This is an important and formidably researched study by Professor Jinhai Guo of the Institute of History at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. First published in Chinese in 2014, the complex text has been well translated by Xiaoxuan Zhou and Weizhen Gu.
Two points need emphasis at the outset. One is that this is not a history of science, nor is it even a history of the organization of science in modern China. The focus here is on issues relating to the choosing and status of scientists and scholars, first in the Nanjing-based Academia Sinica (AS) founded in 1928, and then in its mainland successor institution, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), which was established in November 1949. This means that between the additions to the membership of CAS Academic Divisions in 1957, and the train of events triggered by Deng Xiaoping's reaffirmation of science and the Four Modernizations in March 1978, there is relatively little to report.
The further consideration is that, given the exceptionally detailed material in Guo's narrative, for many readers an easier point of entry into the subject as it unfolded after 1949 is Cong Cao's lucid study, China's Scientific Elite (Curzon, 2004) – although as a briefer and earlier account, this was unable to take account of some of the newer material used in Guo's book.
Interest and enthusiasm for science played an important part in China's early modernization: something illustrated by both the multiplication of scientific societies in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as by the popular enthusiasm with which visitors such as John Dewey, Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell and R. H. Tawney were greeted in the same period. Two forces, however, drove China towards a more centralized organization of science. One was the broad political and cultural point expressed by Liang Qichao, who argued that “every independent country has the possibility and necessity of independence in its learning” (p. 13). The other factor was the indispensability of science in the drive for industrialization and strategic strength. It was the latter that will have been decisive in prompting the Kuomintang to agree to the establishment of the AS on 17 April 1927 – the day before the establishment of the Nanjing Government itself. As a result of this decision, Cai Yuanpei was able to announce the establishment of the AS in a restaurant in Shanghai on 9 June 1928.
Influenced by Western models and experience in America, Europe and Japan, the issue then facing the scientists and Government was this: should the AS be a state-led and -financed institution that recruited the best brains to serve national cultural and scientific purposes (the models of Richelieu and Louis XIV in France, and of Peter the Great in Russia); or should it be a self-governing society of the learned who, with royal patronage, devoted themselves to the advancement of knowledge (the model of the Royal Society in England); or, possibly, a hybrid in which the balance between state-led and more exclusively academic functions could vary, depending on domestic political factors or even on conditions of war and peace.
The AS in the pre-1949 phase is clearly shown here to be of the third variety: a point indicated at the time of the first election of Academicians in 1948 when, while the Academicians were preparing to serve the post-war national reconstruction, they were also reminded by Chiang Kai-shek that this was the moment at which they were ready to “fully demonstrate [the Academy's] gradual progress and to seek truth from facts” (p. 141).
A striking feature of the AS revealed by Guo is the variety of academic talent that played roles in it during the pre-war years. In science, for example, the list includes such famous names as Qian Sanqiang (physics), Li Siguang (geology), Zhu Kezhen [Chu Coching] (meteorology) and Hua Luogeng (the mathematician whose protégé, Chen Jingrun, was to become a favourite of Deng Xiaoping's and a national role “model” in the 1980s). While in the humanities we find scholars such as Fu Sinian (history), Xia Nai (archeology), Feng Youlan and Hu Shi [Hu Shih] (philosophy), Zhao Yuanren [Chao Yuen Ren] (philology) and Liang Sicheng – the “father of Chinese architecture” who also designed the exquisite badges and certificates for the first Academicians. There is also a long list of active social scientists, several of whom wrote works that can still be read with profit today.
The transfer from the AS to the post-1949 CAS was, however, to be abrupt. Within five weeks of the first full meetings of the AS in late September 1948, Manchuria had capitulated in the battle for Shenyang; and then, on 23 April 1949, the PLA finally crossed the Yangtze, an event that signalled the end of the Civil War.
No time, however, was lost for science, for on 13 July 1949 Zhou Enlai told a conference of scientists that “[w]e must set up an academy of sciences” (i.e. to coordinate the natural and social sciences). By the end of the year the newly established CAS was well under way.
The problem for the next six years was how to construct an institution whose members would respond to the Party's urgent economic and defence requirements. In the circumstances, the Party's decision was not to follow the example of the USSR and give scientists the possibility of an independent Academician status, but instead to select “Members” who were to be attached to four newly created Academic Divisions. The lists for this honour were finalized in 1955 and subjected to political scrutiny at the highest levels. In this process, remarkably, Mao personally intervened to insist on the inclusion of Chen Yinke, an historian well known for his opposition to Marxism.
In explaining this fundamental decision, Guo rightly draws attention to the Party's fear that the scientists might “seize power” (duoquan) – i.e., in the sense of controlling the scientific agenda. But by simply adding that there was also the problem that “scientists’ ideas had yet to be reformed” (p. 187), Guo does not fully explain the situation. Yan'an-style thought reform movements for intellectuals had restarted as early as 1950, and they continued under various guises right through to 1955. After a brief “springtime” of relief between January 1956 and the start of the Anti-Rightist campaign in June 1957, such pressures continued, almost without respite, until after the end of the Cultural Revolution. Much of this wider background and its impact on the CAS is vividly described in the enlarged biographical chronology of the physicist, Qian Sanqiang, Qian Sanqiang nianpu changbian. The fact that this work was published, in Qian's honour, in 2013 probably explains why it was not available to Guo in time for his book.
In 1994 the scientists of the PRC did finally achieve their ambition to be allowed Academician status, having hived off the tricky problems of the social scientists by the creation of the Academy of Social Sciences back in 1977. But as this fine work shows, the events of 1994 were by no means the end of academic disputes in China.
