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from the comrade-Lysenko-would-be-proud dept.
There have been many rumblings about scientific fraud in China, and now there are rumbles that the problem is systemic, and goes all the way to the top. Cao Xuetao (曹雪涛), one of China's top immunologists, former president of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, president of Nankai University, and most importantly Chairman of research integrity for all Chinese research, has himself been implicated in scientific fraud and misconduct. A careful examination of Chairman Cao's published scientific papers seems to show how some of his data was fabricated or falsified. This was noticed since much of his papers have pictures, either of western blots, gels, flow cyclometry images, and microscopy images. Some of the fabrication appears to have been done by sending the same sample multiple times through analysis, producing images that are similar but not completely identical, while others are clear Photoshop cut and paste jobs. From the For Better Science article:
And now it comes out, Cao's research works contain elaborately falsified research data. The discovery was made by data integrity sleuth Elisabeth Bik, assisted by Smut Clyde and others. It all started with a fraudulent paper, Wang et al Clin Cancer Research 2005 from Cao's lab, which Bik reported to the publisher AACR in 2014. Despite 4 falsified figures, only an embarrassing correction was issued in March 2015. So now Bik had another look at Chairman Cao's collected works.
[...] Also on 17 November, Chairman Cao publicly replied to his critic Bik, on PubPeer:
[...] Nevertheless, there is no excuse for any lapse in supervision or laboratory leadership and the concerns you raised serve as a fresh reminder to me just how important my role and responsibility are as mentor, supervisor, and lab leader; and how I might have fallen short.
[...] There was even English language coverage, as the dams broke. China's top scientist Cao can now brace himself for retractions, especially since he unwisely published a number of problematic papers in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. Where he already had to retract one in 2015, for massive data fakery.
There is a further follow-up, investigator Elisabeth Bik's own blog post, and commentary by Dr. Steven Novella.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 01 2019, @04:23PM (6 children)
It's worth noting that China is more worse off than most of those capitalist systems that are being decried as being corrupt, decadent, etc. Not much point to bragging about having a system that's "best of both worlds" when it's not. Demoting the Communist Party to just being another political party would go a fair ways to reducing the corruption in China presently.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 02 2019, @06:55AM (5 children)
I think you can only say this due to the hyper-normalization of corruption in our system.
For instance during the last presidency the bankers nearly destroyed not only our economy but the world-economy. And they did this largely by engaging in fraudulent behavior marking securities they knew to be junk as AAA and then leveraging them into infinity and beyond! Obama chose to not only hold 0 people accountable, but even gave them hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars in a bailout. After he left office these same people, among others, then gave him tens of millions of dollars via a proxy of 30 minute speeches. Even if you want to imagine this is not overt corruption, do you think these inevitable payouts had no impact on his decisions during office?
Similarly he also created a brand new position at the FDA, what he not-entirely-jokingly referred to as the 'Czar of Foods'. And he placed Michael R Taylor [wikipedia.org] into that seat he created. Mr. Taylor was Monsanto vice president, lobbyist, and lawyer. As Wiki notes one of his more well known early argument was that companies should be allowed to knowingly include at least a small amount of carcinogens into processed foods. Yip, this guy was in charge of food safety in the US for the better part of a decade. Again, this is a decision that seems very difficult to understand without some substantial behind the scenes deals being made.
Even now with the current impeachment. Somehow Mr. Biden's completely unqualified druggie of a son ended up on the board of a company in the Ukraine pulling in upwards of $50k/month where Dad was responsible for allocating billions of dollars in aid? And dad chose, as a condition of the release of some of that aid, the removal of a prosecutor had previously been investigating said company for corruption? I think people might want to handwave this away because of dislike of Trump, but there's just no way what was going on there was on the up-and-up.
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So I think it's not that we don't have extensive corruption, it's just that it's become so open and ubiquitous that we feel so powerless about it that we just kind of accept things like this as normal. They are not.
This does not mean that China is not corrupt, or even more corrupt. What it means is that they (as in their government) are actually trying to do something about it. Part of the reason Jinping has become so popular there is specifically because he cracked down [wikipedia.org] on corruption hard. More than 100,000 people have been indicted for corruption under him. This includes politicians at the highest level, high ranking military officers, and executives of major state owned corporations. And the penalties are real. A former Politburo Standing Committee (the most powerful political group in China below the president, made up of less than a dozen people) is now serving life in prison on corruption charges.
But this sort of crackdown can only happen when you put the nation ahead of yourself. For instance Zhou Yongkang [wikipedia.org] is now the aforementioned Politburo member serving life in prison. He was a multi-billionaire and one of the richest people in the world. If Jinping just wanted money, he could have gotten whatever he could imagine from that one person alone. Don't you find it interesting that when the ultra wealthy in the US go to prison, it's almost invariably for screwing over other ultra-wealthy (e.g. Madoff) yet basically never for corruption? Guess in spite of all the various degeneracy [wikipedia.org] our billionaires might engage in, none would dare risk trying to corrupt our political system. Well that or everybody's already so corrupt that charges are a nonstarter.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 02 2019, @07:44AM (1 child)
In China's system, you have to put potential opponents behind bars to solidify your own power. Fighting corruption is just an excuse for the purge, and it's a good one since it's popular with the public. Now that Xi Jinping is able to rule China until his death, the corruption will slowly come back, favoring his allies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 02 2019, @05:20PM
I've been unable to find any meaningful evidence for this assertion whatsoever.
I'd take the opposite view here. In particular any positive action from China has to be demonized in the western media. And indeed it is very possible for a corruption crackdown to be little more than a power consolidation. But in this case many of the biggest players were somewhat open with their corruption, but they were seen as untouchable. Again I would say this would be very similar to our system where we already know a ton of our politicians are corrupt. For instance Hillary Clinton and Dick Cheney are just two sides of the same coin. They're both incredibly corrupt, but also simply untouchable. In China, Jinping chose to touch the untouchables and received immense support for that.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 02 2019, @04:19PM (2 children)
Even though hyper-normalizing it to the Chinese extent would be worse?
That's a ridiculous exaggeration of the harm of the real estate crisis. Sure, it wasn't great, but the US and global economies would have recovered even without any attempt at addressing the problem (minus a lot of businesses responsible for the crisis!). Nor was the fraudulent behavior a fundamental part of the crisis - it was a symptom not a disease (here of excessive risk tolerance - why bother reducing fraud you can't see when you make massive profits anyway?). Nor did I claim the US didn't have serious corruption issues.
As long as the Communist Party gets to scoop the cream. No, I don't agree that the Chinese government is trying - demote the Communist Party, employ rule of law, create and enforce anti-corruption laws, etc.
Once again, I find it remarkable how a massive Chinese problem is excused because the US has it too, but not as bad.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 02 2019, @06:46PM (1 child)
You're missing the point on the housing market crash. The exact relevance of the fraudulent misclassification of the securities is irrelevant. What's relevant is that it did happen, and was one of many potentially criminal behaviors engaged in by the bankers. E.g. - take Capone. We couldn't bust him on murder and other charges, so we got him on tax evasion. He was a bad guy that needed to be put away. No idea what other crimes the bankers here we guilty of but they, without doubt, engaged in fraud for immense gain. And that alone is enough to send you away for a long long time. Yet instead of seeing jail cells, or even indictments, the bankers saw checks for billions of taxpayer dollars. That's corruption and it's become perfectly normalized in the US.
In China? I don't and probably can't know, for a fact, exactly how much or how little high level corruption they have. What I do know they are at least trying to combat it, and that's something that we desperately need to start copying.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 03 2019, @03:50AM
The problem is that the "many potentially criminal behaviors" of said bankers were a symptom not a disease. A market with less central bank-created credit and higher reserve requirements wouldn't have had that problem of excessive risk tolerance.
As to the matter of normalization, what has been normalized here is the breezy assertions that there's crime somewhere.
What makes you think you know that? The key to fighting corruption is transparency and rule of law. Chinese government isn't trying that and thus, isn't doing anything worth copying by the rest of the world.