national
scientific and technological academic organizations under the jurisdiction
of the Chinese Science and Technology Association, with branches in
large and medium-sized cities.
With
its headquarters in Beijing, the Chinese Academy of Sciences is
the paramount academic organ and comprehensive research center in
the natural sciences. It has departments of mathematics and physics,
chemistry, earth sciences, biology and technology. It has 123 research
institutes, employing over 60,000 scientific and technical personnel.
Research organs attached to the Chinese Academy of Sciences are
located throughout the country, and branch academies have been established
in provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities where research
organs are concentrated. The Chinese Academy of Sciences selects
its 630 academicians, including 156 reputable academicians and 36
female academicians, from among high-level scientists, professors
and engineers who have made significant contributions in their fields.
The Academicians General Meeting is the supreme state consultative
organ on science and technology.
The
Chinese Academy of Engineering, founded in June 1994, is the most
respected and highest academic advisory institution in China’s engineering
community. It currently has 439 academicians, including seven members
from overseas.
The State Natural Science Foundation Committee
was established in February 1986, with the approval of the State
Council. Its task is to render assistance to basic research projects
and some applied research projects with funds allocated from the
state treasury according to the state’s guiding principles for the
development of science and technology. The Committee has subsidized
more than 40,000 projects in the field of natural science. In the
past decade and more, the Committee of the present (fourth) term
has 26 members, including 18 academicians from the Chinese Academy
of Sciences or the Chinese Academy of Engineering. The National
Committee for Scientific and Technological Awards (NCSTA) was founded
in December 1999, with the approval of the State Council. The principal
duties of the NCSTA are to macroscopically control and direct awards
for science and technology; organize the National Appraisal Committee
for Scientific and Technological Awards by engaging relevant specialists
and scholars; pass resolutions on award-winners, and the types and
levels of the awards, and make policy-related suggestions for perfecting
the presentation of the awards; and study and tackle other major
problems concerning the national appraisal of the awards.
The
prize-winning projects for 1999 were announced on January 20, 2000.
The first prizes for both natural science and technological inventions
were left unclaimed. The “FBC-1 Fighter Bomber” and the “New-Style
Missile Destroyer” won special-grade prizes for scientific and technological
progress. In addition, awards for 602 projects were decided on through
discussion, and four people won Awards of the People’s Republic
of China for International Cooperation in Science and Technology.
The prize-winning projects are indicative of the great attention
paid by the whole of Chinese society to the comprehensive use of
resources and the protection of ecological balance. Young science
and technology workers are also coming into their own rapidly, with
researchers under 45 years of age accounting for 46.5 per cent of
the prize winners.
In
the 1980s, the core of the scientific and technological system reform
in China was to establish a new system beneficial to economic development,
to solve the chronic problem of technology being divorced from the
economy. In the 1990s, the science and technology system reform continued
to make progress in redirecting human resources and adjusting its
structure. After more than 20 years of reform, the unilateral and
closed planned management system has been abolished, and the situation
of science and technology being divorced from the economy has been
remedied to some extent. The socialist market economy system has begun
to play a basic role in scientific and technological operations and
the distribution of scientific and technological resources. Most technological
development institutes have taken the path of operating according
to the market mechanism, gearing to the needs of economic construction
and developing on their own, and most of the nation’s scientific and
technological forces have entered the major battlefields of economic
construction in various ways. This scientific and technological progress
has been playing an increasingly important role in promoting economic
development and the transfer of the mode of economic growth. The micro-operational
mechanism of science and technology research institutes is being transferred
to a path of development that fits in with the characteristics and
new forms of scientific and technological work.
