格致

这是我在Nature Network博客上的一篇文章，最新得知已经被推荐到Nature.com主页上了。

UPDATE: The whole post was revised to avoid misunderstanding. Some parts are bolded.

The first line is the simplified Chinese of the phrase ‘experts and professors’, and the second line is a very popular homophonous variation of the phrase and the meaning changed to ‘rock owner and roaring creature’

Research shows that among several countries in the world China ranks very low in science literacy of the public, especially in understanding the methodology of science as well as the relationship between science and society.

Yes. If you start a poll (I mean a undisturbed, full democratic poll) among the people here, whether to dismiss the Chinese Academy of Sciences and that of Engineering, the answer is very likely to be positive.

Two committee members from Chongqing province proposed this idea to the ongoing 11th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. This news on the web received thousands of comments supporting the proposal. (If you can read Chinese see how people applause to this idea. If you can’t, just notice the number of supporters.)

I remember several years ago a group of Chinese scientists climbed on the Mount Everest for re-determining its height. The result did not change in the integer part, of course, but somewhere several digits after the decimal point was updated. And this change did not vary the ranking of the mountain as the highest place on earth. This frustrated the Chinese people quite much then. ‘Do we spend a huge money on the scientists just to know this?!’

Several days ago there was a report from Spain that a certain kind of fish can count to a maximum of 4. News like this do nothing but strengthen a prevailing public view that scientists are nut and waste money. ‘Why not do something more meaningful and helpful?’

Someone says he hates scholars. Once an economist said the stock would rise and he poured his money into it and at last he lost a double.

People even find the intellects doing research against their interest. In their eyes:

• Research shows that the new labor policy should not protect the labor too much
• Research shows that most of the traditional Chinese medicine is nonsense if not poison (in China TCM is alternative because it is cheaper and more affordable, so canceling TCM may mean a increase in medical budget)
• Research shows that the hygiene system should not be reformed by lowering the price. In fact we should rise it (more medical budget?)

These research results are in themselves conditional, and the full version of the reports may not seem so aggressive against the public. For example research also emphasized that the poor should have medical subsidies from the government for basic health care, but this conclusion is not ‘powerful’ enough to counteract the public anger on the price-rise part. Surely the public is even less able to understand the failure the science than the professional scientists. They don’t and needn’t know to render a research easier to handle scientists often make amendment of or simplify the real world, i.e. modeling, so the results may not always be consistent with the practical environment. But people seem to pay so heavy hope on scientists that these normal, inevitable disagreement between laymen and professional will create a surprisingly large wave of criticism. There is a common feeling among people that scientists eat a lot of money but always say or do something useless or wrong, while an even more common fact is somehow forgot, that scientists make our lives better.

Worse, there are news reporting that 95% of the Chinese research papers are rubbish. Also from news, academic frauds are also well known by the public. In fact the original work of the scientists are generally inaccessible to the public. What the people can access is only the ”(mis-)translation” of some results by the journalists, and these results are chosen because they are just so contradict with people’s common views or their rights, i.e. eyeball attracting. With all these negative images, the Chinese academic community is regarded as a malignant tumor of the country, while in all over the world Chinese scientists are paying an increasing effort to every fields of science. The so called ‘95% junk’ is only a conclusion based on papers written in Chinese. However, important scientific findings are always published in English internationally, and therefore more distant from ordinary people.

I think there are 3 reasons for this trend. 1) the governmental operation is opaque; people know nothing officially about what’s going on after tax payment, and specifically how much and how effective the tax income are used on scientific research; 2) the main pains Chinese people suffer today is little to do with science, but the infrastructure, policy, etc. so people find science unable to relieve them from the current suffering and is therefore useless; 3) Research of average or good quality is all published in English internationally. Only rubbish is published in Chinese (it is quite true that 95% of the papers written in Chinese are rubbish). So non-scientists who care science cannot know the real quality of Chinese scientists and the state of their researches.