刊于《环球时报》（英文版）

Empty boasts and showy projects in Chinese academia

• Source: Global Times
• [22:23 July 13 2009]
• Comments

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By Shi Yu

Professor Dan Ben-Canaan wrote an article for Global Times on July 6 listing the bad habits in Chinese academia, pitying lost opportunities to improve Chinese academic capabilities, and criticizing scholars for producing “recycled papers.”

Ben-Canaan has traveled and studied in Europe and the US. He is a well-known foreign professor here in China leading research projects on China- West cultural studies. He is not alone in criticizing China. But such harsh comments are rare from a foreign scholar. His observations may be over-generalized, but sometimes it takes extreme words to awake the Chinese people, like when the German Sinologist Wolfgang Kubin called contemporary Chinese literature “trash.”

Not long ago China’s Ministry of Education announced that we have built a well-established modern education system. Western media commentated on the amount of academic papers China produces each year, just behind that of US and Japan.

Coming at such a time, Ben-Canaan’s harsh criticism makes us reflect on our current academic environment, which is filled with boasting and exaggeration.
 
Let’s start with the so-called “international academic conference.” Ben-Canaan mentioned that 28 internationally acclaimed scholars were invited to a seminar in Northeast China, while out of a dozen or so Chinese scholars who submitted papers, only two showed up.

The arrogance shocked the Israeli scholar who’s been working in China for years. Is this out of fear toward foreign experts, or is it because the Chinese academics can still be seen as prominent academics without exchanging views with their fellow scholars overseas?

Recent years have seen lots of “international academic conferences” as colleges all over China pay large sums of money to invite international authorities.

The foreign scholars come all the way to China in hope of close interaction with Chinese colleagues, but are instead shuffled around sightseeing and banquets. Though the international conferences look glamorous, most of them have no substance whatsoever. They’re “image projects,” only for show. Under the circumstances, who cares about such conferences?

Data compiled by the China Association for Science and Technology show that the number of academic conferences in China in recent years has increased from 144 in 2003 to 316 in 2006. However a survey by Tianjin University found that most people have a negative view about such conferences, whose level of recognition is less than 40 percent.

This unhealthy academic atmosphere is partly caused by unsatisfying academic capabilities of Chinese scholars and a lack of motivation to exercise good academic disciplines.

Another reason lies in the structural flaws of our whole academic uation system, which emphasizes quantity over quality, and publication over originality.

The system only looks at what high level international conferences an institute holds during the year, rather than what breakthroughs the conferences actually make. It stresses how many papers are published and how many patents registered, rather than which paper or patents show fundamental breakthroughs or are truly original report.

If we continue to go down this road, academic opportunists will be encouraged and the real hard-working scholars marginalized. It’s not surprising that scholars can only produce “recycled papers.”