A couple years ago I had a conversation with a Chinese scientist in the pharmaceuticals industry who had worked in the USA for nearly 15-years. He and a Chinese partner had started their own lab to produce drugs in America, but were frustrated by the lack of funding available. He planned to set up a lab in Zhejiang province, where Wenzhou entrepreneurs were interested in diversifyng their investment interests.

This same scientist may now be part of a major trend that sees China having increased the number of peer-reviewed scientific papers more than 64-fold since 1981,according to Thomson Reuters. America with more than 300,000 papers still published more than three-times the number of papers as China in 2008; however, according to the research company, China could be the largest producer of scientific knowledge by 2020.

The Financial Times article that discusses survey findings sites that nearly 10% of the Chinese papers were co-authored with scientists in the West. A substantial source of the papers recently generated come from Chinese scientists who have lived in the West for several years, and who now spend part or all their time in China with the support of government subsidies intended to bolster scientific research in China.

A genuine telltale of China’s scientific development is a check of references the papers cite. When Pareto sees 20% of the references of papers worldwide refer to researchers schooled and based in Mainland China, and when Western graduate students in the sciences come to China to study and to conduct research, then the world may see a genuine tipping point in the quality, uniqueness and kind of knowledge China is contributing to the world.

Until then, the country is just manufacturing facts.

Further reading: FT