The Coming Ascendancy of China

Matthew Reisz in Times Higher Education reports that Wen Jiabao, Prime Minister of China, has been awarded the King Charles II medal by the Royal Society for an ambitious national research program.

"The scale and success of Chinese investment in research was reflected in findings released last month by Thomson Reuters - drawing on data collected for the Times Higher Education World University Rankings - which showed that the country's elite C9 League now generates more income per academic staff member than the UK's Russell Group.

The top Chinese universities also award the highest number of doctoral degrees per academic.
Despite a vast increase in output over the past decade, there has been no discernible dip in standards, and the quality of the research produced by Chinese universities has remained at about the world average."

Some warnings are necessary. It is debatable whether the generation of research income is always a good indicator of quality. For one thing, note that the report talks about "per academic staff". Getting rid of or forgetting about "unproductive" departments like philosophy or languages could boost scores as easily as getting grants.

Still, it seems likely that the Chinese are on the way to scientific supremacy, at least in the natural sciences. There are obstacles ahead such as centralised control that might one day slow down the growth of research. They might even  read  Times Higher and stop being so unpleasantly aggressive and competitive, but at the moment that seems unlikely.

Incidentally, do the data collected for the THE World University Rankings tell us anything that we couldn't learn from the Shanghai rankings?