A Shanghai academy president tells Kevin Kelly the catch-up era is over

At a Shanghai Academy of Natural Sciences dialogue in July 2026, the academy's president, Lu Bai, told Kevin Kelly that Chinese science is running out of new Western work to absorb and replicate. The metrics-driven evaluation regime that grew up around that catch-up era, he said, is now the deeper problem.

The Shanghai Academy of Natural Sciences (SANS) is one of China's newer city-level research bodies, set up to coordinate basic research across Shanghai's universities and institutes.

Lu's diagnosis has two layers. The first is structural: there is less foreign science left to copy cleanly. Decades of absorbing Western advances, what Chinese policy circles now call the catch-up era, let Chinese labs close gaps quickly by replicating methods, instruments, and questions that had already been validated elsewhere. The shortcut worked when the gap was wide. The gap has narrowed.

The second layer is the harder one, and it is the one Lu named. Chinese research evaluation, he said, is dominated by a metrics regime that rewards publication counts, citation rankings, and grant formulas tied to volume rather than to the originality of the question. The system prizes output that is easy to count. Researchers who spend years on a single hard problem, or who publish in venues that do not boost a lab's ranking, lose out in promotion and funding decisions. Layered on top is a deference to authority that makes it risky for junior scientists to push back on senior judgment or to follow a question that does not have a senior patron.

Both points are institutional, not cultural. A tenure committee that grades a candidate on h-index and grant size is making a measurable rule, not expressing a national character. Lu is identifying a specific design problem in how Chinese labs are evaluated, and naming it as the design problem that has to be solved if the labs are going to produce the kind of work that catch-up could not generate.

The external pressure is real and growing. US export controls on advanced semiconductors, screening of Chinese researchers at American universities, and tighter review of joint funding have made it more expensive to import frontier know-how in the most sensitive fields. That makes the internal problem more urgent, not less. The frontier work Chinese policy wants, in AI, biotech, quantum, and energy, does not survive a system that optimizes for volume.

The transcript of the dialogue was published on 27 July by The Intellectual (zhishifenzi.com), a Chinese-language science account Lu co-founded. The South China Morning Post carried the framing in English the same week. Chinese tech press including Huxiu and NetEase has since amplified the same critique, which suggests the framing has reached the domestic research-policy conversation, not only the China-watching press abroad.

Two things to watch. The first is whether the evaluation reforms Chinese funders have piloted in the past two years, including longer grant cycles and looser thresholds on publication counts for promotion, get extended to tenure decisions at flagship universities, or stay as pilot programs departments work around. The second is whether the next generation of Chinese scientists trained abroad negotiates the terms of return, as some diaspora biotech researchers already have. Lu has named the problem in public. The watch item is whether the reforms reach the flagship-university tenure committees that have to enforce them.