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China overtakes the US in scientific research output

Between 2018 and 2020 China published 23.4% of the world’s scientific papers, eclipsing the US

China has overtaken the US as the world leader in both scientific research output and “high impact” studies, according to a report published by Japan’s science and technology ministry.

The report, which was published by Japan’s National Institute of Science and Technology Policy (NISTP) on Tuesday, found that China now publishes the highest number of scientific research papers yearly, followed by the US and Germany.

The figures were based on yearly averages between 2018 and 2020, and drawn from data compiled by the analytics firm Clarivate.

The Japanese NISTP report also found that Chinese research comprised 27.2% of the world’s top 1% most frequently cited papers. The number of citations a research paper receives is a commonly used metric in academia. The more times a study is cited in subsequent papers by other researchers, the greater its “citation impact”.

The US accounted for 24.9% of the top 1% most highly cited research studies, while UK research was third at 5.5%.

China published a yearly average of 407,181 scientific papers, pulling ahead of the US’s 293,434 journal articles and accounting for 23.4% of the world’s research output, the report found.

China accounted for a high proportion of research into materials science, chemistry, engineering and mathematics, while US researchers were more prolific in research into clinical medicine, basic life sciences and physics.

The report was published on the day US president Joe Biden signed the Chips and Science Act, legislation that would authorise $200bn in research funding over 10 years to make US scientific research more competitive with China.

The Chinese embassy in the US said last month that China was “firmly opposed” to the bill which it said was “entrenched in [a] cold war and zero-sum game mentality”.

The “high impact” finding is in keeping with research published earlier this year , which found that China overtook the US in 2019 in the top 1% measure, and passed the European Union in 2015.

Papers that receive more citations than 99% of research are “works that are seen as being in the class of Nobel prize winners, the very leading edge of science”, study co-author Dr Caroline Wagner said at the time. “The US has tended to rank China’s work as lower quality. This appears to have changed.”

The US still spends more on research and development in the corporate and university sectors than any other country, the report also found. “China has the largest number of researchers in the corporate and university sectors among major countries. In the corporate sector, the United States and China are on par with each other, and both are showing rapid growth.”

“China is one of the top countries in the world in terms of both the quantity and quality of scientific papers,” Shinichi Kuroki of the Japan Science and Technology Agency told Nikkei Asia . “In order to become the true global leader, it will need to continue producing internationally recognised research,” he said.

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China now publishes more high-quality science than any other nation. Should the US be worried?

by Caroline Wagner, The Conversation

By at least one measure, China now leads the world in producing high-quality science . My research shows that Chinese scholars now publish a larger fraction of the top 1% most cited scientific papers globally than scientists from any other country.

I am a policy expert and analyst who studies how governmental investment in science, technology and innovation improves social welfare. While a country's scientific prowess is somewhat difficult to quantify, I'd argue that the amount of money spent on scientific research , the number of scholarly papers published and the quality of those papers are good stand-in measures.

China is not the only nation to drastically improve its science capacity in recent years, but China's rise has been particularly dramatic. This has left U.S. policy experts and government officials worried about how China's scientific supremacy will shift the global balance of power . China's recent ascendancy results from years of governmental policy aiming to be tops in science and technology. The country has taken explicit steps to get where it is today, and the U.S. now has a choice to make about how to respond to a scientifically competitive China.

Growth across decades

In 1977, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping introduced the Four Modernizations , one of which was strengthening China's science sector and technological progress. As recently as 2000, the U.S. produced many times the number of scientific papers as China annually. However, over the past three decades or so, China has invested funds to grow domestic research capabilities, to send students and researchers abroad to study, and to encourage Chinese businesses to shift to manufacturing high-tech products.

Since 2000, China has sent an estimated 5.2 million students and scholars to study abroad . The majority of them studied science or engineering. Many of these students remained where they studied, but an increasing number return to China to work in well-resourced laboratories and high-tech companies.

Today, China is second only to the U.S. in how much it spends on science and technology . Chinese universities now produce the largest number of engineering Ph.D.s in the world, and the quality of Chinese universities has dramatically improved in recent years .

Producing more and better science

Thanks to all this investment and a growing, capable workforce, China's scientific output—as measured by the number of total published papers—has increased steadily over the years. In 2017, Chinese scholars published more scientific papers than U.S. researchers for the first time.

Quantity does not necessarily mean quality though. For many years, researchers in the West wrote off Chinese research as low quality and often as simply imitating research from the U.S. and Europe . During the 2000s and 2010s, much of the work coming from China did not receive significant attention from the global scientific community.

But as China has continued to invest in science, I began to wonder whether the explosion in the quantity of research was accompanied by improving quality.

To quantify China's scientific strength, my colleagues and I looked at citations. A citation is when an academic paper is referenced—or cited—by another paper. We considered that the more times a paper has been cited, the higher quality and more influential the work. Given that logic, the top 1% most cited papers should represent the upper echelon of high-quality science.

My colleagues and I counted how many papers published by a country were in the top 1% of science as measured by the number of citations in various disciplines. Going year by year from 2015 to 2019, we then compared different countries. We were surprised to find that in 2019, Chinese authors published a greater percentage of the most influential papers , with China claiming 8,422 articles in the top category, while the U.S had 7,959 and the European Union had 6,074. In just one recent example, we found that in 2022, Chinese researchers published three times as many papers on artificial intelligence as U.S. researchers; in the top 1% most cited AI research, Chinese papers outnumbered U.S. papers by a 2-to-1 ratio. Similar patterns can be seen with China leading in the top 1% most cited papers in nanoscience, chemistry and transportation.

Our research also found that Chinese research was surprisingly novel and creative —and not simply copying western researchers. To measure this, we looked at the mix of disciplines referenced in scientific papers . The more diverse and varied the referenced research was in a single paper, the more interdisciplinary and novel we considered the work. We found Chinese research to be as innovative as other top performing countries.

Taken together, these measures suggest that China is now no longer an imitator nor producer of only low-quality science. China is now a scientific power on par with the U.S. and Europe, both in quantity and in quality.

Fear or collaboration?

Scientific capability is intricately tied to both military and economic power. Because of this relationship, many in the U.S.—from politicians to policy experts —have expressed concern that China's scientific rise is a threat to the U.S., and the government has taken steps to slow China's growth. The recent Chips and Science Act of 2022 explicitly limits cooperation with China in some areas of research and manufacturing. In October 2022, the Biden administration put restrictions in place to limit China's access to key technologies with military applications .

A number of scholars, including me, see these fears and policy responses as rooted in a nationalistic view that doesn't wholly map onto the global endeavor of science.

Academic research in the modern world is in large part driven by the exchange of ideas and information. The results are published in publicly available journals that anyone can read. Science is also becoming ever more international and collaborative , with researchers around the world depending on each other to push their fields forward. Recent collaborative research on cancer , COVID-19 and agriculture are just a few of many examples. My own work has also shown that when researchers from China and the U.S. collaborate, they produce higher quality science than either one alone.

China has joined the ranks of top scientific and technological nations, and some of the concerns over shifts of power are reasonable in my view. But the U.S. can also benefit from China's scientific rise. With many global issues facing the planet—like climate change , to name just one—there may be wisdom in looking at this new situation as not only a threat, but also an opportunity.

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Timely research papers about COVID-19 in China

Yu-tao xiang.

a Unit of Psychiatry, Institute of Translational Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Macau 999078, Macau SAR, China

c Center for Cognition and Brain Sciences, University of Macau, Macao SAR, China

Qinge Zhang

d The National Clinical Research Center for Mental Disorders & Beijing Key Laboratory of Mental Disorders, Beijing Anding Hospital & the Advanced Innovation Center for Human Brain Protection, Capital Medical University, Beijing, China

Wen-Wang Rao

Liang-nan zeng.

e Department of Neurosurgery, The Affiliated Hospital of Southwest Medical University, Sichuan, China

Grace K I Lok

f Kiang Wu Nursing College of Macau, Macau SAR, China

Ines H I Chow

Teris cheung.

g School of Nursing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China

Brian J Hall

b Global and Community Mental Health Research Group, Department of Psychology, University of Macau 999078, Macau SAR, China

h Health, Behavior, and Society, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, USA

The 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19; previously known as 2019-nCoV) outbreak that originated from Wuhan, Hubei province, China, at the end of 2019 was declared a public health emergency of international concern on Jan 30, 2020, by WHO. 1 As a newly appearing infectious disease, COVID-19 garnered great research interest. According to a recent report in Nature , 2 at least 54 academic papers about COVID-19 were published in English-language journals by Jan 30, 2020.

We searched major Chinese databases including the China National Knowledge Internet and WANFANG Data. As of Feb 3, 2020, just 23 Chinese-language papers on COVID-19 were published. These publications mainly focused on epidemiology, clinical features of COVID-19, and the structure or genetics of severe acute respiratory syndrome corona virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).

Many of the research papers about COVID-19 in international journals were written by researchers in China, which led to great concerns because these findings cannot directly benefit frontline health professionals and policy makers because of the language barrier. It is critical for health science to be published in English-language journals to facilitate communication and enable global coordination and timely epidemic response. However, some media were concerned that Chinese researchers within academic organisations concentrated on publishing papers in prestigious international journals but paid inadequate attention to epidemic prevention of COVID-19 and neglected to disseminate their findings within Chinese-language journals. 3 , 4 A recent statement by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China also encouraged researchers to focus their efforts on epidemic prevention and to publish their results in Chinese. 5

The emphasis on publishing clinical research in English helps to facilitate knowledge exchange between Chinese scientists and the rest of the world. We hope the research community will make efforts to disseminate all findings relevant to the outbreak of COVID-19 in Chinese in addition to English publishing outlets.

For example, clinical research papers about COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 in any Lancet journal were translated into Chinese, and these translated Articles were provided rapidly to the public in China free of charge.

Broad dissemination in both Chinese and English will accomplish the goals of communicating timely and crucial findings to the international scientific community, while also disseminating this information to health-care workers on the frontline who need to understand the epidemiological and clinical features of COVID-19. This strategy will improve effective control strategies to ultimately contain the virus and protect the health of the public.

Acknowledgments

We declare no competing interests. Y-TX, WL, QZ, YJ, W-WR, and L-NZ contributed equally to this Correspondence.

China’s universities just grabbed 6 of the top 10 spots in one worldwide science ranking – without changing a thing

Professor of Public Affairs, The Ohio State University

Disclosure statement

Caroline Wagner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

The Ohio State University provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation US.

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University leaders pay close attention to comparative rankings such as those offered by Times Higher Education , ShanghaiRanking Consultancy and others . Rankings influence student matriculation numbers, attract talented faculty and justify donations from wealthy donors . University leaders rail against them , and some schools “withdraw” from them , but rankings are influential.

A radical shift in the data underlying rankings is about to upend the rankings world – largely in favor of China’s position.

For instance, in early 2024, the Leiden University Center for Science and Technology Studies CWTS group issued new university rankings that add open-data sources to the traditional curated list of elite journals that has been the standard. The results show a world turned upside down for university rankings.

Where once the list of universities with the highest scientific impact would have been dominated by U.S. and U.K. schools including Cambridge, Stanford, Harvard and MIT, the new top 10 list of universities with high scientific impact includes six universities from China.

What does this transformation mean for understanding scholarly excellence? I study the global research system and its contribution to social welfare. China’s swift progress in science and technology , propelled by investments in research and university strength, has alarmed the United States and other nations . Concerns are mounting that the U.S. may be losing its competitive advantage to an assertive rival, with potential implications for national security, economic standing and global influence. These new rankings will likely raise even more alarm.

Broader range of more sources

The rankings programs draw heavily upon quantitative assessments called “indicators.” A glance at the influential ShanghaiRanking criteria shows the inputs to its assessment include “papers indexed in major citation indices.” The popular indices draw from a highly curated set of scholarly journals such as Cell , The Lancet and Chemical Reviews . The most reputed index collecting information on these and other journals is the Web of Science ’s Science Citation Index, or SCI, a product of careful standardization and data enrichment by Clarivate .

SCI represents only a fraction of the work published worldwide , though. Among other critiques , many people decry the SCI’s exclusivity and its perceived Western bias .

But careful curation makes it the gold standard of academic indexing and one that journals and authors aspire to join. Its value is in its replicability: It is possible to dip into it multiple times using different search strategies and produce comparable results.

Reliance on curated databases is about to end with the introduction of rankings based on open data like that collected by OpenAlex . OpenAlex claims to include over 100,000 journals – of highly varying quality and editorial practices – compared with SCI’s 9,200. All data in OpenAlex has been released into the public domain with the laudable goal of making research freely available to all. The downside is that this wider net sweeps in predatory journals that exploit researchers and undermine the quality and integrity of scholarly communication.

Reflecting China’s research productivity

The volume of scholarly articles represented in the open databases has a mighty influence on China’s position in the open-source rankings. Chinese scholars produce a vast body of written work, some in English, some in Chinese; estimates of percentage shares for language range widely, but hover around 50-50. As China has invested in education and grown its science and engineering capacity, many more people turn out scholarly articles.

From a very small number in the 1980s, China had 2.2 million scientists and engineers by 2023, based on UNESCO data. China’s scholarly output of scientific and engineering articles shows a very rapid rise since the 1990s, with growth outpacing all other nations. Quality has lagged quantity , but China is outproducing the United States in the total number of scientific publications in the Web of Science, by my count – a shift in leadership not seen since the U.S. overtook the U.K. in 1948.

Although the numbers are dated, when I counted China’s scholarly publishing in 2010 , my colleague and I estimated that between 2000 and 2009, China published around 1 million scientific papers that were not captured by the Web of Science. That means they didn’t “count” toward traditional rankings. These publications are counted in the new open databases. Many of the papers included in open-source or open-access journals will not be considered of high quality; nonetheless, they become part of the written record.

Open-access publishing services have grown rapidly and offer fast publication times, but there are questions about the quality of their journals. Open publishing services such as MDPI and Frontiers have an outsized number of Chinese contributors compared to those from other countries.

The open-access services often include content from potential paper mills , businesses manufacturing what look like scholarly manuscripts for sale. Despite concerns about the reputation and editorial practices of these publishers and editors, there’s little oversight. These services are flooding the publishing world with vast numbers of lower-quality articles.

Chinese researchers and their sponsoring institutions put a huge premium on publishing in international journals, even those hosted by questionable publishers. Citation stacking practices – when authors cite the works of co-nationals to raise their citation profiles – skew counts to enhance China’s performance.

China is attempting to address malign practices. To its credit, China’s government recently announced the retraction of 17,000 articles with a Chinese author or co-author. Efforts are underway to enhance quality. Governmental payments to researchers for articles in ranked journals are being sunsetted .

Despite the quality questions, the numbers alone will push China up the rankings lists. This rapid shift will enhance China’s position relative to the rest of the world. In itself, the rise does not reflect a change in quality, status or output, but it will continue to stoke the fires of those alarmed by the rise of China in world science , technology and innovation circles, and perhaps put rankings further into question.

The Conversation has updated the headline and the table to correctly report the CWTS Leiden Ranking Open Edition 2023 numbers.

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The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

In the exploration of the efficacy of agricultural subsidy policies, agricultural insurance, as a key element of this policy system, has garnered widespread attention for its potential impact on consumer food safety. This paper delves into the influence of agricultural insurance on the safety of food consumed by individuals, based on provincial panel data in China from 2011 to 2021. The findings indicate that agricultural insurance significantly reduces the incidence of foodborne disease and enhances food safety. Mediating effect tests reveal that agricultural insurance effectively boosts food safety through two key pathways: promoting innovation in agricultural technology and reducing environmental pollution. Moreover, the analysis of moderating effects highlights that increased consumer confidence positively enhances the impact of agricultural insurance. Heterogeneity tests further show that in the provinces with higher levels of agricultural development and stronger government support for agriculture, the role of agricultural insurance in improving food safety is more pronounced. This research not only empirically verifies the effectiveness of agricultural insurance in enhancing food safety but also provides robust theoretical support and practical guidance for the precise formulation and effective implementation of agricultural subsidy policies, particularly agricultural insurance policies, offering significant reference value for policy-makers.

Keywords: Agricultural subsidies, Agricultural insurance, Food Safety, Agricultural Technological Innovation, Environmental Pollution, Consumer confidence

Received: 27 Feb 2024; Accepted: 15 Apr 2024.

Copyright: © 2024 Ruan, Yin and Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Mx. Peiheng Ruan, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, Hubei Province, China

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China’s Economy, Propelled by Its Factories, Grew More Than Expected

China’s big bet on manufacturing helped to counteract its housing slowdown in the first three months of the year, but other countries are worried about a flood of Chinese goods.

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By Keith Bradsher and Alexandra Stevenson

Reporting from Beijing

The Chinese economy grew more than expected in the first three months of the year, new data shows, as China built more factories and exported huge amounts of goods to counter a severe real estate crisis and sluggish spending at home.

To stimulate growth, China, the world’s second-largest economy, turned to a familiar tactic : investing heavily in its manufacturing sector, including a binge of new factories that have helped to propel sales around the world of solar panels, electric cars and other products.

But China’s bet on exports has worried many foreign countries and companies. They fear that a flood of Chinese shipments to distant markets may undermine their manufacturing industries and lead to layoffs.

On Tuesday, China’s National Bureau of Statistics said the economy grew 1.6 percent in the first quarter over the previous three months. When projected out for the entire year, the first-quarter data indicates that China’s economy was growing at an annual rate of about 6.6 percent.

“The national economy made a good start,” said Sheng Laiyun, deputy director of the statistics bureau, while cautioning that “the foundation for stable and sound economic growth is not solid yet.”

Retail sales increased at a modest pace of 4.7 percent compared with the first three months of last year, and were particularly weak in March.

China needs robust consumer spending to bring down persistently high youth unemployment and to help companies and households cope with very high levels of debt.

Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York warned last month that China is experiencing a “sugar high” of building factories with heavy bank lending.

For the year, China has set a growth target of about 5 percent , a goal that many economists had viewed as ambitious, although some have recently upgraded their forecasts. Last year, China’s economy grew 5.2 percent .

Output was 5.3 percent higher in the first three months of this year than during the same period last year, the statistics bureau announced on Tuesday, exceeding economists’ forecasts.

A breakneck pace of factory investments, up 9.9 percent from a year ago, was central to China’s growth. Strong exports early this year also helped.

The value of exports rose 7 percent in dollar terms in January and February from a year earlier, and 10 percent when measured in China’s currency, the renminbi. But the actual contribution from exports to the country’s economy was considerably greater, as falling prices obscured the full extent of China’s export gains.

Guo Tingting, a vice minister of commerce, said at a news conference last month that the physical volume of exports had climbed 20 percent in January and February over last year. Exports faltered somewhat in March, however.

With street festivals and other activities, the government has encouraged families to spend more even as many in China have stepped up their savings to offset a recent nosedive in the value of their apartments.

Domestic tourism spending and box office ticket sales both rose during Lunar New Year in February, easily exceeding levels before the Covid-19 pandemic. Smartphone sales have also climbed — although not for Apple — as Chinese buyers increasingly choose local brands.

Broadly falling prices, a phenomenon that can become entrenched in deflation, continue to be a problem, particularly for exports and at the wholesale level. Chinese companies have been vying to cut export prices and win a bigger share of global markets, even when this means incurring heavy losses.

During top-level meetings earlier this month with Chinese officials, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen warned that flooding markets with exports would disrupt supply chains and threaten industries and jobs. Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany expressed similar concerns while on a visit to China, though he also cautioned against protectionism in Europe.

China is, meanwhile, experiencing a deep slump in housing construction and apartment prices. The construction of homes — and the production of steel, glass and other materials for them — was the biggest driver of growth in China for many years.

But sales of new apartments have fallen fairly steadily since the start of 2022. Few construction projects are now being started, as dozens of insolvent or nearly insolvent developers struggle to finish dwellings they have promised to buyers. Investment in real estate projects plunged 9.5 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier.

Chinese officials blame weaknesses in the Chinese economy partly on high overseas interest rates engineered by the Federal Reserve to combat inflation in the United States. Those rates have made it more attractive for Chinese families and companies to move money out of China, where interest rates are low, to foreign countries where rates are higher.

“The negative impact of the high interest rate environment on the economy is continuing,” said Liu Haoling, the president of the China Investment Corporation, which is China’s sovereign wealth fund. He spoke in late March at the China Development Forum, a meeting in Beijing of policymakers and executives.

China’s manufacturing juggernaut, underpinned by years of policy directives and financial support from Beijing to local governments and companies, has made the country’s goods among the world’s cheapest. The U.S. government disclosed last week that average prices for imports from China were down 2.6 percent in March from a year earlier.

China has required companies to invest more in research and development, in the hope that a wave of innovation will spur economic development.

The country is also requiring factories to pursue greater automation. “By 2025, we will have realized a new type of industrialization,” Jin Zhuanglong, the minister of industry and information technology, said at the China Development Forum.

Many Chinese households have borrowed heavily to invest in apartments and are responding to falling home prices by cutting back their spending. That makes China more dependent on exports to sell its fast-rising industrial output.

“Chinese companies, across a wide range of sectors, now produce far more than domestic consumption can absorb,” the Rhodium Group, a consulting firm, said in a report in late March.

People’s wariness about spending is something Li Zhenya sees daily. He manages Izakaya Jiuben, a Japanese restaurant in the Beijing neighborhood of Wangjing, once home to some of China’s biggest tech companies.

A few years ago, workers lined up outside the restaurant, pouring out of nearby offices to spend their hard-earned money in short breaks between long shifts. These days, many of the restaurant’s seats are empty at lunch and dinner.

“People’s desire to consume is not that high now,” Mr. Li at Jiuben said. The restaurant, he said, pulls in about $2,156 a day in revenue, about half its sales just a few years ago.

“I’m losing money running the restaurant,” he said.

Jiuben is on the fourth floor of Pano City Mall, where restaurants advertising Korean, Japanese and Chinese food operate next to empty storefronts. Some places look abandoned: The lights are off but a pile of takeaway boxes sits by the till, lamps still hanging or chairs and tables intact.

Centered around three curved, pebble-like buildings designed by Zaha Hadid, the neighborhood of Wangjing was once a hub of activity for the capital’s busiest workers. Restaurants and shops benefited from the presence of companies like Alibaba, JD.com and Meituan.

“The lights used to be on when nighttime fell, but now at least half of the lights are off,” Mr. Li said.

A government crackdown starting in 2020 pushed companies to cull jobs. Others left Wangjing. Covid-19 restrictions that froze the neighborhood for weeks at a time made it hard for small businesses in Wangjing to recover.

“The epidemic led to a cautiousness in consumption,” said Kou Yueyuan, the owner of Smoon Bakery, down the street from Pano City. “Customers are obviously quite price-sensitive,” Ms. Kou said.

Ms. Kou started her business more than eight years ago, selling baked goods like bitter melon bagels and ube mochi twists. Now she places less emphasis on developing new baked goods with different flavors. Instead, she focuses on keeping costs low so that the bakery can offer cheaper prices.

Li You contributed research.

Keith Bradsher is the Beijing bureau chief for The Times. He previously served as bureau chief in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Detroit and as a Washington correspondent. He has lived and reported in mainland China through the pandemic. More about Keith Bradsher

Alexandra Stevenson is the Shanghai bureau chief for The Times, reporting on China’s economy and society. More about Alexandra Stevenson

Trend analysis of machine learning application in the study of soil and sediment contamination

• Published: 15 April 2024

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• M. R. Sabour   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3606-3762 1 ,
• P. Sakhaie 1 &
• F. Sharifian 1  

In recent decades, the application of machine learning methods as a powerful tool supporting accurate and representative models has become common in various fields, including pollution assessment in soil and sediment. Widespread contamination in these areas, causing severe impacts on ecosystems and living beings, has resulted in the development of numerous models based on machine learning techniques. These models have been used to detect, trace, and predict the extent of contamination levels and create specified management plans. This paper provides a bibliometric analysis of the evaluation of soil and sediment contamination and treatment strategies using machine learning studies from 1986 to 2022. Meaningful analysis has been done on research trends, publishing activity of journals, most active countries, subject areas, top authors, and author keywords. The research showed that China with the highest number of publications has made extensive investments and has put a special focus on this area. The most studied contaminants are heavy metals, followed by polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and persistent organic pollutants. The artificial neural network followed by cluster analysis and principal component analysis are the most widely used methods.

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Sabour, M.R., Sakhaie, P. & Sharifian, F. Trend analysis of machine learning application in the study of soil and sediment contamination. Int. J. Environ. Sci. Technol. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13762-024-05575-y

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Far fewer young Americans now want to study in China. Both countries are trying to fix that

David Moser, an American and associate professor at Capital Normal University in Beijing, poses for a photo at the university, Friday, March 22, 2024 in Beijing, China. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students are at U.S. schools. Without these U.S. students, “in the next decade, we won’t be able to exercise savvy, knowledgeable diplomacy in China,” warned Moser, an American linguist who went to China in the 1980s and is now tasked with establishing a new master’s program for international students at Beijing Capital Normal University. (AP Photo/Dake Kang)

David Moser, an American and associate professor at Capital Normal University in Beijing, poses for a photo at a restaurant in Beijing, China, Friday, March 22, 2024. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students are at U.S. schools. Without these U.S. students, “in the next decade, we won’t be able to exercise savvy, knowledgeable diplomacy in China,” warned Moser, an American linguist who went to China in the 1980s and is now tasked with establishing a new master’s program for international students at Beijing Capital Normal University. (AP Photo/Dake Kang)

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he sees interest among fellow scholars wane even after China reopened.

Common concerns, he said, include restrictions on academic freedom and the risk of being stranded in China.

These days, only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of close to 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at U.S. schools.

Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see as diminishing economic opportunities and strained relations between Washington and Beijing.

Whatever the reason for the imbalance, U.S. officials and scholars bemoan the lost opportunities for young people to experience life in China and gain insight into a formidable American adversary.

And officials from both countries agree that more should be done to encourage the student exchanges, at a time when Beijing and Washington can hardly agree on anything else.

“I do not believe the environment is as hospitable for educational exchange as it was in the past, and I think both sides are going to need to take steps,” said Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell.

The U.S. has advised its. citizens to “reconsider travel” to China over concerns of arbitrary detentions and widened use of exit bans to bar Americans from leaving the country. Campbell said this has hindered the rebuilding of the exchanges and easing the advisory is now under “active consideration.”

For its part, Beijing is rebuilding programs for international students that were shuttered during the pandemic, and Chinese President Xi Jinping has invited tens of thousands of U.S. high school students to visit.

The situation was far different after President Barack Obama started the 100,000 Strong initiative in 2009 to drastically increase the number of U.S. students studying in China.

By 2012, there were as many as 24,583 U.S. students in China, according to data by the Chinese education ministry. The Open Doors reports by the Institute of International Education, which only track students enrolled in U.S. schools and studying in China for credit, show the number peaked at 14,887 in the 2011-12 school year. But 10 years later, the number was down to only 211.

In late 2023, the number of American students stood at 700, according to Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to China, who said this was far too few in a country of such importance to the United States.

“We need young Americans to learn Mandarin. We need young Americans to have an experience of China,” Burns said.

Without these U.S. students, “in the next decade, we won’t be able to exercise savvy, knowledgeable diplomacy in China,” warned David Moser, an American linguist who went to China in the 1980s and is now tasked with establishing a new master’s program for international students at Beijing Capital Normal University.

Moser recalled the years when American students found China fascinating and thought an education there could lead to an interesting career. But he said the days of bustling trade and money deals are gone, while American students and their parents are watching China and the United States move away from each other. “So people think investment in China as a career is a dumb idea,” Moser said.

After 2012, the number of American students in China dipped but held steady at more than 11,000 for several years, according to Open Doors, until the pandemic hit, when China closed its borders and kept most foreigners out. Programs for overseas students that took years to build were shuttered, and staff were let go, Moser said.

Amy Gadsden, executive director of China Initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, also attributed some of the declining interest to foreign businesses closing their offices in China. Beijing’s draconian governing style, laid bare by its response to the pandemic, also has given American students a pause, she said.

Garrett, who is on track to graduate this summer from Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, said he is ambivalent about working in China, citing the lack of access to information, restrictions on discussions of politically sensitive issues and China’s sweeping anti-spying law. He had lived in Hong Kong as a teenager and interned in mainland China, and said he is still interested in traveling to China, but not anytime soon.

Some American students remain committed to studying in China, said Andrew Mertha, director of the China Global Research Center at SAIS. “There are people who are interested in China for China’s sake,” he said. “I don’t think those numbers are affected at all.”

About 40 U.S. students are now studying at the Hopkins-Nanjing center in the eastern Chinese city, and the number is expected to go up in the fall to approach the pre-pandemic level of 50-60 students, said Adam Webb, the center’s American co-director.

Among them is Chris Hankin, 28, who said he believed time in China was irreplaceable because he could interact with ordinary people and travel to places outside the radar of international media. “As the relationship becomes more intense, it’s important to have that color, to have that granularity,” said Hankin, a master’s student of international relations with a focus on energy and the environment.

Jonathan Zhang, a Chinese American studying at the prestigious Schwarzman Scholars program at Tsinghua University in Beijing, said it was more important than ever to be in China at a time of tense relations. “It’s really hard to talk about China without being in China,” he said. “I think it’s truly a shame that so many people have never stepped foot in China.”

Zhang was met with concerns when he deferred an offer at a consulting firm to go Beijing. “They’re like, ‘oh, be safe,’ or like, ‘what do you mean, you’re going back to China?’” Zhang said. “I feel like the (Chinese) government is trying with an earnest effort, but I feel like a lot of this trust has been broken.”

Gadsden said U.S. universities need to do more to nudge students to consider China. “We need to be more intentional about creating the opportunities and about encouraging students to do this deeper work on China, because it’s going to be interesting for them, and it’s going to be valuable for the U.S.-China relationship and for the world,” she said.

In China, Jia Qingguo, a professor of international relations and a national political adviser, has suggested Beijing clarify its laws involving foreign nationals, introduce a separate system for political reviews of foreign students’ dissertations, and make it easier for foreign graduates to find internships and jobs in Chinese companies.

Meanwhile, China is hosting American high school students under a plan Xi unveiled in November to welcome 50,000 in the next five years.

In January, a group of 24 students from Iowa’s Muscatine High School became the first to travel to China. The all-expenses-paid, nine-day trip took them to the Beijing Zoo, Great Wall, Palace Museum, the Yu Garden and Shanghai Museum.

Sienna Stonking, one of the Muscatine students, now wants to return to China to study.

“If I had the opportunity, I would love to go to college in China,” she told China’s state broadcaster CGTN. “Honestly, I love it there.”

Kang reported from Beijing.

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China’s clampdown on fake-paper factories picks up speed

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Two major research funders in China have conducted a spate of misconduct investigations, punishing at least 23 scientists for using ‘paper mills’ — businesses that produce sham manuscripts, including fake data to order.

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