Science: A New Long March for China

Mobilizing to try to catch up in science and technology

They were the world's first masters of science. Long before the Europeans, they knew how to use the compass, make paper and gunpowder, print with movable type, build canal locks and segmented arch bridges. Now, after centuries of languishing behind the West, the Chinese are once again aspiring to leadership in science and technology. By the year 2000, China hopes to catch up with the U.S., Europe and Japan and in some areas even to exceed them.

Peking is calling this ambitious national goal a New Long March, an echo of the 6,000-mile trek in the 1930s by Mao and his troops that eventually led to the takeover of China. To check on the progress toward this goal, TIME Science Editor Frederic Golden last month visited Chinese research centers, universities, hospitals, factories and communes on a 15-day, five-city tour with the first delegation of American science journalists to the People's Republic. His report:

It was called the Cultural Revolution, but the decade-long upheaval that ended in 1976 with Mao Tse-tung's death was a time of sorrow and hardship for China's scholars. Roughneck Red Guards took over classroom and campus; universities were shut down. Academic standards sank to scandalously low levels. Eminent teachers and scientists were sent off to the countryside for "re-education," to work as farm hands and laborers. Science came virtually to a standstill.

Now the nightmare is finally over. Universities have reopened. New research institutions are being established. Learning has become respectable again, especially the study of scientific subjects. Indeed, science and technology may be the most important pillar of Peking's so-called Four Modernizations; the others are industry, agriculture, and defense. Under this great national enterprise, comparable perhaps to the building of the Great Wall or to the U.S. moon program, China expects to have 800,000 scientists and engineers by 1985, more than double the present number. Says Vice Premier Fang Yi, the shrewd bureaucrat who is China's minister of science: "It is not a loss of face to admit that China is backward compared with the West and Japan. But we are determined to close the gap."

One sign of that determination is China's present love affair with science. It is the leading subject in schools; under Chairman Hua Guofeng's "six ones program" schoolchildren read at least one science book, tell one science story, do one experiment, explain one natural phenomenon and prophesy one scientific advance. Scientific goals and triumphs are heralded on wall posters, and popular science magazines are flourishing, extolling every contemporary marvel.

Shedding the xenophobia that raged during the Cultural Revolution, Peking is looking to the non-Communist world for the scientific know-how once provided by the U.S.S.R. American oilmen are aiding in a search for petroleum off the South China coast. The Chinese are talking of enlisting U.S. experts for tapping the energy resources of great rivers like the Yangtze (at present China uses only 2% of its hydroelectric potential). Peking also wants to make direct purchases, especially of computer hardware.