What is stopping China’s innovation capacity in 2021? A study by the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU) and COVID-19

Even if China can fix some of the fundamental domestic challenges that have thwarted its innovation capacity, it faces a major challenge on international collaboration, which has been hit by both COVID-19 travel restrictions and geopolitical tensions. China–US co-publications, which had been on the rise since 2017, fell slightly in 2021, according to a report by Elsevier and the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU). Although the decline was small, the trend was significant enough for the APRU — a group of 60 universities on both sides of the Pacific — to issue a statement about the importance of maintaining ties.

What is preventing Chinese innovation? Is China’s progress in this area simply taking longer because it needs more time for recent successes in basic research to be translated into real-world impact?

The study comes as tensions between the United States and China escalate and this is affecting researchers’ decisions about where to work. “China is witnessing a higher proportion of returnees because of the tensions, which in the short term is good for the development of Chinese research,” she says.

Domestic travel restrictions too have been a problem, particularly affecting two areas designated as tech hubs and regional centres for innovation. For much of the first half of 2022, the Yangtze River Delta hub was locked down. There wasn’t much information on the connections to the rest of the hub. The second hub is the Pearl River Delta, which includes Guangzhou and Shenzhen on the mainland China side of the border with Hong Kong and Macau. The Greater Bay Area was supposed to be China’s answer to the San Francisco Bay Area, with universities and tech companies on the west coast of the United States.

Travel has been so difficult between Hong Kong and Shenzhen — two cities barely an hour apart on the subway — that the government had to open a special immigration channel to ease passage for cross-border students. Even the head of Hong Kong’s government, chief executive John Lee, postponed his trip to the opening of HKUST’s new Guangzhou campus in August amid COVID-19 restrictions.

The GBA is intended to bring Hong Kong’s knowledge and higher-education excellence to the mainland. The way to accelerate growth would be for these large-scale projects to home in on larger societal issues. He says that the hubs can create an environment where innovation is needed and is provided by universities.

Such an approach could also help international collaboration with China to be rekindled too, according to Christopher Tremewan, APRU’s secretary general, who says that “despite political tensions, international scholarly collaborations in science remain crucial to addressing challenges such as the pandemic and the threat of accelerating climate change”.

Despite its prestige, the programme is viewed with suspicion by government agencies in the US and other countries because of the potential to give technical know-how to China. In 2018, the administration of former US president Donald Trump launched the China Initiative, to protect US laboratories and businesses from espionage. The Chinese government stopped naming recipients of the Thousand Talents Plan due to the negative career impact that the association might have.

Yang is interested in how the YTT recipients develop their careers — for example, whether they move into leadership roles in which they can influence research culture. It will be harder to carry out research on the later cohort of the programme because of the lack of transparency around who receives YTT grants. She says it is a pity.

But they also found that scientists who rejected offers to participate in the programme, and stayed abroad, ranked even higher — in the top 10% for research productivity in the five years before they might have returned. These researchers were also more likely to have published as a last author on papers — which usually denotes seniority — in leading journals. Public-policy researcher Kathleen Vogel at Arizona State University in Tempe thinks that the main reason for these findings is that it’s hard to persuade top-notch researchers to leave elite institutions, where they already have access to funding and resources.

YTT scholars are better able to forge independent research careers as heads of their own research teams because returnees were also more likely to be the last authors than those who stayed.

The main driver of productivity gains appears to be access to funding and research staff, as the impact on publication output is always gone when funding and team size is taken into account. “Research grants really matter a lot,” Wang adds.