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China Technology

China Universities Waste Millions, Fail To Make Real Use of Research, Audit Finds in Indictment of Tech-Sufficiency Drive (scmp.com) 27

Posted by msmash from the reality-check dept.
Universities in a southern Chinese region are not doing enough to turn academic research into market applications, and in maintaining large piles of idle funds, and the findings could raise questions about the nation's ambitious tech self-sufficiency drive. SCMP: According to a new audit report by the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region for 2022, nine universities in the region had extremely low conversion rates in bringing inventions to the market -- below 1 per cent -- from 2020 to 2022. Among them, one university saw no successful industrial applications out of 862 implemented research projects funded with a total of 131 million yuan (US$18.2 million). The findings spotlight a long-standing weak link in China's push to strengthen basic research, which it views as crucial to becoming a tech superpower by the middle of the century, and to breaking free US tech-containment measures. "Essentially, this reflects a nationwide issue," said Liu Ruiming, a professor with the National Development and Strategic Research Institute at Renmin University.
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China Universities Waste Millions, Fail To Make Real Use of Research, Audit Finds in Indictment of Tech-Sufficiency Drive More

China Universities Waste Millions, Fail To Make Real Use of Research, Audit Finds in Indictment of Tech-Sufficiency Drive

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  • are also full of bullshit and prestige posturing.

    • Re:I have a feeling USA universities (Score:4, Informative)

      by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Wednesday August 09, 2023 @05:44PM (#63754436)

      are also full of bullshit and prestige posturing.

      USA universities are profit driven. Show profit = success. Education is absolutely non-necessary. In fact, education may be a hinderance, depending on how prominent the athletic programs are.

      • are also full of bullshit and prestige posturing.

        USA universities are profit driven. Show profit = success. Education is absolutely non-necessary. In fact, education may be a hinderance, depending on how prominent the athletic programs are.

        Education, i.e., the acquisition of knowledge, is absolutely necessary. University degrees may or may not be necessary, depending on the specific job. Professors and teachers need degrees to qualify for a job. Lawyers need law degrees, and doctors need medical degrees (for the most part). Many other jobs require either a degree or experience, so a degree is easier to obtain for young people.

        One big part of getting a college degree is demonstrating the ability to run the college gauntlet, both educationa

        • How is this in any way relevant to what the parent is saying?

          • How is this in any way relevant to what the parent is saying?

            Uh, because the parent claimed, "Education is absolutely non-necessary." My direct response is that education is obviously sometimes absolutely necessary and sometimes not necessary. My response is clearly not only relevant but a direct, on-point response to the parent.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mjwx ( 966435 )

        are also full of bullshit and prestige posturing.

        USA universities are profit driven. Show profit = success. Education is absolutely non-necessary. In fact, education may be a hinderance, depending on how prominent the athletic programs are.

        Sometimes it is difficult to determe if something is satire... which usually means it's decent satire.

        So forgive me if I've missed the joke but if profit was all that mattered, the various certificate mills would be the worlds best universities, especially in developing countries where people just buy their degrees/certificates. Having worked in higher education, it's not so much profitability (universities, even in Europe need to make a euro to survive) but rather employability that matters to students

    • And whatabout them other things????

  • State Capitalism be praised, why is your science not bringing money and glory to great thought leader Xi!?
  • While it sounds like they are wasting money they my still get meaningful results. Given the size of China 1% of anything is usually still a lot.
  • At first glance (I'm not going to RTFA !) this looks like a report that addresses the problem with a directness that I thought was difficult in China.
  • This reads more like a preamble to a restructuring of universities to suit the CCP leadership; a foreshadowing of persecution. Increasing publication of high quality articles in top journals testifies to the remarkable scientific output from China, and this is what the leadership wanted. Their moving the goal posts is very suspicious. After all, if the universities were doing a bad job, Chinese industry would be complaining first.

  • Universities Waste Millions, Fail To Make Real Use of Research.

    FTFY

  • Their paper output and patent output has been amazing, looks like it is all not so useful.

  • I am pretty sure that this is true for most universities. At least I have met a guy who started a company that was trying to put university discoveries to some commercial use. Scientists themselves are not good businessmen, otherwise they would not be professors in the first place. University bureaucrats are not good at business just because they are bureaucrats and not businessmen. They do not profit from the success of the business case. So... it is not really a university thing to implement findings.

    The

  • Fundamental research? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Thursday August 10, 2023 @03:05AM (#63755286)
    That could just mean that they're doing a higher percentage of fundamental research, which doesn't typically get turned into commercial applications. For that, you need applied research (the clue's in the name). Applied research is typically driven by fundamental research but fundamental research isn't particularly profitable, & that's why it's usually funded by govts.

    So are they actually saying that China is investing more than the US in fundamental research? Without a qualitative analysis, we can't know, but apparently the bean-counters &/or the journalist don't seem to care; the bean-counters just want to "move the needle" of the metrics by any means necessary (a bean-counter mindset), thereby frequently falling into the Goodhart's Law trap: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
  • If you are funding research, you have to go in knowing it could fail, or that it could work but not in a way that is realistically productizable. For example, recent algorithms for efficient matrix multiplication have been proven to be more efficient than existing algorithms, but only at scales that are unrealistic even for “big data supercomputing.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_complexity_of_matrix_multiplication). Even applied STEM research has this risk. So yes, I would expect

  • So, it's a study over *two whole years*. And the total "waste" they found is all of $16M! Wow, what a waste! $16 million! There are individual University labs in the US that waste more than that on lunches for meetings, I think!

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