China universities waste millions, fail to make real use of research, audit finds in indictment of tech-sufficiency drive

Universities in a southern Chinese region are not doing enough to turn academic research into market applications, and in maintaining large piles of idle funds, and the findings could raise questions about the nation’s ambitious tech self-sufficiency drive.

According to a new audit report by the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region for 2022, nine universities in the region had extremely low conversion rates in bringing inventions to the market – below 1 per cent – from 2020 to 2022. Among them, one university saw no successful industrial applications out of 862 implemented research projects funded with a total of 131 million yuan (US$143 million).