The prevailing view of Chinese universities is that they are highly effective at turning out large numbers of reasonably well-qualified specialists whose strengths are in the application of existing practices to predefined problems and whose future may lie in shanzhai (“copycat”) innovation.
But that picture is changing rapidly, with the best universities starting to recruit the world’s top faculty talent for priority disciplines and creating an environment where breakthroughs can happen. When Fudan University wanted to develop a wastewater-treatment science program, for example, it hired one of the world’s top thinkers on the topic, who was teaching and conducting research in Singapore at the time. Globally recognized scientific journals are also increasingly filled with publications from leading Chinese researchers: Nature, for example, published 303 papers by Chinese scientists in 2012, up from 46 in 2006.