I know barely nothing about the Hugo process or Sci-Fi awards in general, but unfortunately this rings a bell when I think of my experience as an academic researcher (i.e. "paper writer") regarding some of my Chinese colleagues. No matter how much we want to believe that science (and especially scientific reporting) is objective, the truth is that there are certain unwritten, informal, and subjective rules in the world of academic writing / research reporting that one is simply expected to follow; it is impossible for every reviewer to check every single detail about every paper they accept to review. There are ethical/common sense aspects that are just supposed to be there: the data you report is supposed to be real; the method you report is supposed to have been conducted accurately; etc.

However, when it comes to a large part of Chinese-authored publications, one cannot help unfortunately but to have sometimes a kind of a ear-scratching sensation that one is not 100% sure these aspects are really there. First, because we're absolutely flooded daily by Chinese-authored drafts, and I'm not talking about simple, small-scale research results; these are big sprawling research results, involving large datasets and lots of subjects, all coming in at a staggering rate, non-stop. We don't have enough volunteers to review these papers accurately and carefully, especially given that modern open-access journals want to have reviews (100% volunteered, without any pay, mind you) sent back in ridiculous times, like one week. And yes, many of these journals are either Chinese or managed by Chinese colleagues. So in summary we simply cannot manage to review them in time with the care that is necessary, which means that some undesirable work will invariably pass the check (statistically speaking, it will happen). One cannot also help but think that it seems unrealistic that all these research projects are being carried at such incredible pace and with so much efficiency.

One thing that compounds this problem is that papers come initially with a very low quality. Slowly they become better; you may find yourself reviewing the same paper 5 or 6 times until you get so sick of it that you have no other choice but to say, "I have nothing else to add, just publish the goddamn thing." This is not how the system was designed to work; usually, the authors (and the PhD supervisor) are supposed to work on the paper a bit before submitting, so that they don't submit a horrible thing for reviewers to work with. I think this works usually on the basis of reputation and "name", but my impression is that the Chinese authors could not care less about this. As I usually say to my local colleagues, we are supervising the Chinese PhD students (via paper reviews) without getting paid for it.

Some of the most incredible researchers and smartest people in the world are certainly Chinese and some of their research reports are just amazing. But the numbers are so staggering that invariably the classic system ends up breaking. And one cannot help but think that many of them have found optimized ways to take advantage of the system in exactly those parts were one cannot really point the finger at, because they are based on informal and subjective common-sense rules that are just expected to be there (or else the system does not work).