Nope, I am saying that Chinese science is not reliable. I'm not saying that they lie about all their science, or that no good science is done in China.
But when you have to go with your gut, and there are only two sources and one of them is Chinese, I would never reach a conclusion such as: "some new science has clearly been done here"
From the Chinese graduate students and professors that I have talked to the problems seems to be that it is really is to commit fraud and get a way with it.
In particular in some fields you can get rich writing grants, getting a considerable amount of money and writing fake papers.
There is a heavy temptation for many to do the same when all of their colleges are able to buy multiple houses and live an extravagant life style. An example from ~5-9 years ago would be a Chinese professor flying to California and buying a multi million dollar vacation house in cash. This is an extreme example and was uncommon even at the time.
My understanding is that this is not the case in all fields, it is easier to get a way with fraud in the less hard sciences supposedly. I also have read about several efforts over the last several years to try and correct matters.
It is also the case that many papers written by non-native english speakers suffer from grammar and spelling errors. Unfortunately incorrect grammar and or spelling often has a negative halo effect for many on the scientific content of the paper.
There is plenty of good science that comes out of China, however it suffers from a negative halo effect from the above sources.
I know some phd's here in the states... it's not much better. Seriously.
Lots of back scratching that goes on behind closed doors and lots of bogus papers that re-use old results or "recombine" old data in order to get funding for an actual project... really a lot of hogwash and bad science.
Nothing directly to cause fraud where I am tho. Tho I'm sure some publications are better about that than others.
There's cultural incentive to report results that are favorable even if they are wrong.
This has the unfortunate side effect that research coming out of China needs to be taken with a grain of salt and extra doubly carefully verified.
It's nothing the scientific method can't handle (we're seeing the start of the verification steps here), but knowing that lots of research coming out of China is misrepresented it introduces another layer of healthy skepticism that it needs to be verified before being accepted as a thing.
Suppose University of Shanghai produces a result, and the University of Beijing confirms it. Rather than accept the result, it's likely that before it's declared "SCIENCE!" a NASA or MIT or whoever is going to want to have verification from someplace that doesn't have a long history of misrepresenting scientific claims.
This is going to be treated differently than if the original work was done at say...CERN and the confirmation was done by CalTech.
I don't think NASA has the same credibility as an MIT or Caltech. From their arsenic-based lifeforms [1] to their D-Wave "quantum computer," [2] NASA seems to work on a lot of fringe science.
"There's cultural incentive to report results that are favorable even if they are wrong."
Indeed, but unfortunately in western capitalism there is sometimes a financial incentive to report results that aren't favourable even if they are wrong. A bit like what happened with the banks, or with tobacco companies.
But when you have to go with your gut, and there are only two sources and one of them is Chinese, I would never reach a conclusion such as: "some new science has clearly been done here"