China has a plan to win the technological race that began more than 40 years ago, when it decided to invest in training millions of engineers. We saw this in the hiring of the Meta superintelligence team, where the vast majority are Chinese. Chinese universities have a new plan to further accelerate the awarding of doctorates, in which theory takes a back seat to focus on practice.
What is happening. This is reported by the South China Morning Post. China is implementing a new policy that affects STEM students who wish to obtain a PhD. The PhD or “doctor of philosophy” degree is the highest academic degree that can be obtained and, until now, required the writing of a thesis. With this change, initiated by Harbin University of Technology, engineers can obtain a PhD by developing real products and systems.
First case. The first student to obtain a PhD based on practical results was Wei Lianfeng, in September last year. He graduated from university in 2008 and began working at the Chinese Institute of Nuclear Energy, where he worked for more than ten years before deciding to return to university to obtain his doctorate, which he received for his results in the development of a vacuum laser welding system. To evaluate his work, the committee that attended the oral defence was composed of industry experts.
Why this is important. Training technical personnel has been a priority for China for decades, and recently, efforts in this direction have been redoubled. In 2022, the government launched a programme to promote STEM education, especially in strategic areas such as semiconductors and quantum computing. One of the key points of the plan was close cooperation between companies and universities in the area of joint learning.
This measure is the culmination of this strategy and the recognition that theoretical knowledge is not enough to compete in the technological race, especially given the US blockade of key technologies. This allows China to solve the problem of a shortage of high-level engineers; it is not just a matter of training more engineers, but also of preparing them as quickly as possible and with solutions that can be applied in the real world, rather than hundreds of pages of dissertations.
STEM potential. Encouraging the training of engineers and scientists is part of a long-term government plan that began in the post-Maoist era. And the plan is going very well. If we focus only on doctorates, according to data from 2023, China awarded 51,000 doctorates (PhDs) in STEM, while the US awarded 34,000. According to forecasts at the time, this number was expected to increase to 77,000 by 2025.
As for the total number, in 2020, China was already the country that produced the most graduates in STEM fields worldwide, with a huge advantage: 3.57 million compared to 2.55 million in India and 822,000 in the US. Currently, China already has 5.8 million graduates, and according to estimates, more than 40% of all graduates choose a career in STEM.
