One thing that stood out was that image duplication was more likely to take place in some countries rather than others: India and China were overrepresented in the number of papers with duplicated images, while the US, the UK, Germany, Japan and Australia were underrepresented.

From Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie.  Page 69.

Who are these fraudsters? Can we put together an FBI-like ‘profile’ of the quintessential fraudster, to aid us in preventing further acts of data fabrication? In a review of fraud cases, the neuroscientist Charles Gross lamented the lack of solid evidence on who commits fraud. He did, however, have a go at describing the type of character who regularly appears in well-publicised fraud reports in the media. That person, he wrote, tends to be ‘a bright and ambitious young man working in an elite institution in a rapidly moving and highly competitive branch of modern biology or medicine, where results have important theoretical, clinical, or financial implications.’  By this point in the chapter, it’s a familiar picture: for instance, it fits Paolo Macchiarini almost perfectly.
 
Notably, Gross described the fraudster as a man. This is a clear pattern among the worst fraudsters: of the thirty-two scientists currently on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard, only one is a woman.95 To know whether this tells us something important, we’d need to know what the base rate of men versus women was in each relevant field, and thus whether men were overrepresented. A study in 2013, focusing on “the life sciences, took those baseline differences into account and found that men were indeed overrepresented as the subject of fraud reports from the US Office for Research Integrity.  A 2015 paper examining retractions and corrections across all scientific fields, meanwhile, found no gender differences, although it’s not clear whether it considered the all-important baseline.

 
After collecting their database of papers with duplicated western-blot images, Elisabeth Bik and her colleagues also checked to see if there were any characteristics that differentiated the problematic papers from others. One thing that stood out was that image duplication was more likely to take place in some countries rather than others: India and China were overrepresented in the number of papers with duplicated images, while the US, the UK, Germany, Japan and Australia were underrepresented. The authors proposed that these differences were cultural: the looser rules and softer punishments for scientific misconduct in countries like India and China might be responsible for their producing a higher quantity of potentially fraudulent research.  This once again emphasises that the social milieu in which science is conducted can have serious effects on its quality.
 
Others have made related speculations. After citing research showing that a rather suspicious one hundred per cent of trials of acupuncture from scientists in China had positive results (even if acupuncture worked perfectly, we’d expect to see a few failures just by chance), the doctor and writer Steven Novella argued that the political circumstances in China might not be conducive to good science:

There is also legitimate concern that totalitarian governments do not create an environment in which science can flourish. Science requires transparency, it requires valuing method over results, and it should be ideologically neutral. These are not concepts that flourish under a totalitarian regime. Also, the scientists who get promoted to positions of respect and power are likely to be those who please the regime, by proving, for example, that their cultural propaganda is real. So the selective pressures for advancement do not prioritize research integrity.

 Whatever its cause, Chinese scientists would seem to agree that there’s a major problem. In one survey of Chinese biomedical researchers in the early 2010s, participants estimated that around 40 per cent of all biomedical articles published by their compatriots were affected by some kind of scientific misconduct; 71 per cent said that the authorities in China paid ‘no or little attention’ to misconduct cases.