of the current learned societies do not function well’, ran the Nature editorial, ‘Annual meetings are often a matter of pomp, with elite researchers showing up to swagger about and form cliques based on pedigree rather than scientific views… Constructive criticism is more likely [to] be taken as grounds for breaking off relations than as insightful advice’.

Political sensitivities also shape international relations. Environmental research, especially in Beijing’s Olympic year of 2008, drew the watchful eye of political authorities. Two new laws, Measures for the Administration of Foreign-related Meteorological Sounding and Information (January 2008) and Measures Governing the Survey and Mapping in China by Foreign Organizations and Individuals (March 2008) were introduced to clamp down on unauthorised release of data. Collaborative projects have had their field stations in Yunnan dismantled; geologists working in the sensitive Tibet and Xinjiang region objected to the use of GPS. Projects, to be approvedm had to be seen to be ‘in China’s best interest’. But these laws were also about makings sure that Chinese science benefited from scientific research conducted within Chinese borders: hence the insistence on a demonstrable “equitable partnership” before approval.

Nor, of course, is China immune from the forces of globalisation. It trades with the world, manufacturing much of its goods. Its people travel. China is therefore, by necessity, part of the international science-based networks of organisation that are the infrastructure that make the global world of travel and trade. For example, the network of international disease notification and control has tested the Chinese authorities several times in recent years. The emergence of a new viral disease, Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2003 revealed problems with Chinese healthcare and how it communicated information with the rest of the world. The outbreak eventually stung the authorities into action: “After SARS they started spending“.

The Chinese government has a stated aim of making China a place of predominantly home-grown innovation. (Only a minuscule proportion of new drugs approved in China, for example, are discovered there.) China aims to be among the top five nations in areas such as producing new patents. ‘These are uncomfortable goals for China’, argues David Cyranoski, noting the industrial non-government source of most research and development funds, ‘because, unlike space research, they are more difficult to mandate from the top down’. Indeed it is science deriving from the working world of Chinese and multinational industries that has taken off, to such an extent that complaints such as the following (from a German academic in 2008 with extensive knowledge of working in Chinese science): “Making money has become the major attraction in China and this has severe consequences at the university level: basic research is not considered as important and attractive as it had been”.

Let’s look in more detail at the multinationals’ activities in China. Motorola set up ‘the first major foreign corporate research and development centre on Chinese soil’ only in 1993. ‘In 1997, China had fewer than 50 research centers that were managed by multinational corporations, by mid-2004, there were more than 600’ (see p.210). What are they doing there are why? First, there are companies, such as Pfizer, Roche and Eli Lilly, which set up offices in the Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park in Shanghai, which are attracted the burgeoning number of contract research organisations ‘selling almost every service a pharmaceutical or biotech company could want, including teh production of active ingredients, genomics, analytical and combinatorial chemistry, and preclinical toxicology testing’. Cheap clinical trials are a particular draw, costing between one-fifth and one-half the cost of running one in the United States. Eli Lilly’s Shanghai office did no science itself, but put together chains of contract research organizations. The cost and flexibility were the over-riding interests.

Second, companies have an eye on China itself as a growing and lucrative market, especially for drugs and therapies. Locating a research and development centre in China then is done for tactical purposes rather than in any expectation of new worthwhile discoveries. A research branch ‘helps build connections with regulatory agencies’ and facilitates ‘access to a market that some analysts predict will be the world’s second largest after the United States by 2020’.

Third, some companies are intent on tapping local resources. These resources can be human knowledge and skills: GlaxoSmithKline, for example, have chosen to locate their “R&D China” subsidiary next to the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences rather than across the city in the Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park because the company wanted “hard-core science” not “services”. Nevertheless a secondary justification, given by Jingwu Zang, the leader of GSK’s R&D China, was ‘the benefits of being able to transition drugs to a growing Chinese market more easily’.

Of course, expensive Western-style healthcare is not a unmitigated boon. Parts of China are booming, but other parts suffer desparate poverty. The uneven development within China is directly mirrored in a map of Chinese science: overwhelmingly located in Eastern hotspots: Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangdong.  This final tension show no signs of declining in force. An nation (and China is not alone) that can aim to ‘send a satellite to Mars but not solve the most basic problems that threaten millions of lives in the developing world’ can expect uncomfortable questions.