“Open the red door” for the Year of the Monkey: AIP delegation visits China

On February 8, 2016, China celebrated the Chinese New Year and kicked off the start of the Year of the Monkey. Following the celebration, also known as Spring Festival, a delegation from AIP traveled to Beijing to conduct a week’s worth of meetings with 11 top scientific organizations, universities, and media outlets. The delegation was composed of AIP CEO Robert G.W. Brown, COO Catherine O’Riordan, News Director Jason Socrates Bardi, and myself, the China Media Project Manager.

The week after the Chinese New Year is usually highly valued by Chinese people, as they believe that a good start to the year will lead to a lucky year. In China, red signifies luck and prosperity, and there is a popular Chinese New Year greeting, “开门红,” or “Open the red door,” referring to a perfect beginning of a year or a project. Many Chinese people work diligently from the beginning of the New Year, hoping their efforts will “open the red door” and bring luck for the entire year. As it turns out, the delegation’s spring China trip also opens the red door for AIP’s growing collaboration with China.

Early spring in Beijing is still cold and windy, yet very bright and sunny. Although meetings during the week were intense and followed rapidly one after another, the clear, blue skies outside always refreshed the mind. The extensive discussions with the leadership teams of all 11 organizations were effective and inspiring, provoking ideas for collaboration in various areas, including education programs, media services, Physics Today, the joint event of the world’s best science writing award, history and archiving services, and industrial physics.

All of the organizations we met with represent the top levels in China’s science, science education, and science media communities. Our conversations with their representatives broadened the AIP delegation’s understanding of modern China and enhanced our awareness of potential collaboration opportunities in multiple areas that could advance AIP‘s internationalization process to better serve the science community globally.

These organizations include China’s most prestigious universities (Peking University and Tsinghua University), the top teaching training university (Beijing Normal University), the largest science federation (China Association for Science and Technology (CAST)), the top science and education TV channel that reaches 90% of total audiences (China Central Television 10 (CCTV-10)), the best science daily newspaper (China Science Daily), the second largest newspaper in China but top for science and technology coverage (Guangming Daily), and Scientific American (China edition) among others.

 

AIP's delegation with CAST leadership

 

 

Our meetings with the universities helped us understand their position and point of view. For example, at Peking University the School of Physics has 80 physics professors and 1,745 physics students, of whom 726 are PhD students. The majority of physics professors have studied or worked in other countries, and about 60% of graduate students will go abroad for further study after graduation. According to the school’s dean, Xin-Cheng Xie, Chinese scientific research has been rising in recent decades due to a more stable scientific environment and an increase in funding. There are several government-supported programs, like the Medium-and Long-Term Talent Development Plan, that offer generous resources and funding to entice established scientists from overseas to return to China. Internationalization and collaboration is also what the Chinese universities we spoke with hope to achieve, too.

In our meeting with officials from Peking University, we discussed future exchanges in research training of undergraduate students, career planning and development, and physics education and cooperation. Both sides have agreed to establish close collaborations and to broaden the China-US physics communities. After the meeting, our delegation visited the school’s Laboratory of Modern Optics and the Teaching Center for Experimental Physics and were deeply impressed by the state-of-the-art experimental facilities. 

Other meetings were significant for their role in broadening and strengthening relationships with Chinese scientific organizations that AIP has maintained for years, such as with the China Association for Science and Technology.

Here is a little background about CAST: it is the largest national nongovernmental organization of science and technological workers. It serves as the link between the Chinese government and the country’s science and technology community. Through its 207 member societies (including the major Chinese physical and optical societies) and local branches all over the country, the organization maintains close ties with millions of Chinese scientists, engineers, and other people working in the fields of science and technology. CAST publishes more than 700 journals, about a third of all the journals in China. CAST devotes itself to boosting the development of science and technology in China, enhancing the scientific literacy of the whole nation, encouraging scientists and engineers of the country to conduct academic exchange, and accelerating the emergence of scientific and technological talents.

 

AIP's delegation with leadership team led by Vice President Fanghua Hao, Beijing Normal University

 

In our meeting with the CAST leadership team, their chief executive Yong Shang complimented AIP’s reputation in the global physics community. He said the distance between CAST and AIP mainly lies in the member societies’ management and member services, which is one of the many areas they would like to learn from AIP.

Previous visits between AIP and CAST mainly focused on collaboration in the history and archiving program. This time the meeting expanded on potential collaboration opportunities to areas including old–new member society collaboration, digital communication, international academic exchanges, young talents education program, media services, and industrial physics.

Our meetings with the top mainstream media such as CCTV-10, Guangming Daily (comparable to The New York Times), and China Science Daily highlighted many collaboration opportunities, including the sharing of translated science news, the export of Inside Science TV, and the coproduction of science and education TV programs. We toured these top media outlets and were impressed by their reporters/editors and first-class facilities.

The leaders from all of these organizations understood the importance and the significance of internationalization, and they are enthusiastic about sharing resources and collaborating with AIP in various areas to broaden and better serve the China-US physics community.

 

AIP Delegation with the leadership team of the School of Physics, Peking University

 

The evening after Wednesday’s meeting, our delegation had a nice dinner with Chinese physicists at the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Science, including Prof. Yu-Xin Nie, Prof. Li Lv, Prof. Wei-Mou Zheng, and Prof. Ling-An Wu. In addition to her years of research in experimental nonlinear and quantum optics, Wu is also a well-known expert on the status of female scientists in China. AIP Publishing’s representatives in China, Xingtao Ai and Haibin Zhang, also joined in the dinner.

The last stop for our delegation was the world-famous historic place, The Forbidden City, which was the former Imperial Palace for the Ming and Qing emperors. Rectangular in shape, it is the world’s largest palace complex and covers 178 acres. Surrounded by a 20-foot-wide moat and a 32-foot-high wall, it is said to historically consist of 9,999 rooms. Since 1987, the Palace Museum has been one of the most popular tourist attractions in the world. Although some of AIP’s delegation had visited the Forbidden City before, the palace simply is large enough to make it seem new every time.

The spring China trip was crucial in that it is a start for promoting AIP’s brand globally and paves the way for establishing international collaboration in AIP’s efforts to better serve the global science community. The trip indeed “opens the red door” for AIP’s China project for 2016, and we hope that the relationships we formed will grow into fruitful collaborations in the near future.