[MUSIC] If we look at this data that I'm going to show you in a second, it really led us in the research that we've done to believe that the Chinese Academy of Sciences really needs to undergo some serious reforms. There are lots of problems, and these problems were apparent to me and to other researchers back in 2012, when we did a lot of our research. For example, in 2012, only 3 out of 82 of the scientists we interviewed in Changsha, Guangzhou, Wuhan, and Kunming were actually earning over 35,000 a year on the eve of returning, which meant that they were post docs. They were maybe earning $12, $15, max $20,000 a year. So that was another way for us to know that they were post-docs. Yet all of a sudden they've returned to caste and they're running projects without ever having done independent research or ever having lead a research team overseas. Because, as a PhD fellow, or as a PhD, they studied under a professor. As a post-doc, they studied under that same professor or maybe one of his friends. So they never ran a team by themselves, and suddenly they're running a team on their own, and so the likelihood, I believe, of them failing in a second project. The first project they brought back. They knew it. They understood it. They studied it with their professor. But now they come back, and they gotta come up with something new on their own, and organize a team, and it's just unsure that they are going to be able to do it. And Song Tao, who's a very well known analyst, wrote a book about the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and continues to do research on returnees. A close friend of mine, he found and argued that out of 466 highly talented people, however that was measured, brought into CAS from inside or outside China, only 11.6% had been full or associate professors. 10% were assistant professors, and the rest were researchers, visiting scholars, and post doctoral fellows. So we thought, and even back then we raised the issue that Chinese Academy of Sciences needs to introduce a system to reevaluate its hundred talents recipients every five years. Because after five years they would have run out of the first, used up what they had learned overseas. And so the question was were they able to get something going on their own. And what we also found was just too many institute directors did not have a foreign PhD. So if you look at this table here, right? And this in part goes back to that same experience that I had with Lee Chao, because one of the other people that got into an argument with him was a cast director, institute director, who had only been a visiting scholar overseas. And so you can see in 2002, 42% of the directors of institutes in the Chinese Academy of Sciences had been visiting the scholars, that usually meant one or two years, maybe in the 1980's, overseas, only 19% had a foreign PhD and 39% of people had no foreign experience. So they had not studied or done any research overseas in their lives, which is pretty amazing if you want to compete globally. Now, clearly, that's improved but still in 2013, still 28% of the directors of Institutes at the Chinese Academy of Sciences had no overseas experience. The majority had been overseas as a visiting scholar. But that could have been 15 years before. And the number of PhDs, foreign PhDs was 27%. Now if we look at a few more of the problems at CAS. Before 2000, the Chinese Academy of Sciences was clearly the leading scientific research institute in China. But if you look over these last 15 or so years, the universities have surpassed them. Returnees are often not so interested in going to CAS, and they're much more interested in going to a university. And this reinforces the argument that the internal culture of an institution is critical for its ability to promote good science. And what we see with CAS presidents is that they're really under no pressure. Either the CAS president or many of the directors, they're under no pressure. The Ministry of Education can't put pressure on them. And one would have thought that the organization department of the party could have put some pressure on them. But never the less we see and I'll show you some data that suggests that the pressure's just aren't enough. CAS has a PI system, a principle investigation system, where the senior faculty are the PIs, and they go out and they hire new, younger researchers to work with them. But that really reinforces the kind of paternalism. If you want to come and work, you work with me, you're my team, I hire you. That can really reinforce this kind of relationship problem that exists. A big problem for CAS is that people who win the 100 Talents Program, right, who get an appointment under the 100 Talents Program, they are vetted. How good they are and whether or not they deserve the job, they are vetted only internally by a group or an evaluation committee inside the Chinese Academy of Sciences. While the Changjiang scholars who are in the universities or can win an award and go to CAS, or 1000 Talents Awardees who also can go to CAS, they are vetted by international panels, which means that the criteria, the standards for these last two programs should be higher than the standards for the CAS 100 Talents program. So we wanted to test this, and what we did was, we've got some money from the university, and from some outside support and hired a team. And we collected 1400 CVs, the Curriculum Vitae, of the 1400 returnees to China under national program. And these include people who returned under the 100 Talents, the 1000 Talents, and the Chang Jiang Scholars, okay? So we did, and from each of those CVs, we then looked at the publications that they had, and we calculated a measure based on the impact factor of the journals in which they published. Every journal in science and social science has an impact factor. So we could give them, we could calculate looking at the journals they published in, we could calculate a score for each of these people, and that would be what we would say, who's better, who's score, which programs people have a better score, in terms of the quality of their publications. And so first what we did was we compared the people who returned to the Chinese Academy of Sciences to people in the other programs. So here we had a 1000 cases that were good. And what's important here is if you see here three stars, that means that the probability of getting a positive result for this is actually quite low. If by random, right, it can't just be that it's sort of random that it happened. It really means that the numbers we're getting the data, the scores that we're getting actually are significant. So this is a negative score, which means that relative to people in the other programs, the returnees to CAS published less articles in high quality journals, or they published fewer high quality, let's just say, less articles, fewer articles in high quality journals, than people who came back under the other programs. Now, you could argue that, well, these people came back, and they're in a university, they're maybe a better research environment, they're under different rules, they have to do different things. So to prove and to test this hypothesis even more, what we did was, we took the returnees to CAS, right? People who return to CAS under the Chang Jiang Scholars Program and the 1000 Talents Program, and compared them to the people who returned under the 100 Talents Program. Now remember, the people who return under the Chang Jiang Scholar and 1000 Talents are vetted by outsiders, by foreigners, by people overseas. Whereas, the people who come back under CAS are vetted only by CAS. So the hypothesis would be international tribunals, international evaluation teams, should be tougher than the vetting that goes on in CAS. And so what do we find, right? And what we find here, again, is a negative score, and a statistically significant finding that the quality of publications by CAS's own selections is lower than people entering CAS, but are rewarded by other two programs. So the people who come back to CAS, but have been selected by international tribunals, do better than the people who come back to CAS and are selected by CAS itself. Now, we have seen some progress at CAS. They've established some new institutes, but none of them has an overseas PhD as the director. And the vice president of CAS was quoted as expressing no interest in following Western norms. Still in September of 2014 CAS announced a plan for what it called profound reform whose key words are open and rejuvenate CAS, and bring in high-end talent. So clearly CAS has work cut out for itself. So to summarize this and to give you something to talk about, in terms of a discussion point, why do you think that China has not been so successful in attracting a reverse flow of talent?
