[nwhatt]

It sounds like the ethical review you’re talking about is IRB approval. It doesn’t just happen at Princeton. In fact, most journals won’t accept work that hasn’t been demonstrated to be conducted ethically.

See for example Nature: http://www.nature.com/authors/policies/experimental.html

[cjalmeida]

Likely Chinese researchers have they're own set of papers and incentives that replaces being able to publish at Nature due to ethical concerns.

Wonder if people with more insight would clarify how incentives work in Chinese academia.