When Policy Meets Practice: Evaluating Breaking Five-Only Policy Through Academic Production in China

Tensions between policies and practices have long been studied. When the Breaking Five-Only Policy was issued in October 2020 in China, it was a cause for controversy and debate among scholars and educators. Take the publications-only or S/SCI paper supremacy policy, for example; the proposed policy encourages scholars and educators to publish their papers in domestic journals instead of international or S/SCI-indexed journals. However, scholars and educators have reported that it is even more challenging to publish in domestic journals for various reasons. We thus examined this dilemma by comparing journal metrics of 12 Chinese journals and 12 English ones in the same field. Specifically, we studied how academic publications had been measured in terms of statistics and parameters, including the title ranks, funds, and university ranks of the authors, typically in the Chinese context. We set up different hypotheses, analyzed the data, reported the quantitative findings, and tested the proposed hypotheses. Then, we discussed our results and argued that coercive and authoritarian accountability, quantity over quality, and ever-increased involution are major forces that drive the audit culture with regard to academic performance in the Chinese context. We concluded the paper with hidden tensions between the policy and reality and advocated for continued efforts for policy implementation and reform.