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Reform of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
Soon after being made General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee and State President, Xi Jinping paid a visit to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in July 2013. Xi urged the Academy to be ‘a pioneer in four areas’ (sige shuaixian): in leapfrogging to the frontier of scientific research, in enhancing the nation’s innovative talent pool, in establishing the nation’s high-level think tank in science and technology and in becoming a world-class research institution. Since 2013, China’s political leadership has placed science, technology and innovation at the core of the reform of its economic system, as innovation can help not only with restructuring and transforming the economy but also with solving other challenges that China faces – from inclusive, harmonious and green development to an ageing society and the ‘middle income trap.’ New initiatives have been launched to reform the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the centrally financed national science and technology programmes, in order to increase China’s chances of becoming an innovation-oriented, modern nation by 2020.

The latest in a series of reforms
The latest reform of the Chinese Academy of Sciences once again raises the question of the academy’s place in China’s national science and technology system, a question which first came up at the academy’s inception immediately after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. At the time, research and training were separated at universities and industrial R&D institutes focused on specific problems in their particular sectors. These were the glory days of the academy, when it contributed, in particular, to the success of the strategic weapons programmes through a mission-oriented disciplinary development strategy. The Chinese Academy of Sciences would quickly become a victim of its own success, after its high visibility attracted keen attention from the political leadership and other actors in the S&T system. In the mid-1980s when China began reforming its science and technology system, the Academy was forced to adopt a ‘one academy, two systems’ approach. This strategy consisted in concentrating a small number of scientists on basic research and following the global trend in high technology, while encouraging the majority of its staff to engage in the commercialization of research results and projects of direct relevance to the economy. The overall quality of research suffered, as did the academy’s ability to tackle fundamental research questions. In 1998, the president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lu Yongxiang, initiated the Knowledge Innovation Programme to improve the academy’s vitality. Initially, the Academy hoped to satisfy the Chinese leadership by making the staff of its institutes more nimble and mobile. The academy’s very existence was threatened, however, after it was downsized to compensate for the government’s efforts to strengthen the research capability of universities and the national defence sector – ironically, the very sector that had historically absorbed Academy personnel or depended upon the Academy to take on major research projects. In reaction, the Academy not only reversed its early approach but even went to the other extreme by significantly expanding its reach. It established application-focused research institutes in new scientific disciplines and new cities and formed alliances with provincial and local governments and industries. The Suzhou Institute of Nanotech and Nanobionics is one such establishment; it was created jointly by the Academy and the Jiangsu provincial and Suzhou municipal governments in 2008. Apparently, some of these new institutes are not fully supported by the public purse; in order to survive, they have to compete with existing institutes and engage in activities that bear little relation to the Academy’s mission as the national academy.

Challenges facing the Academy
Although the Chinese Academy of Sciences hosts the world’s largest graduate school in terms of the number of postgraduate degrees awarded each year, which include 5 000 PhDs, the Academy has been finding it difficult in recent years to attract the best and brightest students. This has spurred the Academy to found two affiliated universities in Beijing and Shanghai, both of which opened their doors to a couple of hundred undergraduates in 2014. In 2015, the Academy employed a staff of 60 000 and counts 104 research institutes. It operates on a budget of roughly RMB 42 billion (circa US$ 6.8 billion), just under half of which comes from the government. The academy is struggling with a number of challenges. For one thing, it is in direct competition with other Chinese institutions of learning for funding and talent. Underpaid scientists from the Academy also have to apply constantly for grants to supplement their income, a widespread phenomenon in the entire research and higher education sector, which may have resulted in underperformance. The Academy has also seen its work duplicated on a large scale by its own institutes, which tend not to collaborate with each other. There is also a lack of interest among the Academy’s scientists in seeking opportunities to apply their research to the economy, although this should not be its core mission. Last but not least, the academy is encumbered by the breadth of its mandate, which ranges from research, talent training, strategic high-tech development, commercialization of research results and local engagement to the provision of policy advice as a think tank and through its elite academicians; this makes it extremely difficult for CAS to manage and evaluate institutes and individual scientists.

Reclassification of the Academy's institutes
Since 2013, CAS has come under enormous pressure from the political leadership to produce visible achievements. The loss of independence of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the successor to the Soviet Academy of Sciences on which the Chinese Academy was modelled, in a top-down reform in 2013 has sent a chilling signal: if the Chinese Academy of Sciences does not reform itself, others will. This realization prompted current Academy President Bai Chunli to take advantage of Xi’s call for the Academy to become ‘a pioneer in four areas’ to propose a sweeping reform of the academy through a new Pioneering Action Initiative (shuaixian xingdong jihua). The aim of this initiative is to orient the academy towards the international frontier of science, major national demands and the battleground for the national economy by re-organizing existing institutes into four categories:
 * centres of excellence (zhuoyue chuangxin zhongxin) focused on basic science, especially in those areas where China has a strong advantage;
 * innovation academies (chuangxin yanjiuyuan) targeting areas with underdeveloped commercial potential;
 * centres of big science (dakexue yanjiu zhongxin) built around large-scale facilities to promote domestic and international facilities to promote domestic and international collaboration; and
 * institutes with special characteristics (tese yanjiusuo) devoted to initiatives that foster local development and sustainability.

The reclassification of the Academy’s institutes and their scientists was still under way in 2015. It must be said that the initiative itself is self-congratulatory, as the academy is still resting on its past achievements, with little consideration for whether this new initiative may be good for the nation as well as for the academy. This explains why some are sceptical about the necessity of maintaining such a gigantic organization, a model not found anywhere else in the world. The initiative offers the academy a bright future, as long as it can count on sizeable government funding – but that is nothing new. Many of the goals that President Bai Chunli proposed for the Pioneering Action Initiative are identical to those of his predecessor, Lu Yongxiang, through his own Knowledge Innovation Programme. Nor is there any guarantee that these goals will be fulfilled through the reform.

The Pioneering Action Initiative is pivoting institutions into a new matrix so as to boost collaboration within the academy and concentrate on tackling key research questions, which has a certain logic. Implementation will be tough, though, since many institutes do not fit easily into any of the four defined categories.

Another worry is that the initiative may not necessarily encourage collaboration with scientists external to the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The danger is that the Academy may actually become even more hermetic and isolated than before. The timing of the reform may also complicate matters. The reform at CAS coincides with the nationwide reform of public institutions (shiye danwei) launched in 2011. In general, the country’s 1.26 million public institutions of education, research, culture and health care, which have more than 40 million employees, fall into two types. Institutes within the Chinese Academy of Sciences that fall into Type 1 are to be fully financed from the public purse and will be expected to fulfil only the tasks set by the state. Type II institutes of the Academy, on the other hand, will be allowed to supplement partial public funding with income earned through other activities, including through government procurement of their research projects, technology transfer and entrepreneurship.

The reform will thus have implications both for the institutes and for individual scientists, in terms of the amount of stable funding they receive and the level of salaries, as well as the scope and importance of the executed projects. It is also likely that some institutes will be corporatized, as this is what has happened to China’s application-oriented research institutes since 1999. Consequently, the Chinese Academy of Sciences will need to become a leaner institution, as the state may not always be willing or able to finance such a costly academy.