CHINA / National

China vows to clean up science funding after scandal
(Reuters)
Updated: 2006-06-08 09:35

China has promised to make scientific research spending more accountable in the wake of a scandal that toppled a senior scientist, the official Xinhua news agency said.

An official from the Ministry of Science and Technology said state science funding would be reformed as the country aims to increase expenditure on research and development to 2 percent of gross domestic product by 2010.

China spent 1.23 percent of its GDP on research and development last year, experts say.

Xinhua said in a report late on Wednesday "the scientific community is seriously concerned about how to allocate such large public funds".

Last month, Chen Jin, a US educated dean at Shanghai's prestigious Jiaotong University, was fired for falsely claiming to have invented a new type of computer chip.

His sacking followed the release of an open letter from a group of 120 Chinese scientists working in the United States that urged tighter procedures for handling scientific misconduct in China and said there were increased claims of such fraud.

Chen may have squandered "tens of millions yuan of public funds under the state hi-tech R&D programme", Xinhua reported.

Xu Jianguo, the science and technology ministry official in charge of state research funds, said China would make research spending more transparent by inviting bids for projects online and building a database of funding candidates and expert panels to assess them.