To add some context, the death penalty is used much more widely in China than a Westerner might realize, so to them this idea is not quite as radical as it might seem. The PRC government is a bit tight lipped about exact policies, but it's known the death penalty gets employed for things like corruption and even major economic crimes like fraud or money counterfeiting. And of course drug offenses and the violent crimes.

Replication is just a nice term for it. It can just as well be a crisis of fraud with the failure of replicating fraudulent results as the consequence.

Scientific fraud and garbage results is a huge problem Everywhere. It's actually big enough to nearly invalidate the entire field of psychology.

If China has half the worlds academics-writing-papers, one would _expect_ them to be responsible for half the fabricated ones.

To be fair, according to TFA the death penalty is only for clinical trials where the drug or procedure, due to faked or doctored data, causes severe or fatal consequences.

It actually seems pretty reasonable to me. You develop a drug that actually kills people but fake your data to show it saves lives. Then you make money while people start dying, essentially killing people because your career was more important than reality. I’d call that murder.