Perspective on China

At the end of April, a delegation from the American Chemical Society spent 10 days in Beijing and Shanghai meeting with government officials concerned with science and technology policy, nongovernmental organizations focusing on science and technology issues, and chemistry faculty at leading Chinese universities. The delegation's mission was to explore opportunities for ACS to partner with chemists in China to advance our science.

In two editorials written from China, I provided some first impressions of the country and the chemical enterprise there (C&EN, April 25, page 3; and May 2, page 3). In last week's issue, C&EN Hong Kong Bureau Head Jean-François Tremblay reported on the delegation's trip from an ACS point of view (C&EN, May 16, page 47). In this "Perspective," I hope to provide a broad-brushstroke, impressionistic take on the chemical enterprise in China and a few issues that I think will have an impact on China's development over the next several years.

The delegation consisted of ACS President William F. Carroll; ACS Board of Directors Chair James D. Burke; ACS Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer Madeleine Jacobs; Peter J. Stang, a chemistry professor at the University of Utah and editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society; Elsa Reichmanis, director of materials research at Lucent Technology's Bell Labs and 2003 ACS president; and Joan S. Valentine, a chemistry professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and editor of Accounts of Chemical Research. Also representing ACS were senior staff members David L. Schutt, the chief strategy officer and director of the Division of External Affairs; Denise L. Creech, director of the Membership Division; Tamara J. Nameroff, director of the Office of International Activities; Tremblay; and myself. In Shanghai, the ACS team was joined by Ben Jones, director of advertising sales for ACS Publications, who took the lead in organizing a reception sponsored by C&EN, ACS, and the Synthetic Organic Chemical Manufacturers Association (SOCMA).

CHEMISTRY IN CHINA. "China is a country on the move," Zhou Guangzhao, president of the China Association for Science & Technology, told the delegation at one of its first stops in Beijing. "Keep an objective mind when you are visiting our chemistry facilities. Some of what you see will be quite advanced, but some will be quite backward."

Zhou's comment accurately reflected what we subsequently saw in Beijing and Shanghai university chemistry departments. At the Institute of Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ICCAS), powerful excimer lasers are shoehorned into cramped laboratories with no warnings or barriers to prevent beams from traversing open lab space. Organic reactions are carried out on benchtops because hoods are virtually nonexistent. Almost no one wears safety glasses or goggles.

On the other hand, at the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry (SIOC), a newly constructed chemistry building has more than 300 hoods. A new building is being planned to house a state-of-the-art 900-MHz NMR spectrometer. Yet another new chemistry building to house the remaining faculty is on the drawing board.

The academic chemists we met with in Beijing and Shanghai are justifiably proud of the research they are doing. Much as at any university in the U.S. or Europe, hallway walls outside of labs are covered with posters describing the research being done. The focus of much of the research is, not surprisingly, very similar to research being done everywhere else in the world. Chemistry is, after all, a global science, and chemists in China are very much aware of where the cutting edge in our science lies. Many groups are working on new materials, polymers, nanotechnology, chemistry at the interface with biology, and new pharmaceuticals, especially ones derived from traditional Chinese remedies.

The multidisciplinary nature of chemical research is having the same sort of impact it is having in the U.S. and elsewhere. At the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), Vice President Zhu Daoben said that multidisciplinarity "is the current trend worldwide in every aspect of science. The physical sciences and chemistry in particular face this challenge. As science has become increasingly multidisciplinary, it is critical that the disciplinary structures within chemistry not hinder the future growth of the chemical sciences into new areas. At the same time, we also believe that the disciplinary bases of chemistry are the foundations for successful multidisciplinary research."

Among the research NSFC is sponsoring, Zhu noted, are programs of molecular engineering aimed at innovative new materials and substances and basic science at the interface of chemistry and biology.

Something that strikes you immediately at Chinese universities is the relative youth of the faculty. Almost all of the professors are in their 30s or 40s. There is no secret as to why this is: People freely tell you that, because of the Cultural Revolution, which ran from 1966 to 1976, there are very few faculty aged 45 to 50 or older than 60, and essentially no faculty aged 50 to 60. Ph.D. degrees were considered bourgeois and were not granted during the Cultural Revolution.

This youthfulness of chemistry faculties has a number of implications. For one, the large number of students graduating with Ph.D. degrees in chemistry--100 each per year from ICCAS, Peking University, and Tsinghua University in Beijing; 100 more each year from Fudan University in Shanghai; and another 80 from SIOC--are being trained for academic positions that aren't going to open up for another 20 to 30 years. When we asked about this, it seemed not to have occurred to many people that it might be a problem. SIOC was an exception. With its extensive contacts with the multinational pharmaceutical industry and the Chinese pharmaceutical industry, SIOC is preparing Ph.D. candidates for careers in industry.

I think this youthfulness also makes these chemists particularly driven to succeed. The Cultural Revolution wiped out the better part of a generation of chemists, and with them, a generation of progress in Chinese chemistry. One senses a hunger among these young chemistry faculty to vault Chinese chemistry to the first rank in the world.

Another demographic feature of the faculties and student bodies we met with was the role women are playing. There are a sprinkling of women among the faculties of these elite institutions. Much more significant is the representation of women among graduate and undergraduate students and research groups. Fully half of the undergraduate chemistry students appear to be women. And of the research groups we met, between a third and a half of the graduate students and postdocs are women.

Something else that strikes you about chemists in China is their ferocious drive to publish in journals with high impact factors--which are a measure of how well a journal is read--particularly ACS journals. This was clearly a product both of the drive to succeed and of an incentive system that was acknowledged but never fully explained to us and even denied on occasion. It was clear, however, that this system links research funding and career advancement with publication in such journals.

For example, at Peking University, Zhengfeng Xi, dean of the college of chemistry, said to us that members of the department had published more than 400 papers from 2000 to 2004, and that the number of papers published in journals with impact factors greater than two had gone from 71 in 2000, to 73 in 2001, 129 in 2002, 152 in 2003, and 155 in 2004. "More than half of the papers were in ACS journals," he observed. "It is very important to publish in ACS journals."

At SIOC, Executive Director Jiang (Bill) Biao presented a table for 2000-03 publications in four ACS journals:

ICCAS Director Wan Lijun told us that, in 2004, faculty had published 32 papers in journals with impact factors greater than 6.0 (Nature, Science, JACS, Angewandte Chemie, and Advanced Materials) and 165 papers in journals with impact factors greater than 3.0. Research mentioned in C&EN and on chemistry.org's "Heart Cut" also was highlighted.

In a talk at ICCAS, Stang took note of this trend. In terms of papers from outside the U.S. published in ACS journals, China now ranks behind only Japan, Germany, and the U.K. Stang predicts that China will climb past all three countries within the next several years. China already ranks third in the number of papers abstracted by CAS (C&EN, June 14, 2004, page 38).

We spent much less time interacting with representatives of the Chinese chemical industry than with academics and government officials. In Shanghai, though, the reception hosted by C&EN, ACS, and SOCMA attracted about 200 industry representatives. The following day, the networking firm Pacific Genuity, which helped arrange the reception, organized a half-day tour of the Shanghai Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park, located about a half-hour's drive southeast of downtown Shanghai.

The park, which is nominally privately owned--the company that runs the park has a single shareholder, the Chinese government--currently encompasses 17 sq km of land. Eventually, it will grow to 25 sq km. Officials of the park say that it has "integrated circuits, software, and biotech and pharmaceuticals as its pillar industries," and that it "takes entrepreneurship and incubation as its main functions."

In the biotech and pharmaceuticals sphere, 42 companies have located operations at the park, including Roche, Amersham, GlaxoSmithKline, Boehringer Ingleheim, and Kirin. Thirty-one R&D institutes focused on pharmaceuticals are also located there, including the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, the National Human Genome Center at Shanghai, the National Center for Drug Screening, and the Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine. The latter of these has attracted start-up companies such as Shanghai ChemExplorer and Hutchinson MediPharm, both of which are focused on developing drugs derived from traditional Chinese medicines.

More than 70 R&D centers have been located at the Zhangjiang park. Multinational corporations including General Electric, Honeywell, Eli Lilly & Co., DuPont, and Motorola have R&D centers. Rohm and Haas has committed to building its new R&D center in the park. Spectrum Chemicals & Laboratory Products will open a full-service testing lab in the park in June.

Our whirlwind tour gave us the sense of a place that, like much of the rest of China that we saw, is very much in a hurry to establish itself as a world-class center of science and technology.

PROBLEMS WITH VISAS. At many stops, the ACS delegation discussed with our Chinese hosts possible exchange programs--of students, of junior faculty--and the ability of Chinese chemists to attend and contribute to international scientific meetings. Again and again, the difficulty of obtaining a U.S. visa was raised as a significant impediment to Chinese chemists effectively sharing their work with American colleagues.

At the Ministry of Science & Technology, for example, Cheng Jin-Pei, who received his chemistry Ph.D. from Northwestern University, said: "One concern is that the U.S. embassy often rejects scientists' applications for visas. More and more people are rejected because they are chemists. They are not able to attend meetings. A vice president of ICCAS who specializes in nanotechnology was rejected recently. This is a significant problem."

Other scientists echoed Cheng. Liang Wenping, deputy director general at NSFC, noted that "NSFC and NSF have two bilateral meetings scheduled in China. Problems with U.S. visas come up again and again with regard to bilateral meetings." At Peking University, Jiang told us that "visas are a big problem for exchanges."

Businessmen and women are also having visa problems. In conjunction with the C&EN, ACS, and SOCMA reception, Pacific Genuity arranged a follow-up question-and-answer session with ACS Executive Director and CEO Jacobs, SOCMA President and CEO Joseph Acker, and me. Also invited to the session was Daniel Wald, vice counsel at the U.S. consulate in Shanghai. Wald is one of the consulate officials responsible for interviewing visa applicants.

Wald told the audience that "applying for a U.S. visa is complicated and can cause people to become anxious. We are working to make the process as transparent and anxiety-free as possible."

Wald walked the audience of about 70 through the visa application process. One key point he made concerns qualifying for a U.S. business visa. "U.S. immigration law stipulates that every visa applicant is considered a potential immigrant until proven otherwise," Wald told the audience. "Your job is to convince the officer that you will return to China. You must show that you have a compelling reason to return to China--for instance, that you own a home, have a job, or have strong family ties."

Another key point Wald made is that applicants need to prove that they have a legitimate business reason for obtaining a visa. "You need to be able to answer questions about your company, your business, and what you intend to do in the U.S. Every day, we have applicants who can't explain their business or what they do in their company," he said.

"Every applicant to the U.S. for a business visa should have an invitation letter," Wald pointed out. "There are no age, marital, home ownership, or income requirements for receiving a business visa."

The interview takes about three minutes, Wald noted. Each officer is expected to process between 80 and 100 applicants a day. "Visas in China are a growth industry," Wald said. "There are more applicants than we have the resources to accommodate." In response to a question about the success rate for visa applicants, Wald said, "We don't keep official numbers of acceptances and rejections."

U.S. immigration law has not changed since 1952, Wald noted during his talk. From this observer's perspective, we are shooting ourselves in the foot with such a restrictive visa policy. Talented scientists, students, business people, and entrepreneurs are being denied entry to the U.S. on the basis of an outmoded model for granting visas and security concerns that seem overblown, particularly with regard to Chinese visa applicants. They can and are taking their science and their business elsewhere, and it is hurting us as much as or more than it is hurting them.

GOAL-ORIENTED
Audacious Ambition

Management gurus suggest that an organization should have a 10- to 20-year vision of what the organization wants to become. The vision should be bold, audacious, and a massive stretch that energizes the organization to dare greatness.

The Institute of Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ICCAS) in Beijing is one of China's premier institutions for chemical research and education. No one, however, would mistake it for a U.S. or European university chemistry department. Although the faculty is first-rate, the facilities are cramped and, in some cases, border on the primitive.

ICCAS does not lack for ambition, however. On the second floor of the institute's main building, a series of illuminated panels lays out the ICCAS research program. The first panel is titled "Encouraging Prospect," and it presents a bold vision for ICCAS:

"The initiation of the Knowledge Innovation Program indeed provides a great opportunity and fresh platform for the development of ICCAS. ICCAS is determined to seize on it and meet the challenges ahead. We should stick to the principle of implementing the strategy of national rejuvenation through science and education and sustainable development. Under the guidance of the new development policies set by the [Chinese Academy of Sciences], ICCAS will continue its efforts in promoting basic, strategic, and foresighted researches stressed on the frontiers of natural sciences and the national strategic needs, with an eye to the highest prizes in world science and technology.

"At the present stage when a wide-ranging implementation of the Knowledge Innovation Program is ongoing within the CAS, we should create an internationally TOP (top-ranking, omniscient, and progressive) research institute, i.e., one to create internationally top-ranking research accomplishments, to foster omniscient talents, and to carve out progressive management systems. ICCAS aims to become, within the next 10 to 15 years, a leading national base for basic research in chemical sciences and an internationally first-class research center for molecular science."

The ICCAS "Encouraging Prospect" is the most explicit statement of Chinese chemistry institutions' determination to take a place among the elite of the world, but it expresses a sentiment I heard throughout my two weeks in China. When asked about their vision for chemistry in China in 20 years, one Peking University faculty member said: "Excellent postdocs still want to go to the U.S. or Europe. It is very difficult to get top postdocs. In 10 to 15 years, when we become a famous university and salaries are higher and Peking University is as prestigious as Harvard, we will be able to attract those postdocs."

Another Peking University faculty member said: "It is difficult to put a date on things. If China stays stable, it is still difficult to predict exactly when China will be number one economically and the center of world science." When it happens might be difficult to predict in this chemist's mind; that it will happen, though, he considers a certainty.

ENERGY AND POLLUTION. Beijing is a sprawling, bustling, overcrowded city with horrendous traffic and severe air pollution. It presents striking contrasts. Gleaming office and government buildings rise next to small sidewalk shops and crumbling brick neighborhoods. Construction cranes litter the city's skyline, with one mogul calling them the "national symbol of China," according to the International Herald Tribune. Vehicles ranging from late-model BMWs and Audis to crowded buses and jitneys to hybrid motorcycle delivery trucks to bicycles and tricycles rigged to carry heavy loads of various cargoes pack the streets. Many people still commute on bicycles. Computer-driven neon signs on the tops of buildings flash the names of every high-tech company from around the world; at street level, on many corners, bicycle tire repairmen spread their tools across broken sidewalks.

Much has changed in Beijing over the past 20 years. Two members of the ACS delegation had visited China a number of times since the mid-1980s, and they both stressed how much Beijing has advanced since their first visits and how little it resembles the city they first encountered. To them, the contrasts so apparent to me as a first-time visitor hardly mattered. The many bicycle commuters dodging their way through the heavy traffic, for example, were a shadow of the throngs of bicycles that clogged the city's streets two decades ago, they said.

Shanghai presents many contrasts to Beijing. It is a larger city, and it has been a major metropolitan area longer than Beijing. It appears to be more affluent than Beijing. The commercial area around Nanjing Road appeals to middle-class Chinese. The areas around clusters of major hotels are aggressively upscale--expensive automobiles abound, stores affiliated with designer labels line the streets, and almost everyone, Westerner and Chinese alike, is chicly dressed. Even what are clearly the poorer parts of town look more affluent than their counterparts in Beijing.

There are important parallels between Shanghai and Beijing, however. The traffic jams are not quite as bad in Shanghai as in Beijing, but they are bad enough. The air is polluted; by late afternoon on a sunny day, it is the same dingy yellow color as the air in Beijing. The commercial real estate boom in Shanghai is every bit as frenetic as that in Beijing, with construction towers dominating the skyline of the region immediately surrounding central Shanghai.

Energy is clearly a major issue, and China's demand for energy seems certain to be a factor in the country's future economic growth. The hotel we stayed at in Beijing is located in a central area near the U.S., Russian, and Japanese embassies, and during the evening hours it looks much like any major metropolitan area, ablaze in neon and floodlit billboards. Between 11 PM and midnight, however, the signs and almost all of the lights in office windows blink out, and by the early morning hours the city is eerily dark. On our visits to several Beijing universities, it was impossible not to notice that almost all hallways were dark and the rooms very chilly during a late-April cold snap. As in many things, the energy issue seems not to be as critical in Shanghai as in Beijing, but the skyline does go mainly dark in the early morning hours, and buildings aren't over-lighted.

As anyone who reads my editorials realizes, I don't consider efforts to conserve energy to be a bad thing. I wish lights in office buildings in the U.S. were turned off at night. But I do not think the Chinese in Beijing and Shanghai are practicing energy conservation by choice; I think it is by necessity. Other than coal, China has almost no energy resources of its own, and its demand for petroleum now ranks second only behind the U.S. Demand for energy in China clearly has outstripped supply, and the situation can only grow worse as China continues to aggressively develop its economy.

According to the Ministry of Science & Technology's Cheng, energy is one of the four critical research areas for China in the country's next five-year plan, along with agriculture, human health, and advanced materials. "The Chinese government is paying more attention to changing the style of the economy to greater efficiency," Cheng told the ACS delegation. "We need to use less energy and fewer natural resources. China is now the second largest producer of CO₂ in the world and is catching up with the U.S. We need to consider very seriously how to devise industrial processes to be more efficient."

Pollution is another problem that could put a crimp in China's plans for economic growth. As we were departing for China in mid-April, news outlets including C&EN were reporting on riots in a village in China's Zhejiang province over pollution from 13 recently built chemical plants (C&EN, April 18, page 12). On an average, sunny spring day, the pollution blanketing Beijing and Shanghai is palpable, lowering visibility to a couple of miles and turning the sky a sickly shade of yellowish tan. It is reminiscent of a very smoggy day in Los Angeles 25 years ago, before pollution controls, particularly catalytic converters on automobile exhausts, dramatically reduced the air pollution in that city.

So far, China's economic growth has been accomplished with almost no regard for China's environment. That formula does not seem to be sustainable. China's growing middle class eventually will demand that environmental quality be factored into the economic equation. Regulations governing many types of industrial activities and transportation alternatives will need to be put in place to limit toxic emissions to air and water and convince the world that China is serious about putting its environmental house in order.

CONTROL OF INFORMATION. The day before the delegation left for China, the Washington Post carried a story about the Internet in China. The gist of the story was that, although many people had predicted that the flow of information over the Internet would be very difficult to control, Chinese authorities had become quite adept at it. It turns out that there are choke points on the Internet that the Chinese have exploited to restrict what China's citizens are allowed to access over the Web. According to a story in the International Herald Tribune while we were in China, the Chinese government has 50,000 workers monitoring the Internet.

Late on our last night in Beijing, I conducted a sloppy experiment that nevertheless had fascinating results. My hotel room had high-speed Internet access for a fee, and I had been using it throughout the week to keep up with e-mail and world news via the New York Times and Yahoo. I had not perceived any filtering of the content I had been accessing. In my experiment, I logged on to Yahoo and searched on "Falun Gong," the Chinese religious movement that has been ruthlessly suppressed by the authorities. After a longish wait, I was informed "This page cannot be displayed," the standard page that appears when a website is down or otherwise unavailable. I then searched on "Tiananmen Square" and got "This page cannot be displayed." "Democracy movement in China" and "democracy" likewise could not be displayed.

Then I searched on "Japanese aggression" and got 1,090,000 hits. "American imperialism" got 1,820,000 hits, and "chemistry" got 34,700,000 hits. I tried searching on "Falun Gong" again and, again, got "This page cannot be displayed." "Chairman Mao," "Mao Tse Tung," "Stalin," "Franklin Roosevelt," "Albert Einstein," "Bill Clinton," "Charlie Chaplin," and "Nicole Kidman" were likewise not available. In fact, after my second search on "Falun Gong," nothing was available; my Yahoo search engine had been shut down.

I logged off Yahoo and the Internet and logged back on again. Here are the results of the next searches:

By this time, it was 1 AM and I was tired, so I terminated the experiment. What appears to be happening is that a system has been established that prevents accessing information on particular search terms and modifies subsequent searches on the basis of the banned search terms.

The Chinese government is obsessed with the control of information. Colleagues told of moments when CNN went blank on the television in their hotel rooms for the duration of a story on China that might have been critical of the nation in some way. At the end of the segment, the broadcast resumed. A story in the International Herald Tribune said that the recent anti-Japan protests and riots in Shanghai and other Chinese cities had largely been orchestrated via cell phone and text messaging, and that the authorities were moving to block people's ability to communicate by these means. When we arrived in Shanghai, one colleague stopped being able to receive e-mail via her Blackberry.

China seems in many ways like a typical developing country, but it is not. For reasons that are not clear to me, we in the West seem to ignore the fact that China remains a one-party authoritarian state that controls the free flow of information and arrests its citizens for practicing free speech and expressing their religious beliefs. Yes, China is an enormous market, and the world desperately wants to do business with it. Yes, China is advancing rapidly in science and technology, and Western scientists must engage their Chinese counterparts. But let's not delude ourselves and pretend that China is just like the U.S. or Japan or a member of the European Union.

China's repressive political system gives it both strengths and weaknesses. China is uniquely able to focus the substantial innate energy of its citizens on efforts it deems most likely to bear fruit. When China wants a series of high-tech industrial parks centered on particular economic zones, the land becomes available, the infrastructure is put in place, and the buildings are built. Chinese companies and their Western counterparts flock to the locations because they're good places to do research and conduct business.

I have a soft spot in my heart, however, for democracies, as messy and inefficient as they can be. Capitalism functions best and most humanely within a democracy. People doing what they want to do, saying what they want to say when they want to say it, and interacting with each other in relatively unencumbered free markets has always proven to be the best way to build a society. I do not think China will succeed in the end following a different course because, ultimately, the Chinese people will demand what the citizens of other advanced nations take for granted.

TRANSFORMATION. China is experiencing one of the most profound and rapid transformations any society has experienced in recent times. And the pace of the transformation continues to accelerate.

At many of the universities, businesses, and government agencies we visited in Beijing and Shanghai, we met chemists who had trained and, in many cases, settled in the U.S., and in recent years returned to accept faculty positions or start businesses in China. Given some of the difficulties in conducting chemical research at these universities, we wondered what was drawing these chemists back. At Peking University, one chemistry faculty member answered the question: "China is in transition. I want to be part of that transition so that I can answer my son that I was here when he asks, 'Where were you when China was becoming the new China?' "

On our bus ride to the Zhangjiang biotech park, I spoke at length with Yimin Feng, one of Pacific Genuity's founders and its vice president of business development. Feng was born and spent his early years in a village on Hainan Island, a large, tropical island in the South China Sea off the south coast of China. His parents immigrated to the U.S. when he was a boy and settled in Oakland, Calif. Feng received his B.S. in business administration from the University of California, Berkeley, and subsequently worked for Parnassus Investment, a high-tech growth fund, and Andersen Consulting, where he specialized in high technology and e-commerce strategy for Fortune 500 companies.

"Could you imagine being here in this position when you were growing up?" I asked Feng as our bus rolled along the six-lane highway through the Pudong area of Shanghai.

"No, not at all," he said, laughing. "We were poor. Our house was a solid mud hut, but it had a thatched roof that leaked when it rained. When I was growing up in California, I had no thought of returning to China.

"Look at this, though," he said, gesturing to the new city around us. "There's no place like China in the world today. It's a place to make your fortune. It's something you have to be a part of."