Chinese PhD Dissertations: Many Citations, Little Innovation

"Ask a university undergraduate "how do you cook Braised Pork?" and they will tell you to "take the pork and fry it in a pot". Ask the same question to a Masters student and they will give you a list of the ingredients involved in making the dish and detailed instructions for its preparation. Ask a PhD student, and they will hand you a books-worth of pages in response, where the first chapter is titled “How does one raise pigs”. In Chinese universities this is a popular joke, as it indirectly mocks the value of the typical Chinese PhD dissertation: it is too long, loaded down with trivial details, and has little academic merit. If you have read a Chinese PhD dissertation in recent years, regardless of academic discipline, you probably noticed that it was, perhaps unnecessarily, long (200+ pages). Recently, an academic named Gao Bolong wrote "An Open Letter to Universities, Professors, and Ph.D. Students Nationwide" in which he raised this point: "In my recent reading PhD dissertations, the number of pages seems to be increasing...ten years ago the average was less than 100 pages, now most are over 200 pages. Does a thick dissertation automatically make you a world-class scholar?""


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