The rising number of highly cited papers produced by China should be treated with scepticism because Beijing will use these impressive metrics to push science in a direction that suits the superpower¡¯s national interests, a policy analyst has warned.

Speaking at an event to mark King¡¯s College London¡¯s China Week, Sophia Gaston, head of foreign policy and UK resilience at Policy Exchange, an influential centre-right UK thinktank, said China had sought to increase the citation scores of its research papers because a higher global standing would allow its researchers to influence the future path of science.

Citations are ¡°used in claims of legitimacy in regulation and governance,¡± Ms Gaston told an audience on 16 October, adding that this kind of influence over scientific rules and sector norms was ¡°not in our interest because China¡¯s intention is to overhaul the liberal global order that we have helped to create¡±.

Her warning comes as China rose to become the , accounting for 27 per cent of top 1 per cent cited papers, ahead of the US, which produced 24 per cent of most-cited papers.

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¡°There is not an area on which China does not make a strategic assessment of national interest so, until the day that we also do this, we cannot make the case [for full collaboration] with open hearts and minds,¡± continued Ms Gaston, a at the University of Oxford, who warned that UK researchers were ¡°not aware of all the risks¡± they faced when working with Chinese scholars.

Scholars working with Chinese peers should bear in mind that China is a ¡°surveillance state¡± and ¡°authoritarian superpower¡­where there is no separation between the state and the individual¡±, argued Ms Gaston, adding that China had demonstrated it would ¡°always put national interests before global interests¡±.

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¡°In the pandemic, the Chinese state absconded from its responsibilities to the global community in actively seeking to suppress information and deny it from the global scientific community,¡± she said.

The UK and academia needed to take a ¡°wartime footing¡± over China ¡°because what we are trying to defend is existential to us,¡± Ms Gaston said.

The huge reliance of UK universities on income from Chinese students was particularly misguided, she explained, arguing that the ¡°government will need take a bigger role in funding the sector¡±.

¡°How is it possible that we have a quarter of our international student fees coming from a country which we have decided is an epoch-defining systemic threat to our country?¡± asked Ms Gaston, echoing Rishi Sunak¡¯s introduction to the recently updated?.

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The event also heard from international higher education consultant Michael Natzler, now based at Yenching University in Beijing, who said academics and civil servants should be briefed on China¡¯s strategies to gain intellectual property from the West.

¡°Getting people to [acquire middling Mandarin] will not help people to engage with China,¡± he said, adding that a ¡°deeper awareness of China and how it engages [with the West] is more important¡±.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com