While I don't want to reveal my academic background, I can say that in my work Chinese papers were just as good as if not better than those of other counteies. And to me seemed to be less focused on creating academic cliques.

There are also studies showing that the quality of papers coming out of China is higher as well

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Science/China-tops-U.S.-in-quantity-and-quality-of-scientific-papers