It is quite well known that the U.K's standards have been possibly falling for a while now. In other news, grass is green and the sun is warm.

However, it would not make sense to even use Shanghai as value in a chart to represent China as a whole anyway, even a complete downs would spot that a mile off. Even though it states that China does not participate as a country, the only cities that would have a valid right to feature in such a table would be Singapore and H.K, the latter's inclusion would even be questionable as the mainland is doing everything it can to kill off the local culture (that was once unique to H.K) there and homogenise them into the mainland, you only need to read a recent copy of the SCMP to see evidence of the propaganda war in action.

Besides, Finland probably has a far better known claim to leading the way in terms of education.

When it comes to research, the results are often not the most important thing. The important thing is often how those results are presented to the masses.
There's a lot of this going from many countries now, if you take a look at the media - China, the U.S, even the U.K. A battle of ideologies is bubbling under the surface.

I remember the example that a professor at my university once gave me in rather simplified terms to stress the importance of writing one's dissertation thesis well:

"Adolf Hitler had this strange, ridiculous idea that the Jews were responsible for all that was wrong in Germany, but he knew how to convince people at the time that he was somehow right, regardless of the fact that after the war; we now universally accept that his ideas and how he acted upon them was wrong... Look at what happened there."