【經濟學人】：清華大學的學術研究，領跑全球_風聞

來源：微信公眾號“我與我們的世界”

本期導讀：清華大學（Tsinghua University），簡稱清華，舊稱清華學堂、清華學校、國立清華大學，始建於1911年，因北京西北郊清華園而得名，初為清政府利用美國退還的部分庚子賠款所建留美預備學校“遊美學務處”及附設“肄業館”，於1925年始設大學部。

抗日戰爭爆發後，清華與北大、南開南遷長沙，組建國立長沙臨時大學。1938年再遷昆明，易名國立西南聯合大學。1946年遷回清華園覆校，擁有文、法、理、工、農等5個學院。1949年中華人民共和國成立後，國立清華大學歸屬中央人民政府教育部，更名“清華大學”；而原國立清華大學校長梅貽琦於1955年在台灣新竹覆校，仍沿用原名。

1952年，中國高校進行院系調整，清華大學文、法、理、農、航天等院系外遷，吸納外校工科，轉為多科性工業大學，在土木、水利、計算機、核能等領域貢獻卓越，被譽為“工程師的搖籃”。1978年後，逐步恢復理科、人文社科、經濟管理類學科。1999年，原中央工藝美術學院併入，成立美術學院。2006年，與北京協和醫學院合作辦學，培養臨牀醫學專業學生。2012年，原中國人民銀行研究生部併入，成立五道口金融學院。2013年，黑石集團捐助成立清華大學蘇世民書院及獎學金，與著名的牛津大學羅德獎學金及劍橋大學蓋茲獎學金在捐助規模及名聲上皆相當。

截至2017年12月，清華大學擁有美術館、博物館、圖書館、20個學院，及近200個科研機構、5家校辦產業以及一個科技園區，分別為清華控股及其旗下的紫光集團、同方集團、誠志集團、清華科技園等。學校擁有固定資產超過206億元人民幣，控股資產超過4300億元人民幣，是985工程、211工程、雙一流高等院校。2018年《QS世界大學排名》、《泰晤士高等教育世界大學排名》、《世界大學學術排名》、《USNEWS世界大學排名》均將清華大學排在中國首位。

Academic research

學術研究

Looking to beat the world

志在雄霸全球

Tsinghua University may soon surpass America’s institutions in science and technology subjects. In China, its rapid rise is not unique

清華大學在科技領域，可能很快將超越美國同行。在中國大地上，清華的表現，並非個案。

小編注：譯文部分僅供參考；

Tsinghua university was born out of national humiliation. It was founded in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion—an anti-foreign uprising in 1900—and paid for with the reparations exacted from China by America. Now Tsinghua is a major source of Chinese pride as it contends for accolades for research in science, technology, engineering and maths (stem). In 2013-16 it produced more of the top 1% most highly cited papers in maths and computing, and more of the 10% most highly cited papers in stem, than any other university in the world, reckons Simon Marginson of Oxford University (see chart). The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) still leads in the top 1% of stem papers, but Mr Marginson says Tsinghua is on track to be “number one in five years or less”.

清華大學誕生的時代，是中華民族的屈辱時代。清華大學是在“拳亂”（義和團運動）後利用美國退還的部分庚子賠款所建。當下這個新時代，隨着在科學、技術、工程、數學以及科工數下同領域所取得系列耀眼業績，清華已成為中國榮耀的重要源泉之一。據牛津大學西蒙·馬金森教授統計，2013至2016年間，數學和計算研究領域被引用最多的前1%論文，出自清華的數量最多，而在幹細胞研究領域被引用最多的論文中，出自清華的超過10%，這比全球其他任何大學的都要多**（見下圖）**。幹細胞研究領域被引用最多的前1%論文，麻省理工依然領先，不過，馬金森教授表示，清華有勢頭將“在五年或更短時間內衝到第一”。

Tsinghua and Peking University are modelled on Western research universities. The two are also neighbours and rivals, China’s Oxford and Cambridge. Tsinghua is the conventional, practical one—the alma mater of many of the country’s leaders, including the current one, Xi, and Hu, his predecessor. Peking University is the home of poets, philosophers and rebels; Mao worked in the library, and the university was at the forefront of the protests of 1989. Like other Chinese universities, the two foremost ones all but ceased to function during Mao’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s; rival Red Guard factions waged bloody struggles for control of Tsinghua. But both quickly rebounded. Tsinghua retained its scientific bent and became the principal beneficiary of the country’s boom in stem research.

Seizing the laurels

勇奪桂冠

Since 1995 the central government has mounted a series of efforts, involving billions of dollars in spending, to turn China’s best universities into world-class ones. First came Project 211, which aimed to improve around 100 institutions to make them fit for the 21st century. The latest incarnation of this scheme is the Double First Class Plan, which was launched in 2015. Its goal is to foster world standards in two groups, one consisting of leading universities and the other of select departments in a wider range of institutions.

Money is the lever. The funding system motivates universities to produce top-class research. Universities, in turn, give their academics an incentive to do so. A study by three Chinese researchers, published last year, noted that payments for getting a paper published had risen steadily from the $25 that was offered nearly 30 years ago by Nanjing University, the first university to give such rewards. Now such bonuses range up to $165,000—20 times the annual salary of an average academic—for a paper in Nature, depending on the institution. The system has responded. China’s share of stem papers in Scopus, the world’s biggest catalogue of abstracts and citations, rose from 4% in 2000 to 19% in 2016, more than America’s contribution.

Tsinghua creams off the best researchers. And, like China itself, when it comes to scoring, it benefits from its size. Phd students are the workforce of the research business. In 2017 the university awarded 1,385 doctorates (some recipients are pictured), compared with 645 conferred by MIT. But numbers are not the main reason for Tsinghua’s success. Yang Bin, its vice-president, says “the most important moment in the development of Tsinghua” was in 1978, when Deng said China would send larger numbers of students abroad. “We need to send tens of thousands,” Deng said. “This is one of the key ways of…improving our level of scientific education.” Officials worried that few of them would return, but Deng insisted that enough would. He was right.

Forty years on, Tsinghua and the country’s other top universities are reaping the rewards. The return flow of highly trained people is gathering pace. The government has provided extra resources to attract them. Tsinghua cannot match the best American packages, but it can offer six-figure dollar salaries—and the opportunity for young parents to bring up their children in their own culture. Qian Yingyi (Columbia, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley and subsequently dean of Tsinghua’s school of economics and management) and Shi Yigong (dean of Tsinghua’s school of life sciences; previously at Johns Hopkins and Princeton) are among the star returnees who have transformed the university. “Those intellectuals played a very important role, changing the whole climate, raising standards,” says Mr Yang.

Reforms in staff management have helped, too. In 2012, in the school of which he was dean, Mr Qian replaced a personnel system dominated by personal contacts and political clout with an American-style tenure track: six years of research, then a review of performance, mainly based on published work, after which academics were hired permanently or shown the door. This approach then spread through the university. The result, says Mr Yang, is that “people work terribly hard here: the lights are on all night, people work all weekend”, hoping to get papers into leading journals. The speed with which their efforts have dragged Tsinghua up the rankings is astonishing. In 2006-09 the university was 66th in the maths-and-computing-research league table. Now it is top.

But there are worries about Tsinghua’s direction—particularly among engineers, who used to dominate the university. Their applied skills have played a crucial role in China’s modernisation, but because they produce relatively little cutting-edge theoretical research, they have been losing out under the new regime. Engineers complain that they struggle to get funding or promotion, and that the focus on research neglects their contribution to society.

Others worry that the university is still not cutting-edge enough. “Many Japanese people have won Nobel prizes,” says Mr Yang. “People are saying: ‘Why not the Chinese?’” Mainland China has only one Nobel prize in science, awarded to Tu Youyou for discovering an anti-malarial drug in the 1970s. Japan has 23; America has 282. Mr Yang reckons that the pressure to publish is problematic. “It’s good for short-term results, but not for really big things, for unorthodox thinking. Too many people have the attitude of followers. They’re not entrepreneurial enough. I say: Start some new field. Don’t care too much about recognition from peers. Risk your whole career.” Persuading researchers to think radically instead of incrementally would mean changing the way the system incentivises them.

And while China’s universities forge ahead in the hard-science league table, they seem less likely to triumph in the social sciences. One problem is language. All the world’s leading journals are published in English. That matters less for hard scientists, who communicate mostly in symbols, than for social scientists, who use many more words. An academic in Tsinghua’s education department says Chinese social scientists complain that their best ideas are difficult to translate. “Writing papers for English-language journals is like competing in an exam that is set by the West,” she quotes them as lamenting.

The constraints on free speech, increasingly felt in universities, are another reason why China’s stem triumph may not spread to other disciplines. In 2013 the government told universities that seven topics, including universal values, judicial independence and the past mistakes of the Party, were off-limits. “At a great university,” says William Kirby, professor of China studies at Harvard, “there isn’t one thing that can’t be talked about, let alone seven.”