(11 May 2022) After years of receiving extra government funding to push selected top universities up international university rankings, three major Chinese universities will no longer participate in overseas rankings – a move which academics say could make the rankings landscape less globally representative as Chinese universities pursue a different path. The three prestigious…
(13 May 2022) China’s market regulator had launched an antitrust investigation into the country’s largest online academic database, the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI). The State Administration for Market Regulation published the announcement on its website. It did not provide further details. CNKI, whose parent company is Tsinghua Tongfang 600100.SS, a Chinese state-owned software company…
(27 Apr 2022) China’s powerful State Council is calling on research institutions to expand and improve their ethics training. The directive, one of several detailed in a comprehensive ethics statement, is intended to address gaps in oversight exposed when Chinese researcher He Jiankui shocked the world by creating the first babies with edited genomes in 2018.…
(21 Feb 2022) China’s national higher education policy has entered its second phase, with the government releasing the updated list of Double First Class (DFC) programme universities. The scheme was launched in 2015 and pushed the country’s higher education sector on an upwards trajectory by increasing funding allocations for those universities and specific academic disciplines…
(23 Aug 2021) China’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism has just announced that, from October 1, any music that breaches a fresh set of government rules will be banned from being played within the country’s near-50,000 karaoke venues. According to a direct translation of the new government rules (via Reddit), music that is in contravention of…
(19 May 2021) The digitization of Chinese classics is challenging, as Chinese ancient characters are complex. Throughout history, one Chinese character might have several variants and written forms. Digitizing Chinese ancient books through optical character recognition (OCR) not only facilitates machine reading but also gives a new life to numerous ancient books for public peruse. …
(11 Jun 2021) The killing of a university Communist Party secretary by a lecturer at China’s prestigious Fudan University in Shanghai has shocked academics in China, unleashing a debate on pressures to perform and publish, research demands and precariousness of university jobs in China. Jiang Wenhua (39), a teacher at the school of mathematical…
(10 Jun 2021) The new site of Shanghai Archives has opened to the public free in the Pudong New Area. It is China’s biggest provincial-level archives. The site on Baiyang Road features an exhibition on Shanghai’s history since it opened its port in 1843 and visitors can search the archives free. Some 4.6 million…
(3 Jun 2021) China is working on a master plan for the internationalisation of its domestic journals and plans to pursue an open science strategy at a national level. That was one of the main messages of a session at the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Society of Scholarly Publishing (SSP) held last week, and hosted…
(6 May 2021) The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Chinese Association of Science and Technology (CAST) to deepen cooperation in three aspects: the ‘Innovation China’ platform, impact assessment studies of Chinese scientific research output (including a focus on Open Access) and international knowledge exchange. Under…