The Shape of Code

China and the Future of Science is the title of a recent article on the blog The Scholar’s Stage. In a series of posts the author, Tanner Greer, has been discussing how Chairman Xi and the Chinese central committee have reoriented the party towards a new goal. In 2026, the aim of China’s communist enterprise is to lead humanity through what they call “the next round of techno scientific revolution and industrial transformation.”.

The Chinese view is that: the first industrial revolution happened in Britain, which was the most powerful country of the 19th century; the second and third (computers) industrial revolutions happened in the USA, which was the most powerful country of the 20th century; the fourth industrial revolution is going to happen in China, which is going to be the most powerful country of the 21st century.

This is a software engineering blog, so I will leave the discussion of any fourth industrial revolution and whether China will lead it to others.

One practical consequence of the Chinese central committee’s focus is lots of funding for science/engineering research, and Chinese academics incentivised to do world-class work. How do you measure an individual’s or institution’s research performance? The Chinese have adopted the Western metric, i.e., counting papers published (weighted by journal impact factor) and number of citations. In 2025, eight of the top ten universities in the CWTS Leiden Ranking are Chinese, with the top western university in the number three spot and the other appearing at number ten. In 2005, six of the top ten universities were in the US.

In a post reviewing software engineering in 2023, I said: “it was very noticeable that many of the authors of papers at major conferences had Asian names. I would say that, on average, papers with Asian author names were better than papers by authors with non-Asian names.”

If software engineering researchers in China are publishing highly cited papers, why am I not seeing blog posts discussing them or hearing people talk about them? The answer is the same for Chinese and Western papers, i.e., little or no industrial relevance (when I point this out to academics they tell me that their work will be found to be relevant in years to come; ha ha {at least in software engineering}).

I label much of the research in software engineering as butterfly-collecting, in the sense that project source code is collected (often via GitHub) and various characteristics are measured and discussed. Much like the biological world was studied 200 years ago. There is no over arching theory, or attempt to model the relationships between different collections.

The incentives have pushed Chinese researchers, in software engineering, to become better butterfly collectors than Western researchers. Also, like Western researchers, they are mostly analysing the data using pre-computer statistical techniques.

If the aim is to publish papers and attract citations, it makes sense for Chinese researchers to study the same topics as Western researchers and analyse the data using the same (pre-computer) statistical techniques. Papers are more likely to be accepted for publication by Westerner reviewers when the subject matter is familiar to those reviewers. There are many tales of researchers having problems publishing papers that introduce new ideas and techniques.

The Central committee don’t just want to appear to be leading the world in engineering research, they want the Chinese to be making the discoveries that enable China to be the most powerful country in the world. For software engineering this means some Chinese researchers must stop following the research agenda set by their Western counterparts, and start asking “what are the important problems in software engineering“, and then researching those problems. If they are effective, a few will be enough.

My Evidence-based Software Engineering book lists and organises some of possible questions to ask, and also contains examples of modern statistical analysis.

China has lots of very good researchers. Perhaps they have all been sucked into the mania vortex around LLMs, and we will have to wait for things to subside. Remember, major discoveries are often made by small group of people.