Changtai Bridge over the Yangtze River
Beijing wants fewer experts “on paper” and more on the ground: prototypes and works become valid as engineering dissertations. There is already talk of expanding the program to Medicine.
In Nanjing, a doctoral candidate has just defended his degree without submitting the traditional dissertation lasting hundreds of pages. Instead, it introduced a new product.
Zheng Hehui invented reinforced steel blocks designed to fit together like Lego bricks and form the pillar of a large bridge.
According to , its solution is already being used on a railway and road bridge over the Yangtze River. It seems that Beijing wants fewer experts “on paper” and more on the ground.
Hehui’s case, evaluated at Southeast University, is one of a pilot vacancy for “practical doctorates” in engineering. Under a law approved in 2024, some universities in the country are now able to award doctoral degrees based on physical prototypes, new techniques, installations in large projects or other results of industrial impact, bypassing the classic thesis.
At a time of commercial and strategic tensions and rivalries with the USA, the Chinese government seeks “re-engineer” high-level training by training experts capable of resolving industrial bottlenecks and delivering hardware and processes in the field, not just writing scientific articles.
In recent years, China has invested heavily in the growth of its scientific system, with incentives that, in many institutions, mainly value the number of publications and associated metrics (such as citation indexes). This pressure, coupled with cash prizes and career progression tied to numbers, has helped create a parallel market for “paper mills”: networks that sell articles written by third parties, manufactured data or co-authorship places in reputable magazines. And the problem became difficult to ignore. In 2023, more than 10,000 academic articles were retracted around the world, a record, and analyzes showed a significant presence of Chinese co-authors among these studies, many of which were fraudulent.
In 2020, the central government announced that publication counts would no longer be the sole criteria for promotions and determined the end of cash rewards for articlesin addition to sanctions — including a temporary ban on requesting national funding — for cases of misconduct.
Critics of the old model, recalls ZME, started to talk about “paper generals”: researchers with impressive CVs in terms of metrics and successful applications for grants, but with fragile results when faced with practical needs.
The recent change also seeks to bring advanced training closer to market demands and strategic projects. Nanjing information scientist Li Jiang, cited by , describes a “big ditch” between the knowledge learned in books and the practical execution capacity that society needs.
Since September, at least 11 engineers will have obtained their doctorate through this route. What did they do to become doctors? Components for infrastructure to specialized fire-fighting systems for large seaplanes, for example. Wei Lianfeng, a researcher at the Nuclear Power Institute of China, was the first graduate from the Harbin Institute of Technology in the new format: instead of a thesis, he presented vacuum laser welding processes and the development of associated equipment.
In the last three years, around 50 engineering-oriented postgraduate schools will have been created; the program will have enrolled around 20 thousand students; and involves 60 universities and more than 100 companies. Tsinghua University, for example, has established partnerships with dozens of companies and reported hundreds of students involved in patent projects.
To prevent the new path from being seen as a shortcut, universities are also changing the supervision model. Instead of a single mentor, students work with a dual mentoring system: an academic supervisor and an industry mentor. The objective is also to respond to the weakness highlighted by Li Jiang: many engineering professors spent their careers in academia and never worked in industry.
Initial demand for the program suggests a growing uptake: dozens of students in the pilot programs will have already applied for the degree based on drawings, proposals and case reports. The expectation is that the reform will remain mainly in engineering and applied areas, although it may expand to hybrid fields such as advanced medical devices and intelligent diagnostics.
