Practical focus on prototypes, not paper writing

Last month, Zheng Hehui, an engineering doctoral candidate at Southeast University in Nanjing, stood before a panel to defend his doctorate. Instead of presenting a traditional thesis, Zheng showcased a set of Legolike blocks of reinforced steel that snap together to support a bridge pylon. The committee granted him a PhD anyway.

Zheng is not an anomaly. He is the product of a new policy in China.

Under China's law on academic degrees, passed in 2024 and effective since January 2025, doctoral candidates in engineering can now defend a "practice achievement" — such as a prototype, technique or deployed system — instead of a written dissertation. According to the Ministry of Education, more than 60 postgraduate students have graduated this way, with thousands more enrolled across dozens of universities working alongside industry partners. One earned a doctorate for a vacuum-laser-welding system built on a factory floor, after a decade spent as a technician.

The reform reflects China's broader effort to better align higher education with the needs of advanced manufacturing and technological innovation. China is racing to close talent gaps in fields — advanced manufacturing, semiconductors, robotics — where traditional paper credentials can't tell employers enough about the candidate. A law that lets an engineer graduate on the strength of a deployed bridge component, rather than a dissertation defense, directly addresses that gap.

The modern PhD system, a 19th-century German innovation, traditionally separates scholarship from craft. The dissertation has long been proof that one had added original knowledge to a discipline, not merely built something useful within it. This academic hierarchy has influenced research universities in the United States and the United Kingdom and continues to shape tenure and promotion decisions today, where citation counts and journal placement often outrank patents filed or products shipped.

China's practical doctorate does not challenge this hierarchy. It circumvents it by channeling State resources, prestige and career advancement through practical achievements. This fundamentally changes what a government recognizes as expertise — and, by extension, what millions of young engineers will try to optimize in their careers.

A precedent for this policy came from a classroom two decades before it became national law. In 2006, at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, robotics professor Li Zexiang admitted a graduate student based on a practical project. Convinced about the student's potential, even though the helicopter flight-control system he built through sleepless nights had failed its live demonstration, Li admitted Wang Tao. The company Wang built in a dorm room, DJI, now commands roughly 70 percent of the global consumer drone market.

Li was evaluating Wang's potential to build, not just his academic record. That instinct is close to what China's Ministry of Education has now written into national law. Li went further in 2014, founding XbotPark in Dongguan, on the same premise: fund the prototype, not the paper. The ecosystem has since incubated more than 200 hardware startups, with several listed on the Hong Kong exchange.

The same philosophy is evident across China's innovation landscape. Advanced manufacturing is increasingly integrating design and production, rather than treating them as separate stages. Huawei's chip unit, for instance, is developing new architectures to enhance performance without relying solely on the smallest transistor nodes, while domestic foundries advance their process technology. It is the logic of the practical doctorate applied at industrial scale: prioritize the capability, and let the results validate the credentials.

This approach marks a shift from the traditional global division of labor, in which design and manufacturing were often separated across countries and companies. China's educational and industrial reforms aim to bridge that gap, treating the ability to conceive something and the ability to build it as two stages of the same skill, rather than two separate careers.

Asia's economic influence continues to grow. The region now accounts for more than half of humanity, and in 2020, its economies — measured by purchasing power — became larger than the rest of the world combined for the first time since the 19th century, according to Financial Times. Germany still runs its Meister apprenticeships and Japan its kosen technical colleges, but neither has assigned the practical track the prestige of the doctorate. China's reform tests this model at a scale large enough to yield results within a single generation.

The pilot program is still small, with a few dozen graduates against the roughly 97,000 PhDs China awards each year. Also, how "practice achievement" defenses will translate to fields further from Zheng's bridge pylons and closer to basic research remains to be seen. But the direction of policy is clear, and it offers a lesson beyond China's borders: credentialing systems that focus only on who can explain the best can overlook who can create the best.

Back in Nanjing, the panel that reviewed Zheng's work did not ask whether his dissertation advanced the literature. They asked whether his blocks could hold up a bridge.

They do. For China's new engineering doctorate, that is the credential that matters most.

The author is an investment banker turned technology journalist.

The views don't necessarily represent those of China Daily.

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