Scientific research will help policymakers

Some people, including scholars and Tsinghua University alumni, have petitioned the university to fire Hu Angang, head of its Center for China Studies, because of his "absurd" conclusion in a study widely circulated last year that China had overtaken the United States.

That Hu has insisted his conclusion is correct, without explaining why there are fallacies in his data or revealing the research method he has followed, has widened the broadside against him.

The institute established in 2000 is among the top think tanks aimed at providing advice to government. And many people are angry with Hu because they fear his research and "weird" conclusions could mislead policymakers.

Such fears are baseless, as Hu's controversial conclusions are purely academic, not for political or strategic consumption. In fact, it would be an overestimation to speculate that policymakers make decisions based simply on one scholar's research.

It is widely acknowledged that China is rising, and even the International Monetary Fund has indicated China could be the world's largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity. However, China remains the largest developing country with per capita GDP ranking of 71 on the list of countries in 2017.

And the fact that 30.46 million people were still living in poverty in rural areas at the end of 2017 has prompted the Chinese government to accord priority to the eradication of extreme poverty by 2020, not to replace the US as the superpower.

It is thus natural for so many people, academics included, to repudiate Hu's conclusions. But rather than launching personal attacks against Hu, it is more important that they help improve the quality of some think tanks' research.

Since 2013, the mushrooming think tanks have recruited many talents to conduct research, and their studies have helped diversify the advice for the policymakers. In fact, many of these researchers have contributed to the development of strategies at the national and local levels.

Yet the drama being played out over Hu's research has exposed problems with some think tanks. It is an open secret that some think tanks don't have enough qualified and stable researchers, so they seek out star scholars from home and abroad for their presentations while employing new college graduates, even students on internship to collect data, study them and write the reports, which are then finalized by experts.

In some cases, their research model is the opposite of what scientific research should be, as they look for evidence to prove their pre-set conclusions, rather than arriving at a conclusion on the basis of their findings. Some think tanks even publish dozens of research reports in a year, by compiling facts from already published materials or from online platforms.

And given that only a few think tanks have their own means of obtaining firsthand data, many of them rely on secondhand data obtained from other organizations, which raises serious questions on their findings.

To conduct in-depth research and scientific analysis should be the goal of think tanks. Hu's case shows, China needs think tanks that conduct scientific research to meet the challenges it faces at home and abroad. Competition among the think tanks is welcome, but they should not compromise their integrity just to earn some brownie points.

The author is a writer with China Daily.