Beijing

When the Chinese Academy of Sciences presented a self-cleaning 'nano-necktie' to China's president, Jiang Zemin, last December, it provided a boost to the country's high hopes for nanotechnology.

The technology behind the tie, developed by Lei Jiang at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Chemistry in Beijing, combines water-repellent and oil-repellent nanometre-scale structures on its surface. Such combinations have a wide range of analogous applications, claims Jiang. And it is this kind of potential that has caught the attention of the Chinese government.

Taking its cue from recently established programmes in the United States and Japan, the government now plans to spend an estimated 2.5 billion renminbi (US$300 million) over five years on nanoscience.

The scheme includes construction of a National Nanoscience Center in Beijing, scheduled to be fully operational in 2003. Its planners hope that the centre will be a focal point for China's research efforts in nanotechnology, encompassing basic research in nanoscale physics, chemistry and biology.

“It will be a platform that scientists throughout China and the world can use,” says Chunli Bai, vice-president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a member of the country's national steering commission for nanotechnology.

The centre will also help to bring scientific talent back home to China and foster a multidisciplinary approach to research. “I have watched too many excellent students go overseas, now I want to attract some of them to stay,” says Xing Zhu, a physicist at Peking University, who is helping to plan the facility.

“We will have an international advisory committee to establish a world-class laboratory, and we hope to draw many foreign researchers here,” Bai adds.

Teams selected by the centre's committee of scientists and government officials will be invited to use the facility, carrying out research on the manipulation of materials at the molecular level.

Officials will next month set the budget for the centre. Construction and equipment are expected to cost between 250 million and 500 million renminbi, and the centre will cost up to 15 million renminbi a year to run. The money will come from several government agencies.

The centre was proposed in a July report by various government bodies, which also called for two separate nanoengineering facilities, in Beijing and Shanghai, for application and commercialization. Plans to establish these centres are in the works.

Technology transfer to industry, either through the nanoengineering centres or directly, will be a major goal of the nanoscience centre, according to Bai.

“Integrating engineering with science will be challenging in China,” says Zhong Lin Wang, a materials researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, who has been collaborating with some Chinese universities on nanotechnology. “The key to success will be collaboration, which has been a weakness in the Chinese community, but I do see some promising changes in recent years.”

But some scientists are worried that the nano-necktie has raised expectations for eye-grabbing commercial products. “We should be appealing to real basic science, not this kind of propaganda,” one sceptic argues.