China's road to globalizing research
German-Chinese cooperation in theory and practice
By Lu Yongxiang
Dieser Artikel auf Deutsch
Lu Yongxiang (Foto: privat).
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The year is 1978. After ten troubled years China has opened up its gates again for the first time. Deng Xiaoping has placed his policies under the heading "Reform and Opening to the Outside" and is trying very hard to rehabilitate Chinese research, technology, and education. And this is the year of a visit to China by a delegation from the Humboldt Foundation. It is headed by the then president, the biochemist Feodor Lynen. The agreement concluded between him, the deputy prime minister at the time, and the president of the Chinese Academy of Science laid the foundations for academic cooperation between China and Germany after a break of almost 30 years. At the time, I was a lecturer at Zhejiang University and working on hydraulic control and drives technology. Through publications I had come across Professor Wolfgang Backe of the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule (RWTH) Aachen and started making plans to research with him. In 1979, I was one of the first 31 Humboldt Fellows from China to embark on a stay in Germany since the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949.
The impressions I gathered in Germany at that time have had a formative influence on me. I was impressed by the modern transport and communications infrastructures, by the constitutional and welfare state, by environmental consciousness, by the high level of general education, by town planning, by the quality and excellent equipment in research institutes. By comparison, it became clear to me that China had a lot to catch up on in many areas which could only happen if the reform and opening policy and collaboration with other countries were continued on the basis of equality.
I was particularly impressed by the educational and research systems in Germany. So perhaps it is no coincidence that in 1982 I became the first citizen of the People's Republic of China to complete a doctorate in engineering in the Federal Republic of Germany. My insights into the interweaving of theory and practice in engineering in Germany were of the utmost importance for my research and teaching in China and for the functions I held later. When I became Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Zhejiang University in 1985 and then Vice- Chancellor in 1988, for example, my colleagues and I developed a new structure for linking research and teaching more closely. Numerous projects arose from close collaboration with partners in Germany. Together with the Technical University in Berlin we established a centre for "Technical German". Nowadays, after Tongji University, the Zhejiang University has more academic relations with Germany than any other.
In 1997 I became President of the Chinese Academy of Science - almost twenty years after the meeting described above between the then President of the Academy of Science and the President of the Humboldt Foundation from which I, as a young lecturer, had profited so much. Now that I hold this office myself I try to intensify collaboration with German universities and companies even more. By now, the Federal Republic of Germany has become one of the important strategic partners of the Chinese Academy of Science. Special mention should be made of the close cooperation with the Max Planck Society: together we have established groups of young scientists at the Academy Institute in Shanghai, set up partnership groups, and founded the Shanghai Advance Study Institute to mention but a few milestones.
In 1997 I was awarded the Golden Diesel Medal. On 6 March 2000 the German Ambassador in Beijing presented me with the Order of Merit with Star. All this I consider to be in recognition of my contribution to encouraging collaboration between China and Germany in the fields of research and education. The very beginning of my attempts to globalize research and science in China, however, was the day on which I was awarded a Humboldt Fellowship.
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