Science: A New Long March for China

Mobilizing to try to catch up in science and technology

They were the world’s first masters of science. Long before the Europeans, they knew how to use the compass, make paper and gunpowder, print with movable type, build canal locks and segmented arch bridges. Now, after centuries of languishing behind the West, the Chinese are once again aspiring to leadership in science and technology. By the year 2000, China hopes to catch up with the U.S., Europe and Japan and in some areas even to exceed them.

Peking is calling this ambitious national goal a New Long March, an echo of the 6,000-mile trek in the 1930s by Mao and his troops that eventually led to the takeover of China. To check on the progress toward this goal, TIME Science Editor Frederic Golden last month visited Chinese research centers, universities, hospitals, factories and communes on a 15-day, five-city tour with the first delegation of American science journalists to the People’s Republic. His report:

It was called the Cultural Revolution, but the decade-long upheaval that ended in 1976 with Mao Tse-tung’s death was a time of sorrow and hardship for China’s scholars. Roughneck Red Guards took over classroom and campus; universities were shut down. Academic standards sank to scandalously low levels. Eminent teachers and scientists were sent off to the countryside for “re-education,” to work as farm hands and laborers. Science came virtually to a standstill.

Now the nightmare is finally over. Universities have reopened. New research institutions are being established. Learning has become respectable again, especially the study of scientific subjects. Indeed, science and technology may be the most important pillar of Peking’s so-called Four Modernizations; the others are industry, agriculture, and defense. Under this great national enterprise, comparable perhaps to the building of the Great Wall or to the U.S. moon program, China expects to have 800,000 scientists and engineers by 1985, more than double the present number. Says Vice Premier Fang Yi, the shrewd bureaucrat who is China’s minister of science: “It is not a loss of face to admit that China is backward compared with the West and Japan. But we are determined to close the gap.”

One sign of that determination is China’s present love affair with science. It is the leading subject in schools; under Chairman Hua Guofeng’s “six ones program” schoolchildren read at least one science book, tell one science story, do one experiment, explain one natural phenomenon and prophesy one scientific advance. Scientific goals and triumphs are heralded on wall posters, and popular science magazines are flourishing, extolling every contemporary marvel.

Shedding the xenophobia that raged during the Cultural Revolution, Peking is looking to the non-Communist world for the scientific know-how once provided by the U.S.S.R. American oilmen are aiding in a search for petroleum off the South China coast. The Chinese are talking of enlisting U.S. experts for tapping the energy resources of great rivers like the Yangtze (at present China uses only 2% of its hydroelectric potential). Peking also wants to make direct purchases, especially of computer hardware.

How will China pay for these expensive wares? One high-ranking economist dangled before the visitors the still largely untouched prospects in China’s good earth. Besides oil and coal, China’s natural wealth includes iron, manganese, tungsten, antimony, tin, copper, lead, zinc, mercury, molybdenum and aluminum. Said he: “Remember, it takes four or five tons of titanium to make a single Boeing 747, and we are also rich in it.”

For the moment though, the Chinese seem especially interested in American brainpower. At almost every stop on the tour—at a seismological observatory outside Peking, at an electronics plant in Changzhou (Changchow), at hospitals in Shanghai, in scenic Hangzhou (Hangchow) and at fisheries near Canton—we were told of leading American scientists who had already been there.

The Chinese are obviously eager to learn from their new American friends. Host scientists urged the visiting journalists to make critical comments about their efforts. But, as one explained, “We cannot use all your advanced ideas and techniques. We must adapt them to Chinese skills and economic conditions.”

This blend of new and old was apparent at the Pearl River Fisheries Research Institute, where we saw mammoth carp that had been raised from tiny fry in the center’s ponds. One innovation: the use of female hormones to encourage spawning. But the biologists there also adhered to the Maoist maxim to “change wastes into treasures and turn harmful into beneficial.” They feed the fish animal and even human wastes (after fermentation to kill fecal parasites). Elsewhere, the Chinese are introducing “digesters” (small tanks) that convert biological wastes into methane gas, which in turn powers electrical generators and can be used for cooking. The residue is returned to the soil as a fertilizer.

The Chinese have also turned en masse to advanced technology. They are struggling to improve their electronics industry, and are producing computers of the 1960s type. At the Shanghai Institute of Metallurgy we saw several impressive “clean rooms” under construction for the fabrication of “chips” containing the microscopic circuitry that is the brain of the modern computer. Some of these chips are being manufactured with new electron-beam techniques. Scientists are also experimenting with lasers. One intriguing project: a six-beam experimental laser device to produce power from thermonuclear fusion. Blessed with an abundance of the elements called rare earths, the Chinese are also becoming increasingly skilled at extracting them and putting them to work in many ways, for example, as catalysts in petroleum refining. The visiting American specialists found one area where the U.S. could learn from the Chinese: the production of oil from shale.

The Chinese are also exploring more esoteric realms. In Peking American-educated veterans of China’s nuclear weapons program told of their plans to build by the mid-1980s a 50 billion-electron-volt accelerator for research in particle physics. Scientists are building two gravity-wave detectors, one in Peking, the other at Canton’s Sun Yat-sen University.

By measuring tiny distortions in large aluminum cylinders — deflections that may be caused by cataclysmic events in the heavens — they hope to achieve a goal whose proof has so far eluded Western scientists: unambiguously detecting the gravitational waves forecast by Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Why is a nation still struggling to meet basic needs investing precious yuans and talent in such far-out endeavors? Explained Fang Yi: “We consider basic research fundamental to all scientific progress.”

Fang Yi and his colleagues have set difficult goals for a country that still relies heavily on human sweat. In the cities, women sweep the streets with brooms they make out of straw. In the countryside, road crews work with pick and shovel; when steamrollers are available, they are usually fuming, coal-burning monsters. Despite the vaunted Chinese emphasis on the dignity of the masses, produce is still conveyed by pedal-powered carts carrying burdens several times heavier than their human engines.

Where China has industrialized, it has been at a price. Peking and other cities reek from the effusion of belching smokestacks. Water pollution is so serious a problem that no one drinks unboiled water. Doctors report increases in the rates of cardiovascular and lung diseases, as well as cancer, all of which may have some environmental origin.

Yet for all the backwardness, China has been drastically reshaped since the Communists took over 30 years ago. No longer do people starve by the millions or die of such blights as smallpox, syphilis or malaria. Medical care is available to everyone, and by a combination of propaganda, pay supplements, and free birth-control devices, China seems to be making some headway in its efforts to halt its ruinous population growth, by limiting couples to only two children.

So despite the tremendous odds, the Chinese may yet succeed in closing the gap. As Chairman Hua told his nation’s technocrats last year, “Facts past and present show that we Chinese too have a head and two hands and are no stupider than other people.”