Science: A New Long March for China

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How will China pay for these expensive wares? One high-ranking economist dangled before the visitors the still largely untouched prospects in China's good earth. Besides oil and coal, China's natural wealth includes iron, manganese, tungsten, antimony, tin, copper, lead, zinc, mercury, molybdenum and aluminum. Said he: "Remember, it takes four or five tons of titanium to make a single Boeing 747, and we are also rich in it."

For the moment though, the Chinese seem especially interested in American brainpower. At almost every stop on the tour—at a seismological observatory outside Peking, at an electronics plant in Changzhou (Changchow), at hospitals in Shanghai, in scenic Hangzhou (Hangchow) and at fisheries near Canton—we were told of leading American scientists who had already been there.

The Chinese are obviously eager to learn from their new American friends. Host scientists urged the visiting journalists to make critical comments about their efforts. But, as one explained, "We cannot use all your advanced ideas and techniques. We must adapt them to Chinese skills and economic conditions."

This blend of new and old was apparent at the Pearl River Fisheries Research Institute, where we saw mammoth carp that had been raised from tiny fry in the center's ponds. One innovation: the use of female hormones to encourage spawning. But the biologists there also adhered to the Maoist maxim to "change wastes into treasures and turn harmful into beneficial." They feed the fish animal and even human wastes (after fermentation to kill fecal parasites). Elsewhere, the Chinese are introducing "digesters" (small tanks) that convert biological wastes into methane gas, which in turn powers electrical generators and can be used for cooking. The residue is returned to the soil as a fertilizer.

The Chinese have also turned en masse to advanced technology. They are struggling to improve their electronics industry, and are producing computers of the 1960s type. At the Shanghai Institute of Metallurgy we saw several impressive "clean rooms" under construction for the fabrication of "chips" containing the microscopic circuitry that is the brain of the modern computer. Some of these chips are being manufactured with new electron-beam techniques. Scientists are also experimenting with lasers. One intriguing project: a six-beam experimental laser device to produce power from thermonuclear fusion. Blessed with an abundance of the elements called rare earths, the Chinese are also becoming increasingly skilled at extracting them and putting them to work in many ways, for example, as catalysts in petroleum refining. The visiting American specialists found one area where the U.S. could learn from the Chinese: the production of oil from shale.

The Chinese are also exploring more esoteric realms. In Peking American-educated veterans of China's nuclear weapons program told of their plans to build by the mid-1980s a 50 billion-electron-volt accelerator for research in particle physics. Scientists are building two gravity-wave detectors, one in Peking, the other at Canton's Sun Yat-sen University.