(ECNS) -- China has been increasing research and development (R&D) investment at an annual rate of 20 percent in the past few years, however, about 60 percent of funding has been spent on meetings and business trips, China Enterprise News reported on Tuesday.
According to official statistics, China's R&D expenditure totaled 1.33 trillion yuan ($203 billion) in 2014, the paper said. In 2012, Xu Heping, an official with the Ministry of Science and Technology told reporters that the country's R&D investment will not be less than 1.5 trillion yuan in 2015, which means China's investment in R&D based on purchasing power parity will be close to that of the United States this year.
However, last year the Ministry of Education disclosed four major cases of R&D funding fraud involving five university teachers and more than 16 million yuan.
In another case, 283,600 yuan involving 1,505 one-way train tickets from various places to Jiamusi in the name of business trips were reimbursed, taking up nearly half of the allocated 570,000-yuan funding for two tourism research programs from 2008 to 2011.
Li Ping, a Beijing-based lawyer said that fabricated budgets, false invoices and accounting fraud were used in the embezzlement of funds, "Which was not wise at all." The paper blames loopholes in fund management and insufficient supervision.
Sun Hua, a researcher in the coal industry, also told the paper R&D fund allocation is not transparent and that relevant rules are not always well implemented.
Recently, the Ministry of Finance and National Natural Science Foundation of China jointly issued a new rule on national science fund management.
The new rule will mean "A historic turn in the management of the country's investment in science and technology," according to Liu Haihong from Shanxi University of Finance and Economics. Li said it will surely help improve the utilization rate of China's R&D funds.
The country's annual trillion-yuan R&D investment will bring full momentum to the national science and technology development, it was added.
