science

With goal of being science and tech powerhouse, researchers flourish in China


Professor of molecular biology Gao Xiaodong, background, and Morihisa Fujita are seen at Jiangnan University in Wuxi, in China’s eastern Jiangsu province, on Sept. 18, 2018. (Mainichi/Joji Uramatsu)


BEIJING/WUXI — Astronomy post-doctoral researcher Hayato Shimabukuro’s eyes light up as he explains the resources of China’s top scientific school, Tsinghua University here: “It’s not even comparable to Japan.”


Since the Japanese government converted the country’s national and public universities into corporations in 2009, it has been reducing administrative subsidies to schools by 1 percent a year, and many researchers have been left to writing grant applications for research funding from outside sources.


However, the situation in China is starkly different. In aiming to be a global leader in science and technology, the government has increased research funding over the last 10 years, doubling the amount allotted by Japan, and quickly catching up with the world leader in grants, the United States. After his appointment at Tsinghua, Shimabukuro says he was moved by the words of a senior researcher: “We have the money, so continue to make use of it to improve your work.”


Shimabukuro has two research funds aimed at individual researchers for roughly 3.2 million yen each, and also an approximately 300,000 yen monthly living expenses stipend separate from his salary. The budget for the joint research project he began last month was a staggering figure of some 740 million yen.


“The joint research team is composed of other researchers in their 30s,” explained Shimabukuro, full of excitement about the potential of the project. “I would like to step up the level of my work in the stimulating research environment in China.”


Five years ago, when Toru Takahata, 41, was working on his post-doctoral research at Vanderbilt University in the U.S., a Chinese-American professor gave him an interesting proposal: “I’m gathering 20 laboratory principal investigators instead of 15 and starting a research center in China. Do you want to come along?” The promise of being promoted to a principal investigator with his own lab was appealing, and Takahata is now a professor at Zhejiang University in China’s Zhejiang province, conducting research on the brains of monkeys. He was also presented with a contract including a four-year grant of some 50 million yen.


“In China, where research on the brains of monkeys is still young, there were many things that I had to teach from zero. But on the other hand, because principal investigators had all been gathered in one place with a clear vision, it was extremely easy to do joint research with others at the research center,” explained Takahata. In the U.S. and Europe, doing research on animals like monkeys has become difficult for ethical reasons, and China is emerging as a place where such research can be continued.


“Let’s send several thousand, several dozen thousand. No matter how much money is spent, it will not go to waste.” These were the words of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping at Tsinghua University in June 1978, calling for a large number of Chinese students to go and study in Western countries. Deng visited Japan in October of the same year to implement the Treaty of Peace and Friendship between Japan and China, requesting that the Japanese government accept students as well.


Professor Gao Xiaodong, 52, who teaches molecular biology at Jiangnan University in Jiangsu province north of Shanghai, embarked for Japan as a university student in 1984 on a Chinese government sponsored scholarship. Soon after, the dispatch of graduate students became the center of the program, and Gao and the other students sent in the fifth year of the program became the last group of undergrads to be sent abroad. This was because many students never returned to China, and the program had been criticized as a brain drain for the country.


But Gao will never forget the departure ceremony held for him and his fellow students heading out of China 34 years ago.


“We were told by a top official that Deng Xiaoping said, ‘If 30 percent of the students we send overseas return, then we have succeeded.’ I was shocked that he would say it was a success to use government funds only to have 30 percent of the students return,” he remembered.


Today, of the 30 students who departed alongside Gao in that fifth class, some 10 have returned — the 30 percent success line drawn by Deng. Gao himself returned to China from Japan in 2011, inviting two Japanese junior researchers to join him in professor posts at Jiangnan University. One of them, 39-year-old professor Morihisa Fujita said, “It is incredibly good luck to be able to go abroad as a young researcher and have your own lab. In addition to Europe and the United States, I think there is a new choice for researchers — China.”


On the 40th anniversary of the ratification of the peace and friendship treaty between Japan and China, it seems as though the benefit of exchange between the two nations is only continuing to grow.


(Japanese original by Joji Uramatsu, China General Bureau)



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