Modern genetics reached China in 1937, when Jiazhen ("C. C.") Tan went home with a PhD from Caltech. It fell out of favour during the 1950s, but Tan lived to see his Institute of Genetics at Fudan University restored to prominence in the 1970s. In 1948, Edinburgh-trained physiologist Robert Kho-Seng Lim — head of the Chinese Red Cross during the Second World War — left China for the United States, where he was to become the first US National Academy of Sciences member of Chinese descent.
Most of the traffic was one-way at first, as scientists fled to the West during the civil war of the 1940s or the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). China has traditionally been indifferent to the outside world; there was little cultural exchange with western Europe, and the United States rarely allowed its citizens to visit China after 1949, when the Communists came to power. That changed in the late 1970s, when China began promoting scientific exchange in an effort to modernize and diplomatic relations were restored with the United States.
The 'science road' has become more of a two-way street recently. Although many Chinese scientists who find success abroad decide to stay there, a high percentage visit home regularly. In the past few years, increasing numbers have either moved back to China or visited for longer stints to teach courses, establish new institutes and modernize existing ones.
Foreign Exchange
Ray Wu, a biochemist at Cornell University in New York, helped establish in 1982 the China–United States Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Examination and Administration programme (CUSBEA), which brought hundreds of top scientists to the United States. About 90% stayed in the United States, says Wu, but they now support visiting scientists who will go back and help China 'catch up'.
"I feel that I have been privileged with the chance to study and work in this country," says Wu, who arrived from China in 1949 and has returned there twice a year since 1980.
China has enormous potential: in the United States alone, Chinese students have earned 40,000–50,000 PhDs in the past 25 years, adds Wu.
"If everyone goes back to China there's no reservoir to hold all this talent," says molecular biologist Xiang-Dong Fu, who considers himself a member of the "first class of the Cultural Revolution", having been among the first to enter the reopened universities shortly after it ended. He was in the first group to go to a US university under Wu's CUSBEA programme, earning his PhD at Case Western University, then doing a postdoc at Harvard under Tom Maniatis. Like many of his contemporaries, Fu intended to go back until the Tiananmen Square political clamp-down happened in June 1989.
"Because of political turmoil and instability, we got stuck here," Fu says. The US Congress issued what many Chinese Americans of his generation call the 'June 4 Green Card', which gave permanent residence to all Chinese scholars in the United States.
Fu says the tide is turning in China, with schemes such as the Yangtze River Scholars paying young scientists well above the market rate. But the country needs to attract and retain more senior scientists — ones who are effectively able to write grants, conduct meetings and publish in international journals. "Most of those people are still in the United States," Fu says.
A few larger universities are succeeding. Tan's Fudan University recently recruited Li Jin, from the University of Cincinnati, Ohio, as dean of life sciences, and he has put the school up for an independent international review. Meanwhile, it is bolstering its genetics team by bringing in Yale Drosophila researcher Tian Xu and two researchers from the University of Colorado, Boulder: Min Han, who works on Caenorhabditis elegans, and mouse geneticist Yun Zhuang. The Chinese Academy of Science scored a coup when it attracted Mu-Ming Poo from Berkeley to run its Institute of Neuroscience.
Western-trained scientists have also taken turns to lecture 300 graduate students at a time in Shanghai and Beijing universities.
Yi Rao — now an associate professor of anatomy and neurobiology at Washington University School of Medicine — came to the United States in the 1980s, with the help of Charles Dickens rather than CUSBEA. "I read a few issues of Nature, Science and Cell and figured I couldn't do good science in China," says Rao, who pored over classic nineteenth-century fiction to improve his English.
Three years ago he initiated a course in molecular cell biology in Shanghai, taught in tandem with his China-based partner Jiarui Wu. They have now expanded the course to Peking University and its neighbouring rival Tsinghua University.
Such courses could help Chinese scientists in both the East and the West, says Rao. Chinese students are eager to pick up new techniques, but they do not always know how best to apply them.
Taiwan Indicator
Chung-I Wu, chairman of the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, agrees that Chinese students need more encouragement to think creatively, but adds that they have plenty of energy and ambition. He hopes that China's growing tendency to conduct large-scale science and engineering — such as building massive dams and conducting high-profile space launches — doesn't eclipse smaller, more elegant projects. "We have a joke about it," says Wu. "If you cannot make something beautiful, you make it big."
Wu sees parallels between Taiwan, where he is from, and mainland China. He visits the two countries four or five times a year. Taiwan is about 10–15 years ahead in terms of repatriation, he says. But he feels it is not the best model as Taiwan has a top-down management structure, which China is emulating, and an emphasis on seniority, which, so far, China is avoiding.
His compatriot Ken Chien, now director of the Institute of Molecular Medicine at the University of California, San Diego, agrees that Taiwan is seeing a stream of scientific repatriation, compared with China's trickle. But this could change, because facilities in China are improving. "They've put an emphasis on a few top universities," says Chien. "I think that's good."
China is using the market economy to draw back top scholars, sometimes offering US-level salaries. "If you have a US salary and you're living in China, you are doing very well," says Chien.
In mainland China, says Chien, administrators do not worry about paying a young scientist "ridiculously more" than senior scientists in the same department — the benevolent side of the top-down system.
Changes in Chinese scientific culture are not always for the better. Within the past ten years, there has been a shift to publish in top international journals. The downside is what many see as an excessive dependence on citations indexes.
What is still missing, say Chien and Ray Wu, is a rigorous peer-review system. Two years ago, Wu helped to set up the National Natural Science Foundation of China — a sort of US-style peer-review body — which is helping to improve the grant system. In Taiwan, Chien set up a similar process ten years ago.
Modernization may take time, but it is happening. "I have learned to have patience," Yi Rao says.
