Dr. Wei Yang Ph.D. Sc.D., President of China's National Natural Sciences Foundation (NSFC), is urging Beijing to invest more to improve the quality and integrity of basic research in China

Saying this improvement must be the focus of a national effort to boost innovation in China, Dr. Yang is asking Beijing to spend more on research and development. The head of China's top science agency said boosting technological development justifies pouring more resources into basic research.

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Dr. Yang calls for a sustained focus on basic research "to bring about such a change by 2020."

He pointed out China spends relatively little of its total R&D budget (public, industrial and private) on basic research. This percentage comes to only 4.7% of GDP compared with 24.1% in France; 17.6% in the United States and 12.6% in Japan in 2013.

Dr. Yang also noted China has only one Nobel Laureate in Science despite China having 1,000 research institutions capable of basic research and more than 1,000 universities doing research and teaching.

Since becoming boss of NSFC in March 2013, Dr. Yang has also made it his priority to boost funding for the agency.

"China has to transition from an economic powerhouse to a technological powerhouse and then to a scientific and cultural powerhouse," he said at the time.

"To achieve this goal, we will need many scientists, and we need to convince the government that it should provide more funding to the NSFC."

Dr. Yang has succeeded in this aim. NSFC has expanded more than 300-fold and has funds for research amounting to $3.7 billion in 2016. It funded 62.1% of Chinese research papers (equivalent to 11.5% of global academic output) in 2015. With this accomplished, he's turned his attention to boosting basic research in China to world class standards.

Dr. Yang said "raising the bar on quality -- higher citations and more major breakthroughs -- must be the top priority. Put another way, China needs to raise the altitude of its basic research landscape and form high mountains."

He pointed out China's research lags behind other countries in terms of citations.

"Its Field Weighted Citation Impact measure was 0.86 in 2015, below the world average of 1.0," he said.

The Field Weighted Citation Impact assesses a country's research performance. Citations are widely recognized as a proxy for quality.

Dr. Yang lamented the uneven quality of Chinese research. He bemoaned the international perception that "China's universities have become paper mills induced by metrics that value quantity over quality. Impact remains low: few chemical reactions or processes are named after Chinese scholars, even though the nation now publishes more papers in chemistry than any other."

Action must be taken to improve the "conflicted image in China" in basic research.

"Improving the quality and integrity of basic research must be the focus of national efforts to boost innovation in China," he said. "Quality needs to matter more than quantity, and integrity is the best way to ensure quality."

TagsDr. Wei Yang, National Natural Sciences Foundation, china