A Peek Into the 'Black Box' of Where China’s Hefty R&D Budget Goes

The amount of money China spends annually on research and development has tripled since 1995—reaching $163 billion in 2012, or 1.98 percent of GDP. As China cracks down on corruption elsewhere in government, so too has Xi Jinping’s administration turned greater attention to curtailing massive graft in research fields—including arresting top scientists and administrators suspected of skimming off the top. In June, for instance, Song Maoqiang, former dean of Beijing University of Posts & Telecommunications’ school of computer science and technology, was given a harsh 10-year prison term for embezzling $110,000 in research funds.

One component of China’s campaign to clean up corruption is requiring central government agencies to disclose their annual research budgets. In the Aug. 29 issue of the journal Science, two researchers—based at China’s Dalian University of Technology and the U.K.’s University of Nottingham—mined and compiled available budget information to “open [up] the ‘black box’ of China’s government R&D expenditures.”