In their editorial titled “China’s Research Culture” (Yigong Shi and Yi Rao, Science, 2010, 329, 1128), Shi and Rao pointed out the major drawback in China’s research that the building a good connection with bureaucrats and their favorite scientists, also called the evaluation experts in China, is more important than doing high quality research. At the end of the editorial, Shi and Rao made a very good suggestion for an improved funding process for the future. However, in my opinion, their suggestion will be a nice wish that will not come true in the framework of the culture. The reason is that they did not put forward an effective way to break the current conventions.

In fact, most researchers know the China’s research culture and have a love-hate relationship with it. They often criticize the culture in public but try to find ways to integrate themselves into the culture on the sly. They almost totally attribute the generation of this clique culture to the bureaucratic management system. Unfortunately, they are barking on the wrong tree.

The generation of the culture cannot be attributed only to bureaucrats, although a lot of people like to think so. The basic rule of bureaucrats is not to make mistakes and not to make decisions that will jeopardize their careers. However, they shoulder heavy responsibilities that make substantial demands on their personal abilities. They need scientists to share their heavy responsibilities through the use of a peer-review system consisting of panels of the experts. They can make their decisions on the proposed grant applications based on the evaluations of the quality of the proposal scientists. In this system, all mistakes will be attributed to the panels as a whole but not to any individual, which will not jeopardize the careers of either the bureaucrats or the experts.

Thus, it is really the group of the experts that has led to the china’s current research culture. Since those experts take away the major responsibilities from the bureaucrats, they obtain privileges in return. For example, they have the chance to determine the annual funding guidelines based on their own fields of studies, which is the reason why Shi and Rao complained about the narrowly defined guidelines. They often approve the grant applications of persons who have good connections with them instead of basing decisions on the scientific merit of the proposals, demonstrating other researchers the importance of making good connections with the panel members. Some of them take the opportunity to punish their detractors simply by rejecting their grant applications year after year exposing the darker side of this culture.

The reason that those experts can perform above ways is that the China’s peer-review system of grant application has both open and closed characteristics. When grant application reviewing starts, the names of the experts should be kept secret to prevent favor-seeking of people with grant proposals under review. Ironically, their names are soon known by most of researchers in this way and another. On the other hand, the experts can give any comments on a grant application whether they know the scientific merits or not. The authoritative of the experts will not be challenged because the applicants will never know the comments come from which of the experts when they finally get a feedbacks on their applications. Every year, some researchers publish the feedbacks on their grant application over the internet but this action has no effect on improving the system because of the special research culture.

The major issue is that the experts are busy establishing the connections instead of concentrating on scientific study. Some of them cannot stay current with developments in their own study field and thus lose the ability to evaluate some proposals. However, their positions will not be changed because of their relation with the bureaucrats. Any attempt to change the culture by changing the bureaucrats’ system will encounter tremendous resistance because it will threaten the authority of the Government. It is not a realistic option to abandon the peer-review system because most of the experts are qualified and believable. On the face of it, there seems no way to change the bad culture.

Fortunately, there is a potential way to remodel the China’s research culture. Based on the present situation, the best way is to establish an open peer-review system. In the system, both the names of the experts and their comments on grants applications are open to all researchers. Their evaluations will be analyzed by all researchers, which forces the experts to focus on the scientific merits of the grants applications instead of personal connections. I am sure that the experts will get admirations from other researchers instead of feuds if they really provide sound scientific evaluation of the grants applications no matter from whom the application are submitted. This kind of system will not impair the management of bureaucrats so should not be objections from the Government. We will not worry about the candidates of the peer-review system either. There are a large number of scientists who have both integrity and capacity. They are the people who can remodel the China’s research culture.