Citations used by China to ‘seize control of global science’

The rising number of highly cited papers produced by China should be treated with scepticism because Beijing will use these impressive metrics to push science in a direction that suits the superpower’s national interests, a policy analyst has warned.

Speaking at an event to mark King’s College London’s China Week, Sophia Gaston, head of foreign policy and UK resilience at Policy Exchange, an influential centre-right UK thinktank, said China had sought to increase the citation scores of its research papers because a higher global standing would allow its researchers to influence the future path of science.

Citations are “used in claims of legitimacy in regulation and governance,” Ms Gaston told an audience on 16 October, adding that this kind of influence over scientific rules and sector norms was “not in our interest because China’s intention is to overhaul the liberal global order that we have helped to create”.

Her warning comes as China rose to become the world’s leading country for highly cited research, accounting for 27 per cent of top 1 per cent cited papers, ahead of the US, which produced 24 per cent of most-cited papers.

“There is not an area on which China does not make a strategic assessment of national interest so, until the day that we also do this, we cannot make the case [for full collaboration] with open hearts and minds,” continued Ms Gaston, a research fellow at the University of Oxford, who warned that UK researchers were “not aware of all the risks” they faced when working with Chinese scholars.

Scholars working with Chinese peers should bear in mind that China is a “surveillance state” and “authoritarian superpower…where there is no separation between the state and the individual”, argued Ms Gaston, adding that China had demonstrated it would “always put national interests before global interests”.

“In the pandemic, the Chinese state absconded from its responsibilities to the global community in actively seeking to suppress information and deny it from the global scientific community,” she said.

The UK and academia needed to take a “wartime footing” over China “because what we are trying to defend is existential to us,” Ms Gaston said.

The huge reliance of UK universities on income from Chinese students was particularly misguided, she explained, arguing that the “government will need take a bigger role in funding the sector”.

“How is it possible that we have a quarter of our international student fees coming from a country which we have decided is an epoch-defining systemic threat to our country?” asked Ms Gaston, echoing Rishi Sunak’s introduction to the recently updated Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy.

The event also heard from international higher education consultant Michael Natzler, now based at Yenching University in Beijing, who said academics and civil servants should be briefed on China’s strategies to gain intellectual property from the West.

“Getting people to [acquire middling Mandarin] will not help people to engage with China,” he said, adding that a “deeper awareness of China and how it engages [with the West] is more important”.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com