350,000 Yuan over Six Years: How Should We Assess the Cost of Studying Mo Yan?

A Hot-Search-Style Argument

Something has been making quite a stir lately: a key project funded by the National Social Science Fund of China, led by a professor at Renmin University—350,000 yuan over six years to study Mo Yan—has been branded by many as “a waste of taxpayers’ money.”

To be honest, my first reaction was irritation too: what kind of amount is 350,000 yuan, really? Why single out one academic project and call it wasteful? “If we’re talking about waste, the state is the real culprit”—I almost blurted that out.

But after calming down and looking at the numbers more carefully, this argument really should not have become so heated. And those “emotion-driven rebuttals” are precisely the wrong way to respond.

First, the Person: Why Mo Yan

One fact hardly needs arguing: Mo Yan’s status in contemporary Chinese literature is beyond dispute. He is China’s first Nobel laureate in Literature and one of the most internationally influential contemporary Chinese writers. As a Nobel Prize winner in literature, he has long since entered the ranks of major figures in world literature, and his works have long been an important subject of literary research.

Studying Mo Yan is not studying some random passerby. In any country, studying one’s own Nobel laureate is about as legitimate an academic topic as it gets.

Then, the Topic: This Research Is Worth More Than “Mo Yan”

More importantly, the value of this project should not be narrowly reduced to “studying Mo Yan as an individual.”

Research in the humanities and social sciences has a radiating effect. For literary studies, it provides foundational material for author studies, textual studies, and regional cultural studies; for sociology, psychology, and education, it offers historical materials and cases that can be cited. And in the present moment, there is an even more practical layer of value: with the development of digital humanities and knowledge-base construction, this kind of verified and structurally organized material is exactly the kind of high-quality Chinese-language corpus that is most scarce in knowledge graph construction, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), academic databases, and even AI training data.

In other words, the money invested here may produce outcomes that span literature, the social sciences, and AI infrastructure. The question “What’s the use of studying one writer?” underestimates the reach of this project.

Then, the Money: Is 350,000 Yuan Really a Lot?

Then there is the funding itself. 350,000 yuan over six years is not high at all for a domestic social science project—a key project of the National Social Science Fund is, by definition, a serious project selected from among many. Compared internationally, equivalent humanities and social science projects in the UK and the US often receive hundreds of thousands of pounds or dollars, far above this amount.

So the charge of “wasting taxpayers’ money” is frankly rather hasty. To evaluate a research project, one should look at whether its results contain academic innovation, whether its materials are solid, and whether it meets the project’s expected goals—not pass judgment the moment one sees the title.

All of this is not to excuse social science projects. In fact, the problems with domestic social science research are obvious to anyone paying attention:

Heavy emphasis on project approval, light emphasis on completion: once a project is approved, it is already more than halfway home; completion standards are lax, and plenty of outputs merely meet word counts while lacking academic substance.
Low-level repetition: the same topic gets repackaged and funded again and again; real innovation is limited, while “watered-down” output keeps rising.
Perfunctory review: personal connections and circle culture in peer review mean that truly solid applications may not receive funding, while those that do receive funding may not necessarily produce real work.
Results locked away in drawers: many projects are shelved once completed; publishing a paper counts as fulfilling the task, whether or not anyone cites it or reads it.

These criticisms are not excessive at all. On the contrary, they are the right way to approach the question of whether “taxpayers’ money is being well spent”—the issue has never been “who is being studied,” but “how well the research is being done,” and in the current situation, far too many projects are indeed not done well.

So criticizing social science funding is not wrong. What is wrong is the way the criticism is made: taking one specific project and slapping a label on it based solely on its title is neither rigorous nor aimed at the real target. Reasonable criticism should be directed at review mechanisms, completion standards, and public access to research outcomes at the institutional level, not at a particular research subject.

Why Those “Emotion-Driven Rebuttals” Should Not Be Used

Returning to my opening line—“the state is the real culprit”—using that phrase in public discussion is actually a bad example.

There are two reasons. First, the argument instantly goes off track, shifting from “Is research funding being well spent?” to “Do you have a problem with the state?” The focus is completely lost. Second, “culprit” is a serious characterization; without sufficient factual support, it only gives people something to seize on in your wording while ignoring the point you were actually trying to make.

If one truly wants to criticize the use of public funds, the better approach is to apply the same standards across the board: evaluate research projects by their outcomes and peer review; evaluate fiscal spending by demanding transparency and assessable performance. The same standards should be applied to all money, instead of singling out one 350,000-yuan social science project. That is a fairer discussion and a more persuasive one.

“Wasting Taxpayers’ Money” Is an Imported Phrase

At the end of the day, there is another angle worth considering: the phrase “wasting taxpayers’ money” itself is imported.

In the Anglo-American context, “taxpayer money” is one of the cornerstones of political discourse. But it is never just a standalone phrase—behind it is an entire supporting system: public budgets, parliamentary questioning, performance audits, and fiscal accountability. When “taxpayers” say “my money,” there are institutions there to receive that claim.

The domestic situation is very different. For decades, the concept of the “taxpayer” felt distant to ordinary people. People were used to thinking of fiscal money as “the state’s money,” not “my money.” In recent years, netizens have become increasingly fluent in saying “wasting taxpayers’ money,” but most have learned only the phrase, not the system behind it.

It is a bit like “wanting to Westernize but only learning it halfway”: the discourse has been imported, but the institutions have not come with it. There is nothing wrong with using the phrase to express emotion. But once it is used to make a precise accusation against a specific project, its weakness shows: on one hand, people righteously demand an accounting for “taxpayers’ money”; on the other, they never ask a single question about fiscal expenditures many times larger. If it is all “my money,” why do the standards suddenly change?

So rather than saying this incident is about “wasting taxpayers’ money,” it is better to see it as a glimpse of how poorly the concept of the “taxpayer” fits the domestic context. If we really want to learn it properly, the point is not to shout “waste” whenever we see a 350,000-yuan project, but to apply the standards of transparency, performance, and accountability equally to every sum of money. That is what it would mean to truly understand the word “taxpayer.”

An Avalanche of Public Opinion Does Not Rely on Independent Thinking

Finally, I want to talk about why this issue was able to blow up like this.

The phrase “wasting taxpayers’ money” is full of holes, as argued above. But its power to spread does not come from rigorous reasoning. It comes from conformity.

Conformity is a psychological mechanism shared by all human beings; it is not unique to Chinese people. In the Asch experiments, participants could clearly see the correct answer, yet still followed the group when everyone before them chose the wrong one. “Going with the crowd” and “no punishment when everyone does it” are mechanisms that exist all over the world. What is different today is that the communication environment amplifies conformity by several orders of magnitude: comment-section formations, hot-search rankings, and algorithmic feeds constantly tell people that “everyone thinks this way”; the spiral of silence then makes those who disagree even less willing to speak up. As a result, the comment section under a position-taking post can look like a “national consensus.”

And so we get a strange spectacle: someone condemning “a waste of taxpayers’ money” may never have read the project application and may not even know what the project actually studies—but that does not stop them from joining the formation. The cost of speaking out is extremely low; the cost of independent thinking is extremely high. Following the crowd brings a sense of belonging; dissent invites attack. Reason is a scarce resource, and the public-opinion arena always rewards emotion.

So attributing this spectacle to “Chinese people being prone to conformity” is itself the same kind of intellectual laziness—using one broad label to replace a complex problem. Conformity is human nature, not a national trait. What truly ignites conformity into an avalanche is the environment: the visibility of information, the sense of safety in expression, and the cost of independent thinking. Change these variables, and the temperament of public opinion will naturally change as well.

In Closing

A humanities scholar spending six years and 350,000 yuan to conduct solid research on Mo Yan is, domestically speaking, a perfectly normal academic activity.

The problems in social science research should absolutely be criticized; but criticism needs to hit the right target. Aim it at review mechanisms and completion standards, and leave evaluation to research outcomes and peer review, instead of venting anger at a research subject or a project title.

Before mocking the question “What’s the use of studying Mo Yan?”, it may be worth asking: if one day an AI system gives wrong answers because it lacks high-quality Chinese-language data, will we regret being unwilling to spend even 350,000 yuan back then?