Science: Red China's Drive

Like everything else about Red China, its massive effort to catch up with the rest of the world in science and technology is accompanied by internal secrecy and external boasting. Last week the American Association for the Advancement of Science, meeting in New York, gave an important place on its agenda to a symposium adding up what is known about science in Communist China. The consensus: Red China is making impressive—and ominous—progress. At one level the Communist effort stresses education and technical training.

At the end of World War II, said Dr. Edward Chao, a China-born specialist from the U.S. Geological Survey, there were fewer than 200 active geologists in China. Now there are 21,000 "geological workers." They are, to be sure, poorly trained by U.S. standards—but they are capable of improving China's primitive mines and prospecting its great territory. Already they have found enormous deposits of iron, molybdenum, nickel and other valuable minerals. Again, said Dr. William Y. Chen, a senior surgeon in the U.S. Public Health Service and likewise China-born, when the Communists took over in 1949, there were only 12,000 scientifically trained physicians in all China. During the past ten years medical and pharmacological schools, most of them new, turned out 40,000 graduates. In the same period the graduates of secondary medical and public health schools numbered more than 153,000. This crash program sacrificed quality for quantity, but even a half-trained medicine man is welcome in a disease-ridden district that has had no doctor at all. As evidence that low medical standards will not be permanent, the government recently established at Peking a new college that gives an eight-year medical course.

Two Legs. Particular attention at the New York symposium was paid to the Red Chinese policy of "advancing on two legs"—that is, using old and outmoded methods and equipment while building up the modern techniques and technologies that will in time replace them. Primitive Chinese mines are still yielding dribbles of ore in sight of modern mines with up-to-date equipment. Primitive schools are teaching millions of illiterate peasants the rudiments of learning while a younger generation is being trained step by step to fill modern high schools and universities that are still to be built.

High-level theoretical science was neglected at first, but is now coming to the fore, experts agreed. Red China has four known nuclear reactors and may have more. Physicist Robert T. Beyer of Brown University told the symposium that Chinese physical sciences are extremely well planned, with proper division of emphasis between theoretical research and practical work in making and operating scientific equipment. In its science drives, Red China works closely with the Soviet Union. Said Beyer: "About one-third of the scientific papers originating at the Soviet nuclear research center at Dubna, near Moscow, have Chinese names attached to them."