Sick science of China

Inside the shadowy world of China's fake science research black market
By Natasha Mitchell 

There is a growing black market in China trading in fake scientific research papers.

When the cancer research journal Tumor Biology retracted 107 papers last year, a dubious new world record was set — and the world's scientists took notice.
Largely because all 107 papers were penned by Chinese "researchers".
"The fact they were all from one journal was eye opening", Ivan Oransky, who co-founded Retraction Watch, a publication that investigates scientific misconduct, said.
"The journal rocketed to the top of the charts in terms of how many retractions it had. It also lost a lot of credibility … and ended up being dumped by its publisher."
But it wasn't a first for the journal, now published by Sage. 

In 2016, it retracted 25 papers because of similar doubts over their integrity.
The incidents expose a deeper, darker problem for science globally.
A growing black market is peddling fake research papers, fake peer reviews, and even entirely fake research results to anyone who will pay.
"Organised crime in certain countries has realised there is a lot of money to be made here," medically-trained Dr Oransky said.
"This really is a shadowy world."

China's quest for a fake Nobel Prize
Under Xi Jinping, China has ambitions to become a global leader in science and technology and is making big investments in that effort.
A decade ago, the country launched the Thousand Talents Program to attract world-class scientists to China, setting its sights on winning Nobel Prizes.
"The biggest telescopes in the world now are being built in China," David Cyranoski, a Shanghai-based correspondent with Nature, said.

"Quantum computing, gene editing ... the future of artificial intelligence is something that they're very keen on.
"They want to be comprehensive, from basic to applied."
The pressure on Chinese scientists to publish their work in prestigious, English-language journals is now immense.
This has created new opportunities for China's thriving black market.
Companies offering standard editing and translation services to scientists have, in some cases, become a source of serious fraud.
"They have these fake article mills that pump out papers on order," Mr Cyranoski said.
"People can ask them to produce a paper of a certain kind, and they will produce the figures, the data, everything, and give it to you.
"You see this kind of very large-scale fraud going on in China."
Professor Cong Cao, a scholar in innovation studies at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China, said the market for these kind of services is large.
"In China, for a scientist to be promoted, they have to have a certain number of papers," he said.
Chinese graduate students and medical clinicians now also face the same strict requirements.
Some universities also pay huge cash rewards — over $US40,000 — if a scientist succeeds in publishing in a high-profile journal like Science or Nature.
Many see these financial incentives as part of the problem, especially in a country where average academic salaries are very low.
"The incentives are all misaligned," Dr Oransky said.
Cao said the aim was to encourage scientists to be innovative.
"[But] there are some unintended consequences of this kind of policy," he said.

A growing marketplace for fake science
In China's shadowy scientific marketplace, scientists can even pay to have their name included on scientific papers they didn't work on.
"A company will sell authorship and say, 'if you want to be the first author or the corresponding author you have to pay this much, and if you're going to be somewhere in the middle you can pay this much'," Mr Cyranoski said.
The order in which authors' names appear on a scientific paper reflects their role in the research — and can have a significant impact on a scientist's career progression and status.
When a scientific journal retracts a paper it's a sign that something is wrong with the study.
"It's a statement by the journal that this result, this finding, this conclusion is not reliable anymore. Do not rely on this," Dr Oransky said.
Not all retractions point to scientific misconduct. 

Sometimes a scientist might discover an unintended mistake in their own work and ask to have the paper pulled from publication.
This is considered good practice, because it prevents other scientists wasting time with the study's results or being led down rabbit holes in their own research.
But retractions are on the rise, and Dr Oransky says around two thirds of cases point to something more nefarious.
"Either falsification, which means you made things look better than they were; fabrication, which means you made it up; or plagiarism."

Fake peer reviewers
Science is driven by peer review — a process via which research is critiqued by peers in a related field, before it is published in a scientific journal.

Journal editors rely on peer review to help them interrogate the veracity and accuracy of research.
But peer review is now facing its own integrity crisis.
More than 600 papers have been retracted since 2012 for fake peer review, according to Dr Oransky.
"Arguably many more than that," he said.
"I think we're being naive and trusting the process too much. It's a human endeavour, it's only one filter.
"But with fake peer review, it's actually a whole other level of malfeasance."
The papers retracted by Tumor Biology were suspected to have exploited fake peer reviews.
This is when a scientist, or a company representing them, submits a paper to a journal and recommends to the journal editor possible reviewers they think are qualified to assess the work.
But the email addresses they provide for those reviewers are fake.
"The addresses take them back to the company or to the individual who is trying to publish the paper," Mr Cyranoski said.
"And, of course, then they just give the paper rave reviews."
Dr Oransky and his colleagues at Retraction Watch have managed to speak to scientists who employ this deceit. 

One was a South Korean scientist.
"He ended up having to retract 28 papers. And he blamed it on the people that he had hoodwinked.
"He actually said, 'well, if those editors have been paying attention, they would have seen the problem'."
Fake peer reviews do suggest a gross failure by journal editorial teams to source their own independent and trusted reviewers, but even prestigious publications have fallen prey to such scams.
"Science really prides itself on self-correction," Dr Oransky said.
"It is important for public trust to know that when something is published we have reason to believe that it represents reality as best as a scientist can.
"A lot of this research is funded by our tax dollars ... and it is in the service of humanity."

The Chinese Government knows it has a serious problem.

"It's a challenge for the international scientific community to figure out whether a piece of research coming out of China is genuine or fake," Professor Cao said.
"That kind of reputational damage to Chinese science is huge. It's an image issue.
"It also endangers international collaboration between Chinese scientists and their peers outside of China."
In May, China announced a suite of reforms designed to crack down on scientific misconduct.
Scientists who have committed misconduct may end up on a lifelong blacklist and lose access to all future research funding.
China's Ministry of Science and Technology will now manage investigations into scientific misconduct. 

This is a departure from other countries where individual institutions are often in charge, despite implicit conflicts of interest.
How punitive Chinese authorities could get remains to be seen.
"The party can rule by fear. It's a dictatorship," Dr Oransky said.
"We haven't seen any cases prosecuted yet, but it's very clear that China's Government understands that the world is always going to be looking at what they're doing."

Sticks and carrots
Dr Oransky argues that preventing scientific misconduct needs both sticks and carrots.
"The Chinese Government has created a lot of sticks. The question is, will they and others create the carrots that actually encourages good behaviour?"
These include strategies that promote openness and transparency in science, he argues, like data sharing and encouraging scientists to check each other's work.
But Dr Oransky and colleagues are also calling for better peer review after research is published.
"We should reward people who come forward about problems in other people's work, not in a punitive way, but actually looking at it and saying, 'hey, that's a problem, we should do something about it', and give people the chance to correct the record," he said.
"We are not seeing enough of that now.
"If you just scare the bejeezus out of everyone and say 'don't do this', basic psychology tells you that isn't going to solve the problem."
The editor of Tumor Biology did not respond to Science Friction's interview request.

Religious suppression creates ‘black market’ for believers in China

“Security forces across the country detain, torture, or kill believers from various faiths on a daily basis.” -- Freedom House

By NATHAN VANDERKLIPPE

China's ongoing destruction of churches and removal of crosses from church buildings. 

BEIJING — Beijing’s tightening grasp on religion has “created an enormous black market” for the fast-growing ranks of Chinese believers.
Under Xi Jinping, followers of many faiths have been pushed “to operate outside the law and to view the regime as unreasonable, unjust, or illegitimate,” says The Battle for China’s Spirit, a lengthy report released this week by Freedom House, a Washington-based NGO that advocates for civil liberties.
The report documents Christians barred from gathering for Christmas, Muslims jailed for praying outdoors and Tibetan Buddhists forced into “patriotic re-education.”
“Chinese officials have banned holiday celebrations, desecrated places of worship, and employed lethal violence,” the report finds. 

“Security forces across the country detain, torture, or kill believers from various faiths on a daily basis.”
In the last two weeks alone, authorities have required the installation of GPS monitoring devices on private cars in one prefecture of China’s heavily-Muslim western Xinjiang region, and then marshalled a huge display of military force in the capital, Urumqi, where more than 10,000 armed troops gathered for what local media called an anti-terror rally.
A recent report by United Nations human rights investigators, meanwhile, called attention to “severe restrictions of religious freedom” in Tibet, noting mass evictions from two monasteries, the demolition of monastic homes and mining at a holy mountain. 

The Freedom House report documents many other measures in China.
“Extensive surveillance, ‘re-education’ campaigns, and restrictions on private worship affect the spiritual lives of millions of people,” the report finds. 

“And increasingly, economic reprisals and exploitation have become a source of tension and a catalyst for protests,” the report finds.
Religion has, from the time of Mao Zedong, existed uncomfortably in a state run by the formally atheist Communist Party. 

But for much of the past two decades, authorities have taken a more lenient approach to religious observance, allowing underground places of worship into the open. 

Religion has flourished, with hundreds of millions of people flocking to beliefs of all stripes.
Some of this has been encouraged under Xi, too, whose administration favours Buddhism and Taoism, religions the Communist Party sees as domestic belief systems that can help to instill a common sense of moral value and purpose.
At the same time, however, China has embarked on a broad effort to squeeze out foreign influence and civil society in order to reassert the authority of the state.
In a landmark speech on religion last spring, Xi urged monks, imams and pastors to “interpret religious doctrines in a way that is conducive to modern China’s progress,” and called on cadres to “guide and educate the religious circle and their followers with the socialist core values.”
Communist Party leadership sees “religion as a kind of existential threat to the party state. It creates a counterideology that can mobilize people quite quickly and quite passionately to oppose the party state,” said James Leibold, an expert on Chinese ethnic policy at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.

Draconian repression of some beliefs, like Falun Gong, is long-standing. 

But under Xi, religious suppression has grown broader and deeper, Prof. Leibold said. 

“As a result, we’re seeing increasing controls across the board, from Catholicism to Tibetan Buddhism to Islam.”
China’s religious policies are not uniform, and deeply entangled with its treatment of ethnic groups.
In Tibetan areas, for example, Buddhist monks face heavy restrictions on travel and religious instruction. 

Elsewhere in China, officials are erecting new Buddhist and Taoist temples. 

The treatment of Islam, too, is not uniform across the country. 

Muslims in Xinjiang live under restrictive rules on dress, facial hair and observance of important religious occasions, such as Ramadan. 

Hui Muslims observe their faith with more freedom, although Hui, too, are facing more severe treatment, Prof. Leibold said.
The treatment of Tibetans and Uighurs offers a glimpse of the downward spirals that can emerge under harsh policies.
In Xinjiang, what’s needed is de-escalation, “some kind of a peace process like the British had in Northern Ireland,” said Ian Johnson, a Pulitzer-winning journalist and author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao. 

But that’s difficult to do when strict government policies have largely eliminated moderate voices and civil society.
“It’s a tough hole for them to climb out of there,” he said. 

“And this is going to be the largest conflict area for religion and state in China going forward.”
Elsewhere, China has so far been more lenient. 

Though hundreds of crosses were removed from churches in Zhejiang province, such action has barely been seen elsewhere – and virtually all Zhejiang churches remain open.
There are signs, however, that China is preparing for stronger action. 

Draft rules released last fall threaten fines for those who rent space to unregistered religious organizations, and new restrictions on contact and financial transactions between Chinese believers and foreign groups.

Mr. Johnson warned that such a strategy could “create a lot more problems for them than they think. They’re essentially picking a fight with people who are not likely to back down.” 

Under Mao, he noted, the Christian church roughly quadrupled in size despite the imprisonment and death of pastors and priests.

The Chinese church enjoys far more freedom today than it did then. 

Still, some religious leaders, worried about the changes they are seeing, have begun to discuss how they might adapt. 

Authorities have refused to allow the commercial publication of Christian books and told philosophy professors to expunge discussion of Christianity, which poses problems to the teaching of Western thinking influenced by the church.
“We do see efforts to limit the influence of religion among youth, and in educational situations,” said Brent Fulton, president of ChinaSource, a resource site for Christianity in China, and author of several books on the Chinese church. 

“There have been Christians who have been questioned extensively about their relationships with foreigners.”
In response, some pastors have talked about rethinking their religious organizations, which might include splitting large congregations into smaller family churches. 

Others see no reason to change, Mr. Fulton said.
“They would say, ‘We’re used to having our phones tapped. We’re used to having our meetings monitored. We’re used to being called in to drink tea with the police. So that’s normal. We just deal with that and we continue to do what we do.’”