With a few exceptions, most of the claims coming out of Chinese reserach is immediately suspect. For decades claims were irreproducible or the work not of high quality.
It's certainly improved, and there are a few institutions that produce high quality work, but they make up a few percent of the total coming out of China.
No doubt the quality will continue to improve, but no more than any other developing country.
The number of papers from Chinese teams getting accepted into the top international journals paints a different picture.
Chinese scientists are now publishing more papers in journals like Nature and Science than American scientists are. Those are journals with very difficult peer-reviewing and editorial thresholds.
Counting papers in top journals isn’t a great measure. While top journals do have high standards, not all papers are equal.
I got published in a Nature journal but my paper was not groundbreaking by any means. You have groundbreaking research and you have “we made a slight, but important modification to an existing technology”.
In my area of physical sciences, the big breakthroughs are still coming from the US and Europe.
1. Chinese researchers are catching up and increasingly producing good papers.
and:
2. There is a lot of low-quality junk science spam coming out of China.
Are entirely compatible. Both can be true at the same time.
I don't really know about scientific papers, but the high number of Chinese patents is generally considered a fairly useless metric files mostly for "CV reasons" rather than representing any genuine invention (see e.g. [1]). But here too, "China is producing tons of trash patents" and "China is catching up on innovation" are entirely compatible.
With a few exceptions, most of the claims coming out of Chinese reserach is immediately suspect. For decades claims were irreproducible or the work not of high quality.
It's certainly improved, and there are a few institutions that produce high quality work, but they make up a few percent of the total coming out of China.
No doubt the quality will continue to improve, but no more than any other developing country.