【经济学人】：清华大学的学术研究，领跑全球_风闻

来源：微信公众号“我与我们的世界”

本期导读：清华大学（Tsinghua University），简称清华，旧称清华学堂、清华学校、国立清华大学，始建于1911年，因北京西北郊清华园而得名，初为清政府利用美国退还的部分庚子赔款所建留美预备学校“游美学务处”及附设“肄业馆”，于1925年始设大学部。

抗日战争爆发后，清华与北大、南开南迁长沙，组建国立长沙临时大学。1938年再迁昆明，易名国立西南联合大学。1946年迁回清华园复校，拥有文、法、理、工、农等5个学院。1949年中华人民共和国成立后，国立清华大学归属中央人民政府教育部，更名“清华大学”；而原国立清华大学校长梅贻琦于1955年在台湾新竹复校，仍沿用原名。

1952年，中国高校进行院系调整，清华大学文、法、理、农、航天等院系外迁，吸纳外校工科，转为多科性工业大学，在土木、水利、计算机、核能等领域贡献卓越，被誉为“工程师的摇篮”。1978年后，逐步恢复理科、人文社科、经济管理类学科。1999年，原中央工艺美术学院并入，成立美术学院。2006年，与北京协和医学院合作办学，培养临床医学专业学生。2012年，原中国人民银行研究生部并入，成立五道口金融学院。2013年，黑石集团捐助成立清华大学苏世民书院及奖学金，与著名的牛津大学罗德奖学金及剑桥大学盖兹奖学金在捐助规模及名声上皆相当。

截至2017年12月，清华大学拥有美术馆、博物馆、图书馆、20个学院，及近200个科研机构、5家校办产业以及一个科技园区，分别为清华控股及其旗下的紫光集团、同方集团、诚志集团、清华科技园等。学校拥有固定资产超过206亿元人民币，控股资产超过4300亿元人民币，是985工程、211工程、双一流高等院校。2018年《QS世界大学排名》、《泰晤士高等教育世界大学排名》、《世界大学学术排名》、《USNEWS世界大学排名》均将清华大学排在中国首位。

Academic research

学术研究

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

清华大学在科技领域，可能很快将超越美国同行。在中国大地上，清华的表现，并非个案。

小编注：译文部分仅供参考；

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”.

清华大学诞生的时代，是中华民族的屈辱时代。清华大学是在“拳乱”（义和团运动）后利用美国退还的部分庚子赔款所建。当下这个新时代，随着在科学、技术、工程、数学以及科工数下同领域所取得系列耀眼业绩，清华已成为中国荣耀的重要源泉之一。据牛津大学西蒙·马金森教授统计，2013至2016年间，数学和计算研究领域被引用最多的前1%论文，出自清华的数量最多，而在干细胞研究领域被引用最多的论文中，出自清华的超过10%，这比全球其他任何大学的都要多**（见下图）**。干细胞研究领域被引用最多的前1%论文，麻省理工依然领先，不过，马金森教授表示，清华有势头将“在五年或更短时间内冲到第一”。

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

勇夺桂冠

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.”