SocietyIssue #1

China Awards PhDs for Products, Not Papers

China now lets engineers earn PhDs through deployed technology instead of journal papers. How the Practical PhD model is changing doctoral education.

Oswarld (Kwangseob Ahn)· Writer & editor of INLEVEL9

China Awards PhDs for Products, Not Papers

Opening

Dear subscribers, last January an engineer defended his doctoral degree at Southeast University in Nanjing, China. There was no conference paper. No journal publication. Instead, he explained to the examiners the “reinforced steel Lego blocks” he had developed. The technology was actually used in the construction of the Changtai Yangtze River Bridge, the world’s longest cable-stayed bridge1.

When the science journal Nature reported the case in February, academia around the world took notice. A PhD without papers—can that really happen? And why now?

Today I want to unpack China’s emerging “Practical PhD” system and consider what it says about the meaning of degrees in the age of AI.

What happened: the birth of the paperless PhD

The protagonist is a civil engineer named Zheng Hehui. The pylon2 he developed is a steel structure assembled like Lego blocks to form bridge piers. It is credited with shortening construction time and improving quality compared with conventional concrete pouring methods.

In fact, Zheng was not the first practical PhD. That distinction had already gone to Wei Lianfeng, a researcher at the China Nuclear Power Design Institute, who received his degree from Harbin Institute of Technology in September 2025 for developing a vacuum laser welding process and equipment. According to Nature, at least 11 engineers have earned doctorates through this route since September 2025. Their achievements include developing firefighting systems for large seaplanes and advanced welding technologies.

The important point is that this is not an experiment by one or two universities. It is a state-level reform. In 2022, the Chinese government instructed major universities to establish engineering graduate schools. In 2024, it revised the law to allow master’s and doctoral students to graduate on the basis of practical outputs. Today, 50 engineering graduate schools have been newly established, with 60 universities and more than 100 companies participating. Roughly 20,000 students are enrolled in the programs.

Why now: three structural forces

This change did not come out of nowhere. At least three structural forces are converging.

First, AI is unsettling the meaning of academic writing. We now live in a world where generative AI can draft papers, survey literature, and even analyze data. Studies are also finding that existing plagiarism-detection tools struggle to identify whether a text was written by AI. In other words, the paper as a form is losing some of its original function: proving the capacity for original research.

Second, the U.S.–China contest for technological supremacy has accelerated the timetable. China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has said explicitly that the system is designed to cultivate innovative talent in critical industries such as AI and semiconductors. The underlying judgment is clear: in fields such as semiconductors and quantum computing, where theory alone will not overcome U.S.-led technology restrictions, China needs engineers who can build working technologies.

Third, the quantitative expansion of doctoral degrees has created a qualitative crisis. In South Korea alone, the number of domestic doctoral degree recipients rose from about 9,400 in 2008 to about 18,700 in 2024—nearly doubling. China’s numbers are far larger. The more PhDs there are, the weaker the degree’s differentiating power becomes. We are entering an era in which expertise must be proven not by numbers, but by the question: what can you actually do?

But is this really sound?: the unresolved questions

To be candid, academia has plenty of concerns about this system.

The core issue is fairness in evaluation. Sun Yutao, a professor at Dalian University of Technology, told Nature that judging excellent technology—and whether that technology will deliver a real industrial leap—is far harder than assessing an excellent paper. Papers at least have a verification system in peer review3 that has accumulated over more than a century. There is still no agreed framework for assessing the “excellence” of a product.

Another question is scalability. For now, the system applies only to engineering. Professor Sun also saw little chance of extending it to fields such as basic science, where theory is central. That said, some observers think there may be room for application in hybrid fields where the boundary between engineering and science is blurring, such as medical-device design or intelligent diagnostic systems.

And we cannot ignore conflicts of interest in industry–academic collaboration. The core of the practical PhD program is a dual-adviser system: one academic professor and one industry expert supervise the student together. Li Jiang, a researcher at Nanjing University, has noted that the quality of education depends on whether the industry practitioners hired by universities are sufficiently capable. The key will be balancing the training of “skilled workers” tailored to companies’ immediate needs with the cultivation of “experts” capable of independent thought.

Oz’s Lens

I see this less as a “crisis of the degree system” than as a shift in how expertise is proven.

Over the years I have met many experts. In real-world practice, the people who are genuinely respected are not determined by their degrees. The central question is: “What has this person actually built, and what problems have they solved?”

Paradoxically, the degree system has not reflected that well. The paper is an excellent tool for showing “the ability to conduct research,” but it does not always map neatly onto “the ability to solve real-world problems.” What makes China’s experiment interesting is that it is the first large-scale attempt to institutionally close that gap.

Still, I do have concerns. It would be dangerous if this system were simplified into the message that “papers are unnecessary.” The more accurate interpretation is not that the paper as a form has become useless, but that there are domains where papers alone are not enough. In basic science, the value of papers remains absolute.

Ultimately, I think the PhD of the future is likely to split into three tracks: the traditional PhD for basic research, the practical doctorate based on real-world outputs, and a hybrid of the two. What matters is that, whichever track is chosen, the rigor required to prove “you really are an expert in this field” must be preserved. The format of evaluation may change. The standard of evaluation must not fall.

Closing

To sum up: China’s practical PhD system is the first national-scale challenge to the paper-centered model of degree evaluation. Behind it are the research environment reshaped by AI, the pressure of technological competition, and the quantitative expansion of doctoral degrees. The core question is not “paper or product,” but the need to build a new social consensus around how expertise should be proven.

If this topic interests you, I recommend starting with the original Nature article below. It lays out the details of the China case clearly. You may also want to watch the Oswarld’s Knowledge Talking video, which goes deeper into the subject.

📎 References & Further Reading

The author, Kwangseob Ahn, is a professor in the Department of Business Administration at Sejong University and lead consultant at OBF(Oswarld Boutique Consulting Firm). At the university, he teaches statistics and data analysis, including business data management and business analytics. In the field, he leads consulting on GTM strategy and artificial-intelligence strategy, designing the intersection between technology and business. He has published an academic paper on the memory architecture of AI dialogue systems, HEMA, and runs Daily Arxiv, a project that curates global AI papers every day. He completed a master’s program at Korea University’s Graduate School of Management of Technology and the Korea MBA. His books include 《People Who Outsource Their Thinking: Homo Brainless》.

Footnotes

  1. Cable-stayed bridge: A bridge type in which cables run diagonally from towers above the piers to support the deck. It looks similar to a suspension bridge, but the structural principle is different. ↩

  2. Pylon: A steel structure used in transmission towers or bridge piers. The pylon developed by Zheng Hehui is distinctive because it can be assembled in modular form, like Lego. Yes, it is also the etymological source of that Protoss thing. ↩

  3. Peer review: The process by which experts in the same field evaluate the quality of an academic paper before it is published in a journal. It is a core mechanism for ensuring scholarly credibility and has served as academia’s quality-control system for hundreds of years. ↩

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