IN DEPTH
SCIENCE IN CHINA
Tiananmen's bitter legacy
Mara Hvistendahl*

As intellectuals gathered in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in the spring of 1989 to demand democratic reforms, a young Stanford University statistician, Alex Liu, was in China studying the small businesses then springing up in the wake of economic liberalization. Three years earlier, Liu had graduated from Peking University; now his alma mater had promised him a teaching post, and he had committed to moving back permanently after finishing his doctorate. But on 15 April, 5 days after Liu touched down in Beijing, the protests started. He dropped his project and joined the crowd in the square.

By the time the army opened fire on protesters on 3 and 4 June 1989, killing hundreds or possibly thousands, Liu had returned to the United States. But the Tiananmen crackdown changed the course of Liu's career and those of thousands of other scientists. It also warped science in China, say researchers inside and outside the country, contributing to problems it is now struggling to overcome. Tiananmen and its aftermath drove an exodus of talent and cemented a top-down research system that is prone to corruption. “It's just like the political system,” says Bob He, a materials scientist who helped organize protests in the United States following the crackdown and is now director of innovation and business development at Bruker AXS in Madison.

The years leading up to the Tiananmen protests had been ones of unprecedented openness in China, with debates erupting over the relationship between scientific development and political liberalism. Scientists led by the late physicist Fang Lizhi, sometimes called China's Sakharov, and science historian Xu Liangying challenged Marxist versions of science and the utilitarian approach to research that had taken root with economic reforms. In February 1989, 42 prominent scholars signed an open letter to the Chinese government calling for the release of political prisoners—along with greater democracy. They also called for increased science funding, especially in basic research.

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Staring down tanks at Tiananmen.
PHOTO: JEFF WIDENER/AP
The scholars helped inspire a movement culminating that April, when thousands gathered in Beijing and other cities to mourn the death of Hu Yaobang, a liberal reformer who had been purged from China's leadership circle. Students occupied Tiananmen Square, demanding that the government uphold Hu's views. The government ultimately ordered martial law and condoned the bloody crackdown.

In the repression that ensued, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences fired staff involved in the protests. Talented scholars like Fang fled China. Nascent efforts at building overseas ties faltered. In China, most mainland scientists fell silent, says sociologist Lun Zhang, a protest leader in the square. They “just returned to their offices and stayed out of anything related to society,” says Zhang, who escaped to Hong Kong and then to France, where he now studies change in contemporary China at the University of Cergy-Pontoise in France. Meanwhile, thousands of top Chinese students who were studying abroad, the vast majority of them in the sciences, put off plans to return.

Many never did. In 1992, under pressure from Chinese students, President George H. W. Bush pushed the Chinese Student Protection Act through Congress, guaranteeing green cards to all Chinese nationals who had been in the United States between 5 June 1989 and 11 April 1990. The act was a “huge blow” to Chinese science, says David Zweig, a political scientist at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology who researches Chinese returnees. Fully 54,000 people collected green cards under the new law, many of them scientists. Thousands more took advantage of similar provisions in Canada and Australia. The exodus “delayed China's science and technology dramatically—probably by 5 or 10 years,” says He, who stayed in the United States instead of returning to China as initially planned.

Luring back that talent has been tricky, Zweig says. In the early 1990s, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping urged overseas students to return, declaring that their previous “political attitude” didn't matter. By 2000, even some scientists who had been politically active after Tiananmen had been invited back, often for prominent positions in the country's booming research enterprise. They returned to a vastly different intellectual environment: one with far more money for research, but dominated by political connections and more intolerant of dissent—and still hindered by a top-down distribution of grants and accolades. “The ethos and culture of the domestic research system” took a hit after 1989, notes Richard Suttmeier, an expert on Sino-American science cooperation at the University of Oregon, Eugene. “It is hard to recover from that.”

In surveys and interviews, overseas scientists tend to name the complex social relations shaping Chinese science as the key impediment to their return, Zweig says. “If you're not part of the inner network, if you're not part of the team of the director of the institute, you're not going to get grants,” he says.

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To hear a podcast with author Mara Hvistendahl, see http://scim.ag/pod_6187.

Returnees concur that fundamental cultural issues hamper Chinese science. One prominent scientist who was barred from China after 1989 for his political activities but eventually returned from the United States to head a lab on the mainland says that a rigid hierarchy and lack of openness thwart scientific debate. While the culture is gradually changing, he says, the top-down distribution of grants and a lack of investigator-initiated projects mean that “big investments are sometimes wasted.” Young scholars are discouraged from contradicting their advisers, He adds. “If you have a higher position, people think you are more right.”

Such shortcomings seem to hardly register with Chinese science officials, many of whom question why the government's outlays haven't yielded more breakthroughs—or netted the nation a Nobel Prize in science. To try to boost innovation, the government has stepped up efforts to bring overseas Chinese scientists back home. Foreign-born researchers are now wooed, too, under the Recruitment Program of Foreign Experts introduced in 2011. Some say that scientists brought in under such programs are helping change China's research culture—by instituting reforms within their labs and sitting on university committees dedicated to institutional change. China's science ministry has even consulted former dissidents for their thoughts on scientific reform.

But the recruitment drive misses the point, Zhang contends: “The most important question is not talent. It is the loss of vitality.” In the wake of the Tiananmen crackdown, he says, Chinese intellectual life lost its edge. Without that, he notes, “They can train engineers and scientists, but the really original inventions won't come from China.”

↵* Shanghai, China