Research-intensive universities provide crucial support for STEM innovation by attracting top scholars and supporting their scientific discoveries and core technological breakthroughs. Those breakthroughs then promote the creation of new fields and drive technological and economic development. In fact, a 2023 study by Scientometrics found that among winners of the Nobel Prize in the natural sciences, research universities accounted for over 60% of the institutions affiliated with scientists and over 70% of the individual laureates. With one of the largest education systems in the world, China boasts around 1,308 research universities as of June 2024. In addition, China’s research capacity has grown at an unprecedented pace, with Research and Development (R&D) investments surging dramatically to around a trillion dollars, surpassing American federal investments by around 20 billion dollars. In addition, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Global Innovation Index ranked China 10th globally in terms of innovation capabilities in 2025. Nevertheless, reforms to university evaluation systems and even more support for specialized research universities are crucial to cultivating innovative talent and supporting scientific breakthroughs.
The classification of Chinese universities into “Project 211,” “Project 985,” “Double First Class,” and “C9 League” essentially ranks institutions based on governmental initiatives. The China Discipline Evaluation (CDE) and “Double First Class Initiative” act as a “baton” that leads universities to expand their number of disciplines to capture more funding and prestige. Higher university rankings increase the university’s popularity with applying students and therefore improves the quality of the school’s applicants. So, universities are incentivized to give focus to awards and evaluations as a primary determinant of the ranking system. The evaluation system’s focus on using quantitative benchmarks such as published papers and journal citations to assess complex academic and research value leads to universities’ giving insufficient weight to cultivating talent and innovation. The evaluation systems tend to be dominated by large, high-volume institutions; by recruiting enough staff, institutions can game the system for higher scores. In addition, underperforming disciplines risk being merged with others or being closed down out of administrators’ fear of impacting the school’s overall standing, ultimately hurting the end goal of education at some universities. Through this loss of a university’s distinctive disciplines, the uniform ranking harms the educational ecosystem, since all disciplines are valuable. Discipline evaluation is a tool and a means of measurement, not the ultimate goal.
While China’s top institutions perform admirably, the performance of average research universities tells a more complicated story. A 2025 study by Stanford professor John P. A. Ioannidis ranked research universities by raw number of high-impact and productive researchers. In this study, China had the largest number of research institutions (410), surpassing the 344 in the US. However, when ranking universities based on the number of scientists in the top 2% of their scientific subfield based on a compound citation indicator (one that considers citation impact, number of papers, and more), only five Chinese institutions rank in the global 100. Moreover, after the study adjusted for penalizing factors such as excessive self-citations, publication in lesser academic journals, and authorship of retracted papers, the typical Chinese research university outperformed only 14% of its global peers. By contrast, countries such as the US, the UK, and Switzerland all maintained a median ranking above 80%. This drop fully exemplifies how Chinese ranking systems prioritize quantitative indicators, causing an over-reliance on volume instead of true research and innovation. With a single set of metrics determining quality, Chinese universities become homogenous to meet evaluations, which neglect the unique development of paths and focuses. In addition, the reliance on quantitative indicators is unfavorable to the continuous development of a more varied and innovative research landscape for different universities. Consequently, the awards and evaluation systems must move beyond these standardized metrics and diversify to focus on the specialized development, quality, and innovation of research universities.
The wide, complete range of disciplines offered at many current universities is crucial to general education and foundational knowledge. However, the Chinese government should increase support for more specialized research institutions that would spearhead innovation in certain fields rather than encompassing a broad range of research disciplines or focusing on an institution’s size. Furthermore, the status quo cultivating talent would need more refocusing; earlier exposure of students to research environments, laboratory settings, and interdisciplinary collaboration would strengthen the shift from standardized testing performances to cultivating innovative capabilities and scientific curiosity that fits the need of innovation.
The Chinese education system should remove the incentive that rewards quantity over quality by decoupling financial rewards from quantitative standards. Instead, evaluations should prioritize innovative impact and quality while rewarding research universities for distinctive contributions rather than disciplinary completeness. Reforms to the system are currently underway, and the establishment of institutions such as Westlake University reflects the continuous shift to new standards. Westlake provides one example of a working model by eliminating publication-based incentives and focusing on the innovative and scientific impact of the contribution; Westlake achieved 101st in Nature’s global ranking of institutions by research output. In Chinese, the concept of “magnitude” within the phrase for “university”—which literally translates to “big study”—should not be merely defined by campus size, number of graduates, university ranking, disciplinary breadth, or publication counts, but rather by the institution’s contributions to innovative sciences through research and technological advancement.