The Stalled Leap Forward

"Marxist philosophy holds that the most important problem does not lie in understanding the laws of the objective world and thus being able to explain it, but in applying the knowledge of these laws actively to change the world. "

--Mao Tse-tung

For the past three decades, the People's Republic of China has sought to apply Chairman Mao's idea by demanding that its scientists be politically orthodox and by subjugating all scientific research to the solution of the country's most pressing national problems. China has made impressive progress in increasing agricultural and industrial output and providing health care for its 850 million people. But. says a contingent of scientists from New York City's Rockefeller University, the Chinese have realized these auspicious goals by ignoring basic research almost entirely. As a result, the Rockefeller researchers revealed in interviews with TIME Science Editor Peter Stoler, Chinese science has been stagnating. Says Physicist Frederick Seitz, Rockefeller's president: "They're doing basic and applied research to the best of their limited ability, but are still highly dependent for their innovations on the scientific community of the rest of the world. All they can do is work with what they've already got."

The Rockefeller scientists base their grim conclusions on an 18-day tour of China completed in May. Nearly two years in the planning, the trip to the People's Republic was arranged at Seitz's request after several groups of Chinese scientists had visited the U.S. and toured Rockefeller, which counts 16 Nobel laureates among its alumni and faculty. The eleven American scientists visited five major Chinese cities, half a dozen universities and nine of the country's 100 research institutes, many of which exist in name only. With few exceptions, they found their hosts open and eager to accommodate them. "We didn't see everything," says Rodney Nichols, a Rockefeller vice president. "But we saw enough to get the picture."

Minimal Care. The Rockefeller researchers discovered that the Chinese health system aims to bring at least minimal medical care to every citizen, largely through the wide use of paramedics known as "barefoot doctors" and a network of spartan but well-staffed clinics and hospitals across the country. "Everyone we saw looked healthy and well fed," said Dr. Maclyn McCarty, a Rockefeller vice president and professor of biomedicine. The Chinese were well informed about what their Western colleagues were doing. They religiously read such scientific publications as the British Nature and the U.S. Science. The visiting scientists were impressed by the work the Chinese have been doing in protein synthesis, in the use of insect and viral agents to replace chemical pesticides, and in trying to find the scientific basis of acupuncture as an anesthetic. Says Biophysicist Floyd Ratliff: "Their work in neurophysiology is very good, comparable to that in the West."

But other aspects of the picture are not so favorable. The researchers found that Peking's once prestigious Institute of Genetics was apparently closed; the Chinese geneticists have forgone investigative work for field work aimed at increasing crop yields to feed their country's swelling population. Research in other sciences also appeared to be lagging behind that of the West. Says Cell Biologist Zanvil Cohn: "The work going on in China today is similar to that done in the U.S. years ago. They're doing reasonable research, but with no great insight and no evidence of very recent progress."

The visitors observed that some laboratories seemed hopelessly archaic by Western standards. Few of the facilities showed the intense buzz of activity characteristic of U.S. research labs; some showed little sign of use. Others had broken or outdated equipment. "Scientifically," concludes Molecular Biologist Norton Zinder, "China is several decades behind the West."

To foreign observers, the cause of this lag seems clear. During the '50s and early '60s, the Chinese emphasized applied science and--except for high-energy physics projects connected with weapons development --downgraded basic research. Then Mao's Cultural Revolution erupted in 1966. Rampaging radical students shut down universities, and the government sent professors out to the countryside to plant rice and learn from the peasants. As a result, says Zinder, "research came to a halt. Professors hibernated. Chinese science lost a whole decade."

Now the Chinese are trying to make up for lost time. The ouster last fall of the so-called Gang of Four (including Chiang Ch'ing, Mao's widow) as enemies of the revolution seems to have given the country's pragmatic new leaders both an excuse for the failures of the past decade and the push needed to get science started again. With characteristic zeal, they have set themselves an awesome new goal: "To catch up with and overtake advanced world levels in science and technology" by the end of the century. Scientific journals, banned during the Cultural Revolution, are at last being revived. But even this renascence retains its Maoist patina. The first issue of the just revived journal of natural sciences published by Canton's Sun Yat-sen University contains several serious articles. But it opens with two poems by the Chairman.

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