By Kevin Holden
June 26, 2015

Universities in south China are taking the lead in an array of reforms aimed at making academic centers and scientific collaboration more international and more dynamic. Leaders of universities across southern Guangdong Province are expanding award schemes designed to recruit researchers and scientists who have obtained advanced degrees or taught in the United States or Europe. These measures are increasing openings for scholars trained abroad, and are helping globalize university faculties and joint scientific research. In the process, China is strengthening its position as a world power in science. By Kevin Holden

As the new millennium unfolds, reform-minded leaders of Chinese universities and academies, and of independent scientific institutes, are all pushing for research discoveries and applications that will bolster China’s rise in diverse spheres of science.

These leaders—many of whom have received advanced degrees in the United States or Europe—likewise support making colleges and scientific collaboration more international and dynamic.

This trend is gaining momentum in south China’s Guangdong Province and is creating new openings for scientists trained abroad.

For centuries, coastal Guangdong has been China’s main portal for contact with the West—everyone from Italian astronomers to British tea traders ended their seafaring passage from Europe at one of the province’s harbors—and the region is moving to expand these intercontinental connections.

Capped on one side by the South China Sea and by mountains to the north, Guangdong features the palm-tree–lined megacities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen along the Pearl River Delta, one of the planet’s most densely populated regions.

Zhuhai, a smaller seaside outpost opposite the former Portuguese colony of Macau, hosts China’s biggest space technology exhibition every 2 years. Daya Bay, a boating resort in eastern Guangdong, holds a massive nuclear power complex.

On the island of Hainan, just off Guangdong’s coast, China is constructing its most technologically advanced spacecraft launch center—the first spaceflight complex to be open to international visitors.

Although Guangzhou, the provincial capital, has been the academic center of south China for hundreds of years, Shenzhen—a sleepy checkerboard of coastal villages when the People’s Republic was founded nearly 6 decades ago—is now experiencing a construction boom in terms of new colleges.

Guangdong’s simultaneous moves to expand universities and to attract scholars worldwide to conduct research or teach at these academic centers are rapidly boosting progress across a spectrum of scientific areas.

Guangzhou’s universities are magnets for scholars trained abroad

In Guangzhou, which has been an export powerhouse in terms of manufactured goods since the launch of China’s market-oriented reforms more than three decades ago, academic leaders are ramping up campaigns to “import” scholars who can help shape the transition to a knowledge-based economy.

At Guangzhou’s Sun Yat-sen University, President Luo Jun is using an assortment of talent schemes, along with perks like access to one of the world’s fastest supercomputers, to attract scientists worldwide to the university’s School of Advanced Computing, School of Engineering, and School of Life Sciences.

The university was founded by Sun Yat-sen, the Hawaiian-educated leader of the 1911 revolution that toppled 2,000 years of imperial rule and gave birth to the Republic of China. Sun, a medical scholar who became the first president of the new republic, envisioned a rejuvenated China guided by “science and democracy,” and he promoted ever-closer ties with the West.

These days, the university he created is transforming itself into an international center for the life sciences and engineering, partly by forging partnerships with American schools: Sun Yat-sen University has teamed up with Johns Hopkins University to create the Medical Research Center for Clinical and Translational Research, and with Carnegie Mellon University to launch the Joint Institute of Engineering.

The university recently received international attention after a group of 16 scientists based at the Key Laboratory of Gene Engineering published the results of a controversial experiment in which they genetically modified single-cell human embryos to repair the human β-globin (HBB) gene in a procedure aimed at preventing a serious blood disorder (www.sciencemag.org/content/348/6234/486.full).

Some scholars argue that the Chinese scientists have crossed an ethical line by editing the human genome, but others welcome China’s comparatively liberal regulation of this area of experimentation, which allows genetics researchers to push the scientific envelope.

Meanwhile, Sun Yat-sen University and other academic centers across Guangdong are competing to attract Chinese scientists who have relocated to Europe or North America after studying there.

For example, Jinan University, which has five campuses spread across the cities of Guangzhou, Zhuhai, and Shenzhen, is stepping up recruitment of researchers who have obtained a degree or taught abroad, says university president Hu Jun.

Jinan University’s academic focus ranges from aquatic ecology and biotechnology to medical bioengineering and traditional Chinese medicine.

The university’s globe-spanning headhunting campaign covers the fields of biology, medicine, information science, and engineering; this effort has been so successful that more than half of the scholars currently joining the faculty have been trained abroad, Hu says.

“Talent from overseas have more expansive academic views and international ways of thinking,” Hu explains. These scholars likewise tend to develop innovative approaches to research and thinking about science.

Source Link: http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2015_06_26/science.opms.r1500155