Japanese immunologist Takusu Honjo and American scientist James P. Allison shared the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Japan has altogether won 18 Nobel Prizes since entering the 21st century. While marveling at Japanese achievements, we can't help but think how far China has to go to become a “Nobel frequenter”?

For that, we should take a sober and dialectical look at the Noble Prize. On the one hand, as the world’s most renowned award, it is still an impartial recognition of the research capabilities of a country. On the other hand, it is by no means the most authoritative or the only criterion of research achievements. Not to mention the harshly criticized fact that the Nobel Committee has long focused on Western countries.

The average age at which the laureates made the breakthrough achievements is 37, but they tend to be awarded the Nobel Prizes much later, when in many cases their achievements no longer represent the ever-changing research trends.

What's more, many decisions in the Nobel history were proved mistakes or deviations later on. Therefore, we should not be too focused on the Nobel Prize.

Before answering the question raised at the beginning, however, we should shift our focus to the basic research policy and input.

Since the reform and opening-up, the Chinese government has attached huge importance to basic research and major frontier research, with more labs built, talents nurtured and instruments developed.

In 2012, an innovation-driven development strategy was unveiled at the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. Since then the central government has been giving even greater support to basic research.

Take basic research-related polices for example. The National Guideline for Science and Technology Development 1978-1985 identified major areas , emerging technologies and leading disciplines, and listed them as top priorities. The guideline was renewed and put forward that from 1986 to 2000 the national sci-tech policy would stay committed to basic research.

A new medium- and long-term program in this regard was launched and it was emphasized that original innovation would be promoted from 2006 to 2020.

Then, in 2018, the State Council issued a specific document on basic research, providing further support for basic research, talent nurturing, international cooperation and mechanism building.

With these policies, China has scored notable results in basic science in recent years. The world’s first quantum science experiment satellite Mozi was launched by China; the 500-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope was put into use, with the intellectual property rights owned by China; and a new brain atlas was mapped out by the Institute of Automation of Chinese Academy of Sciences.

These achievements can be attributed to the coherent policies on basic science and the efforts of numerous researchers.

Meanwhile, we have every reason to be confident of China’s prospects of winning Nobel Prizes. And we should have patience with the long “input-output” cycle of research and the time needed by the academic community to make fair judgment of certain achievements.

Fortunately, after 40 years of reform and opening-up, China has nurtured a rich reservoir of research factors. And a large number of research achievements have been translated, commercialized and accepted and reviewed by world academics. As China’s overall strength and voice keep enlarging, the world is on the way to giving China's research a fair and positive response. So, it is quite likely then that many Chinese scholars and experts will be awarded the prize, of whom Tu Youyou maybe just a fore-runner.

Meanwhile, to enhance our competitiveness when it comes to Nobel Prizes, in addition to the policy support and financial input, the Chinese government needs to take more actions at the macro-level and focus on resolving salient issues of research environment and talent training.

In terms of fostering a favorable research environment, the Chinese government issued a document on further enhancing research integrity in 2018, which aims to create an honest environment for research. On this basis, we should focus on building a sound evaluation mechanism for scientific research achievements, and implementing an income distribution policy based on the value of knowledge, and improving the chain from values to achievements evaluation. Then we will be able to establish a healthy research environment with powerful endogenous incentive.

In terms of nurturing talent, we can see the great value local governments have attached to the war of attracting talent they waged last year.

In 2018 the Ministry of Education published Opinions on Accelerating the Improvement of Undergraduate Education and Promoting All-round Capability of Nurturing Talent, with the aim to set up a high-caliber talent nurturing system. While improving the mechanism of training traditional talent, the Chinese government has also expanded the scope of talent training.

In February 2019, the State Council issued the implementation plan on national vocational education, which places vocational education at a more important position. With time and patience, China will surely have a more sound training mechanism for both research and application fields.

So, we have enough reason to be optimistic about China's prospect of becoming a Nobel frequenter.

Wang Su is a researcher of Policy and Law Research Institute, China Center for Information Industry Development.

The author contributed this article to China Watch exclusively. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of China Watch.

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