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(Global Times) 09:51, October 28, 2013

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"I was so stunned, angry and distressed." It is rare to hear such words from a senior Chinese official uttered publicly. China's science minister even repeated the word "angry" early this month to express his anxiety over academic corruption.

What shocked Wan Gang, minister of Ministry of Science and Technology (MST), were two major graft cases that he revealed authorities were now working on at a press conference on October 11. Although Wan didn't give details, he said the cases involved abuse of power and the embezzlement of huge amounts of funds by a well-known environmental scientist and a senior science official.

Last month, former head of the Guangdong Provincial Department of Science and Technology, Li Xinghua, was removed from his post. It is believed that Li's fall was connected to a large number of research projects in the LED industry which were under his control for the past few years, according to Guangzhou-based Time Weekly.

According to a recent national science and technology funds report from the National Bureau of Statistics, China's total annual investment in research and development (R&D) last year exceeded 1 trillion yuan ($164 billion) for the first time and had increased annually by 20 percent over the past five years.

There is no doubt that the Chinese government's generous input shows its firm determination to promote the development of science and technology as a national strategy. In theory, this should allow China to make truly outstanding progress in scientific research. But it is an embarrassing fact that the growing corruption caused by a faulty scientific funding system has become an unexpected obstacle for the country's scientific and technological advancement.

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After returning from the US in 1990 as a winner of the Chang Jiang Scholars Program, which was set up by the Ministry of Education to attract outstanding scholars to China, Chen Liangyao became the founding director of the School of Information Science and Engineering at Fudan University. However, over the past two decades, he has not been able to get a single project funded from the National Program on Key Basic Research Projects (973 Program), despite trying every year until his retirement.

The 63-year-old professor told the Global Times that he didn't lose out because of a lack of academic qualifications or sufficient preparations, but because of the irrational application system.

According to Chen, grants for most scientific research projects in China come from the government. More specifically, they come from two sources, the MST and its local branches, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), which was established under the ratification of the State Council.

A report from the NSFC, the major national fund supporting scientific research in China, showed the organization only invested 80 million yuan annually for the entire country's scientific research development when it was established in 1986, but last year, the number had surged to more than 23.6 billion yuan.

In 2012, the NSFC had accepted more than 177,000 applications for project funding nationwide, a 70 percent increase compared to five years ago. Over 38,000 projects were chosen to share 23.6 billion yuan in funds.