Science: The Scientist in China

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Before they conquered the mainland in 1949, the Chinese Communists could claim few scientists. Afterwards, Chinese scientists were promised heaven and earth and rapid promotion if they stayed on or came back from overseas. Reluctant to leave home, all but a handful of China's physicists, chemists and mathematicians went to work for the Reds. A survey prepared for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for International Studies, released last week, offers a tentative look at the fate of Chinese scientists under the Red regime. Conclusion: once wooed and rewarded, Chinese scientists are now feeling the Red pinch.

At least three leading experts—Mathematician Hua Lo-keng, Geologist Li Ssukuang and Dr. Wong Wen-hao—voluntarily returned to the mainland from the West. Without a shot or a kidnaping, the Communists quickly recruited an invaluable braintrust: 233 topflight scientists and 691 second-stringers. Ironically, 35 of the 50 most talented were educated in the West, 25 in the U.S. Only eight of these leaders were known to have any pro-Communist leanings, and only three were party members in 1949.

At first the Reds lived up to their promises of special treatment. Fifteen scientists got elected to the National People's Congress, more than from any other profession. Most of the non-Communists continued to teach, serving the government on a part-time basis. Some went to key technical jobs in the Ministry of Water Conservation, the Bureau of Railroad Research, the Ministry of Forestry. All got more pay and faster promotion than colleagues in the social sciences, regardless of party standing.

Today the Red squeeze is on. One prominent American-trained psychologist, Lu Chih-wei, was liquidated when he refused to sign an anti-American testimonial; others have been pressured into phony confessions and self-ridicule. What hurts most is the enforcement of Communism's concept of science as a political and social weapon rather than a "bourgeois" search for truth. Meteorologists were ordered to "learn from Chairman Mao's statement on party doctrine." At a conference of mathematicians, one topic was "How to Realize Patriotism Through Education in Mathematics." At another meeting, the president of the Society of Chemistry, Tseng Chao-lun, confessed his organization's past errors in adopting "Anglo-American" laboratory methods, called for a "patriotic" reorientation.

Red officials are taking sole credit for every major technical achievement. Party chiefs, rather than scientific experts, boss Red China's biggest projects, e.g., the taming of the Hwai River, with a resulting emphasis on hand labor rather than new machines. Concludes the M.I.T. survey: "It is a sad day for the 'bourgeois scientists,' who must sit inactively watching the wastefulness of the Communist method of organizing masses to perform unskilled tasks."