Forty years ago, China sent huge cohorts of students off to study abroad.
Then, Chinese paramount leader Deng Xiaoping argued this wasn’t a flight for human capital, but rather an investment that would eventually return to make the country more educated and innovative.
“We need to send tens of thousands,” Deng said. “This is one of the key ways of…improving our level of scientific education.”
A recent working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research proved the politician right. China now accounts for about 23 percent of scientific publications in the international journals indexed by Scopus, adjusted for the Chinese share of addresses or names on publications. This means the nation is now the “largest contributor to global science”. READ MORE...
