29/06/2025
TOP ACADEMIC PAPER OF 21ST CENTURY WRITTEN BY BEIJING BOFFINS
The top cited academic paper of the 21st century was written by four Chinese scientists in Beijing in 2015-2016, a new study at Nature revealed today.
But the east-west collaboration that produced it is under attack.
The researchers, Kaiming He, Xiangyu Zhang, Shaoqing Ren, and Jian Sun, published results about “deep residual learning” networks—a study that would eventually lead to the development of AI tools.
“The proposed residual connections are now being used everywhere in modern deep learning models, including Transformers (e.g., ChatGPT), AlphaGo Zero, AlphaFold, and virtually all GenAI models today, among many others,” said Kaiming He, who now lives in the US.
The Beijing paper was cited more often that any other paper, between 103,756 to 254,074 times, depending on how the citations are counted, the report said. This gives it the crown of most-cited paper of this century.
ENTER THE POLITICIANS
But this story has a sad ending. The paper came from Chinese staff at a Microsoft research lab, opened in Beijing 1998, a subsidiary of Microsoft Research Asia. This was a time when the demonization of China was general background noise – not big enough to build walls between educators and researchers east and west.
The paper in question was first published in the international “pre-print” system in 2015.
But, from 2017 onwards, the demonization of China, led by the Five Eyes espionage agencies supplying stories to the western mainstream media, went into overdrive. This created a wildly artificial narrative of a dangerously dystopian, expansionist China engaged in genocidal practices, and plotting to invade Australia.
PROPAGANDA PROGRAM
The heavy propaganda program coincided with a series of witch-hunts against Chinese scientists and academic institutions in the US (and UK and Australia to some extent), gradually building barriers against the international collaboration which is the lifeblood of scientific progress.
In May of 2024, Microsoft bowed to pressure, and offered relocation options to more than 700-China based AI staff—in effect, taking many of China’s best and brightest to the US. Earlier this year, the US firm shut down an AI and “Internet of Things” laboratory in Shanghai.
JOE MCCARTHY IS BACK
On Friday this week, a virulently China-hostile US publication called National Interest named many of the successful Chinese scientists who worked with the Microsoft China project in a report which had a classic “Reds Under The Beds” tone.
“Many alumni of Microsoft Research Asia have used their expertise to develop technologies that enable oppression, censorship, and genocide,” it said.
POLITICIZED BLOCS
The fundamental problem with the disturbingly McCarthyite Five Eyes’ position is that science cannot be divided into politicized blocs.
If a Chinese physicist discovers a new particle, for example, it is patently ridiculous for the west to pretend it doesn’t exist. Science doesn’t work that way.
Yet that is precisely how the west now plays the game. In February 2022, the Journal of Molecular Structure said it would no longer publish papers from scientists working at Russian Federation institutions. The European Commission suspended all co-operation with Russian entities in research, science and innovation, in April of that year.
WESTERN SELF-HARM
Such insane actions can only harm the west – and yet they are taking place regularly, with literally no pushback from the corporate media, which is not performing its watchdog function.
Science itself is now in the hands of anti-science politicians in the west: people literally paid by the military industrial complex. And that’s bad news for everyone.
Fortunately, scientists themselves often choose to ignore the politics, and get on with their work. In AI, this tends to mean that the west provides the money and Chinese people do the research—which is why they made such an important breakthrough in AI in Beijing in 2015.
