Are "publication metrics" also used heavily in China by the bureaucracy ?

I know for a fact that the number of fake-journals exploded once the Govt. of India decided to use this for promotions.

It's a bit sad really: in the classical world both these countries spent inordinate amount of time on the questions of epistemology (India esp.). Now reduced to mimicking some silly thing that vaguely tracks knowledge-production even in the best case in the West.

Yes. And filtering out publications in "paper mills" and then judging the guy properly doesn't scale beyond the top few institutions. So you'll find a sudden drop-off in research quality once you reach the n_th university. It really is almost like a threshold.

What a wonderful illustration of Goodhart's Law.