Will China’s Thousand Talents plan work?

By Cong Cao
Column: Notes on China

Published: August 11, 2009

New York, NY, United States, — In an unprecedented move, the Chinese Communist Party has become a headhunter. The Department of Organization of the CCP Central Committee, known for its role in high-level cadre management, initiated a program in late 2008 called the “Thousand Talents Program.” Thus far the program has attracted a number of Chinese expatriates with impeccable credentials from overseas.

Xiaodong Wang, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, who was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2004 at age 41, and Yigong Shi, a chair professor of structural biology at Princeton University, are two of the first recruits.

According to Shi, the program aims to “kill two birds with one stone” – not only raising the level of research, but more importantly, improving the academic environment in China. While the former is relatively easy, the latter will prove to be an extremely challenging task.

In recent years China has witnessed tremendous progress in scientific research, most notably in quantity. Measured by the number of papers included in the Science Citation Index, a bibliometric database published by Scientific Business of Thompson Reuters, in 2007 China ranked third in the world, after the United States and the United Kingdom. In the same year, China surpassed the United States as the No. 1 contributor of papers catalogued by the Engineering Index.

Although China still lags behind the world’s leaders in many areas of science and technology, notable achievements have been recorded in a number of emerging fields such as genomics and nanotechnology. In nanotechnology, for example, in terms of published papers, China is second only to the United States.

The progress can in a significant way be attributed to the Chinese who have returned from overseas study and research stints in the post-1978 open-door era of reform. They have brought back firsthand experience and information from the international research frontier and have kept close contact with their former mentors, classmates and colleagues.

There is no doubt that many of the early returnees are not among the best and brightest of Chinese expatriates, most of whom have restrained themselves from moving back to China permanently. This is true especially for academics, for personal as well as institutional reasons. Therefore, the first-rate returnees recruited through the Thousand Talents Program are not just expected to be practitioners in science; they will be charged to nurture an environment conducive to high-quality work.

This will include changing Chinese society’s emphasis on “guanxi,” or personal relationships, to a focus on meritocracy; forming an “invisible college” in which scholars who share common paradigms can exchange information and ideas to advance scientific knowledge and their careers; instilling long-term vision into a research culture that gives preference to quick and instant results; and encouraging risk-taking and failure tolerance.

The Thousand Talents Program recruits also have to fight the rampant misconduct in Chinese science. Plagiarism, falsification and fabrication of data, exaggeration of research findings, conflicts of interest in research, and the promotion of commercial products of questionable quality – some of which have involved leading academics – have tarnished the image of the Chinese scientific community.

At the end of the day, the success of the party-run program will not be measured merely by how many top-notch talents are attracted. Rather, its legacy, if there is one, should be the substantial perfection of the research culture in which every scientist, including recruits themselves, can perform well and demonstrate their value.

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(Cong Cao is a senior research associate with the Neil D. Levin Graduate Institute of International Relations and Commerce at the State University of New York. He received his PhD in sociology from Columbia University in 1997 and has worked at the University of Oregon and the National University of Singapore. Dr. Cao is interested in the social studies of science and technology with a focus on China. ©Copyright Cong Cao.)