The University of Michigan in China

Wang Chengshu and Zhu Guangya: Pioneers of China’s Nuclear Age

In August 1946, Mao Zedong met with American journalist Anna Louise Strong in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) stronghold in Yan’an. The Second World War had just ended in the fires of America’s atomic bombs, but peace was not yet on the horizon for China, whose civil war between the CCP and the Nationalists had flared to life again. During his conversation with Strong, Mao was famously dismissive of the atomic power that had just ended WWII: “All reactionaries are paper tigers” (Zhang 195).

Such a dismissal could have been bravado, misdirection, or a genuine belief that military might came from the people rather than from technological advancements. And yet, as early as 1949, “a CCP delegation in Moscow headed by Liu Shaoqi, supposedly requested—­but was denied—­a tour of Soviet nuclear installations” (Horsburgh 41). With the Communist Party’s victory over Chiang Kai-­shek’s Nationalists, Mao’s ambitions had room to grow. Having created a sovereign Communist nation, he set his sights on establishing China as one of the world’s superpowers. In a 1956 essay, “Mao connected economic construction with defence construction,” ultimately planning to step out from under the USSR’s protective nuclear umbrella. China needed an atomic program of its own—­the threat of the United States’ nuclear arsenal during the Korean War and the Taiwan Straits Crises in the early 1950s had proven just how powerful a symbol and a deterrent nuclear weapons could be. In 1955, Mao formally inaugurated China’s nuclear weapons program. A call went out to “expatriate and foreign trained scientists”: China was joining the nuclear age (42).

Two students from the University of Michigan answered this call. One, Wang Chengshu, had already been studying physics for a decade and a half before the end of World War II. She received her bachelor’s degree in 1934 and then a master’s in physics in 1936 from Yen-­ch’ing University in Beijing. Wang made her living during the war years as an instructor, working as a lecturer first at her alma mater before, like so many others, moving inland during the Japanese invasion, where she continued teaching at Xiangya Medical College in Changsha (Wang 256). In the autumn of 1939, Wang married Zhang Wenyu, himself a professor of physics, but the newlywed couple only had two years together before life interfered.

In 1941, Wang left her husband and her war-­torn country behind to study at the University of Michigan on a Barbour Fellowship. In an interview with the Ann Arbor News that December, Wang said that she hoped to be reunited with her husband in three to four years. “Our sacrifice is not so important,” Wang said, “if we can return and aid in the rebuilding of China.” She described the condition of education in the war years, telling the reporter about multiple universities relocating and sharing buildings, about students “living and studying in caves where they can hide when planes fly overhead.” The contrast of her experience—with the convenience of a modern dormitory and the expanse of the University’s facilities—with the poor conditions plaguing her husband and their friends must have been difficult. “Of course, we feel terrible,” she said, “to think that our friends and relatives at home are suffering through want of food and some of them are even dying. . . . If I keep busy,” she continued, “it is easier to forget.”

Wang Chengshu (top row, left) with her Barbour cohort, 1942. Barbour Scholarship for Oriental Women Committee Records, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

“Keep busy” is one way to put it. Wang quickly became one of the top students in her program, studying under famous Dutch theoretical physicist George Uhlenbeck, with whom she would write and publish several papers. She received her PhD in 1945 and stayed on at Michigan as a research fellow for the next 10 years. Wang “conducted research into statistical mechanics and the kinetics of inert gases. She is credited with an adjustment to the Boltzmann equation . . . in polyatomic gases that resulted in it being renamed the WC-­U equation” (Wang 526). In total, during her time at the University of Michigan, Wang published more than 10 research papers—­and her career was just beginning.

Several years after arriving in America, Wang’s hope of reuniting with her husband was realized. Zhang Wenyu had himself come to the United States, appointed first by Princeton and then Purdue University as a visiting research professor. The end of the 1940s saw China, under the banner of the People’s Republic, united and whole for the first time in decades, and both Wang and her husband ached to return home. It was years, however, before they could leave the country, due to “American regulations in force during the early years of the Cold War” that forbade the travel of Chinese nationals (Lee). Not until 1956, with their young son in tow, were Wang and her husband permitted to return home.

Wang (left) in the lab at U-M. Barbour Scholarship for Oriental Women Committee Records, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

Back in the People’s Republic, the role of science in creating an international superpower was finally being reflected in government budgets. At a time when many millions of citizens were sliding toward famine, “funds for science rose from about US $15 million in 1955 to about US $100 million in 1956; the Chinese Academy of Sciences received three times as much money in 1957 as it had received in 1953” (Lewis and Xue 42). Wang found that her new skills and expertise were in high demand. The Chinese Academy of Sciences used some of their new funds to appoint her as researcher at their Institute of Physics in Beijing, a position she held for eight years (at one point even holding a second faculty position at Peking University).

Wang’s real contribution to the legacy of New China, however, was about to begin. In 1964, Wang was chosen to work at the Third Research Institute of the Ministry of Nuclear Industry. This move brought her directly into the arms of the nuclear program, where she was put “in charge of the diffusion process to enrich uranium” (Wang 261). Such an important position offered some shelter for Wang during the difficult years of the Cultural Revolution, which would begin in earnest in 1966. In fact,

Wang’s work with the nuclear industry carried her into the mid-­1970s, when she rejoined the world of academia. Ultimately, Wang balanced her work as an instructor and as a government researcher, serving as a professor for Tsinghua University and as chief engineer in the Ministry of Nuclear Energy’s Department of Technology, where she continued her research on uranium isotopes. Ultimately, Wang Chengshu is justly remembered as a key scientist in China’s burgeoning nuclear program, “not least through the research theoreticians she trained in uranium isotopes separation studies” (Wang 527).

The second student from the University of Michigan to have a hand in China’s nuclear program was Zhu Guangya. While Zhu, like Wang Chengshu, was trained as a scientist and received advanced degrees in physics, he played a primarily administrative role in the development of the atomic bomb.

Zhu seems to have been handpicked for leadership. During the war years, Zhu graduated from and then taught at Southwest China Associated University, the conglomerate of schools that had fled inland from the Japanese invasion. There he met Professor Wu Dayou (see chapter 5), himself an alumnus of the University of Michigan. When WWII ended and Wu was invited back to U-M as a visiting scholar, Wu suggested that Zhu Guangya accompany him, and “that invitation became Zhu’s ticket to America and a doctorate in nuclear physics at the University of Michigan” (Lewis and Xue 145). The birth of the People’s Republic during Zhu’s years as a student at U-M invigorated him just as it did Wang Chengshu, then a research fellow in the same department. In the first year of the People’s Republic, Zhu went so far as to coauthor an open letter to all Chinese nationals studying abroad, exhorting them to return home to the motherland.

Zhu followed his own advice, returning to China as soon as he graduated with his PhD in nuclear physics in 1950. Just a year after achieving sovereignty, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was already facing its first international crisis. The invasion of South Korea by North Korea grew quickly from a territorial dispute into a battleground for political ideologies, with Russia and the People’s Republic providing support to their Communist North Korean allies and the United States and the UN supporting South Korea. China and the United States, so recently allied during World War II, found themselves on opposite sides of the battlefield. But it was precisely Zhu Guangya’s experience in the United States that brought him into this conflict. He was called away from his teaching position to serve as a translator on behalf of the Chinese People’s Volunteers during armistice talks (Ni).

Zhu Guangya (left) in 1947 at the University of Michigan with, from left, Zhang Wenyu, C. N. Yang, and T. D. Lee. Yang and Lee, both students of Wu Dayou, won the Nobel Prize in 1957. Courtesy of the People’s Publishing House, China.

Zhu Guangya with his wife, Xu Huijun, in America, 1950. Photo courtesy of the People’s Publishing House, China.

Zhu Guangya with his wife, Xu Huijun, in front of the North-Eastern People’s University. Courtesy of the People’s Publishing House, China.

By the mid-­1950s, Mao and the People’s Republic had jump-­started their nuclear weapons program. Mao’s “paper tiger” doctrine had evolved:

In 1955, Zhou Enlai himself, China’s premier, ordered “the Ministry of Education to form a Nuclear Education Leading Group,” and Zhu Guangya was one of several professors who was called on to organize a physics curriculum at Beijing University (106). After this job, it wasn’t long before Zhu found a home working for the Ninth Bureau, the top-­secret nuclear weapons program. When he first joined in 1959, Zhu assisted in the “management of scientific research” (145).

The Ninth Bureau, meanwhile, was scouting locations for a secret research facility: “Few outsiders ever knew of the academy, and those who did, if they spoke of it at all, referred to it only by its code name, the Ninth Academy” (Lewis and Xue 141). After several years of difficult construction during a time of famine, the Ninth Academy was completed in the remote western reaches of Qinghai province “‘on a plateau where the air is thin and people breath[e] with difficulty [and] feel dizzy and asthmatic after they have taken a few steps’” (143). Zhu was one of only four leaders and scientists to helm the administration of this secret facility:

Zhu (right) with Qian Xuesen (left) and Deng Jiaxian (center), two other key contributors to China’s nuclear program, 1966. Courtesy of the People’s Publishing House, China.

This attention to detail grew ever more significant as China’s relationship with Russia deteriorated in the years after Stalin’s death in 1953. As advice from Soviet scientists working at the Ninth Academy began to dry up, Chinese researchers had to do more with less. On one occasion, Russian advisers departing the academy left behind some shredded documents, which the Chinese then painstakingly reassembled. Zhu Guangya was called on to explain “the meaning of this ‘number-­one secret document’ to his associates in the academy and [point] out its important clues for their research strategy” (Lewis and Xue 161).

In 1964, after years of labor, difficult timetables, food shortages, and political labyrinths, Zhu Guangya and his colleagues gathered 70 kilometers away from the test site to witness the detonation of China’s first atomic weapon. Watching the shockwave unfurl, Zhu and the rest “were overcome with the emotions released after long years of trial. They wept” (Lewis and Xue 188). News of the successful test went out immediately to Zhou Enlai, then on to Chairman Mao, then to the people of Beijing, and finally to the rest of the world.

In the following decades, Zhu Guangya was elected several times to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, served as an academician for the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was president of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and served as the director of the State Administration for Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense.

Zhu Guangya shakes hands with Chairman Mao Zedong, 1974. Courtesy of the People’s Publishing House, China.

Zhu Guangya marking nuclear test research papers. Courtesy of the People’s Publishing House, China.

Huang Jiasi: At the Helm of Surgery in New China

Huang Jiasi (Huang Chia-­ssu), a cardiothoracic surgeon in charge of directing large swathes of China’s medical education, wrote two essays addressing the international medical community. He wrote them more than 20 years apart: the first just a decade into the life of the PRC, the second some years after the death of Mao Zedong. Both essays aim to take the pulse of medical education in China, and both begin by connecting the work of contemporary surgeons to China’s millennia-­old tradition of surgery. “In China there has long been coexistence of two schools of medicine, traditional Chinese medicine and modern medicine,” he wrote in 1982. In 1959, Huang wrote that “the history of surgery in China dates back as far as the Chou dynasty (1134–­770 B.C.), when surgical diseases were described and their treatment became a specialty.” As a Western-­educated surgeon working in China, Huang became a part of this lineage, the synthesis of Eastern and Western medicine into a global discipline. It speaks well of Huang’s values and convictions that even after the Cultural Revolution’s demonization of “the Four Olds,” he was willing to connect his own work with the venerable traditions of ancient China.

The story of Huang Jiasi’s place in this tradition begins with the ambition and impudence of his older brother. The fourth of eight sons, Huang was raised by his mother and older siblings—­his father had died when he was only five years old. While Huang had shown “talent in mathematics and physics in early primary school,” by the time he reached high school in 1924, he still hadn’t settled on a career path (Wan and Yim 1147). During spring break, he visited one of his older brothers in Beijing, who quizzed Huang on his future. As they strolled past the Peking Union Medical College (PUMC), then a “beautiful . . . Chinese palace style campus in downtown Beijing,” Huang’s brother asked him if he might like to study there someday: “‘Sure,’ Huang answered without thinking. Six months later, his brother applied to PUMC on Huang’s behalf. ‘Your English is good . . . Why not just try so that two years later you can be better prepared for the real examination?’” (1–­2). Huang followed his brother’s lead, was accepted to PUMC, and took the first steps of a career that would place him at the head of surgery in China.

Huang’s education took him from Beijing at the PUMC to the National Shanghai Medical College, where he lectured until 1939. The Japanese invasion displaced Huang and the rest of his university—­they retreated first to Kunming and then to Chongqing in southern China. In 1941, he escaped the war entirely. With a scholarship from Tsinghua University funded by the Boxer indemnity, Huang was chosen to study abroad. He arrived in Ann Arbor in mid-­October, just in time for Michigan’s full flush of autumn, and began the final stage of his education.

An oil painting of Huang Jiasi gifted to the Peking Union Medical College in 1985. Courtesy of Chinese University Press Hong Kong.

At the University of Michigan, Huang studied with John Alexander, who had established “the first surgical residency program in thoracic surgery in the United States.” Under Alexander’s influence, Huang focused his studies on pulmonary tuberculosis and was “extremely active not only in the operating rooms but also in the laboratory” (Wan and Yim 1148). When Huang received his master’s in 1943, he turned down a lucrative position at a military hospital to return home to China. In a twist of irony, Huang’s trip back was delayed when he himself contracted pulmonary tuberculosis.

Like Wang Chengshu and Zhu Guangya, Huang’s return to China from the United States was accompanied by a swift rise in prestige. In the latter half of the 1940s alone, Huang became a professor at Shanghai Medical College, “the surgeon-­in-­chief of two hospitals,” and the president of the Chinese Surgical Association. When the Korean War broke out in 1950, Huang led a contingent of medical practitioners from Shanghai into service at an army hospital in northeastern China. Huang and his peers did incredible work, performing nearly 1,000 procedures in six months. And yet, the political connotations of this service threatened to rupture Huang’s synthesis of East and West. He had been chosen to be one of the founding members of the American Board of Thoracic Surgery, but “‘this honor was withdrawn by the Board when it was thought that he supported China during the Korean War,’” and it would be some 28 years before the position was restored to him by the dean of the University of Michigan Medical School (Wan and Yim 1149). In the meantime, Huang reported on his experience during the war at the 1951 National Congress; at the official dinner, Huang was seated next to Chairman Mao Zedong himself.

With his increased authority and visibility, Huang threw himself into the task of developing and reorganizing China’s medical practices. In the decade after the Korean War, Huang, already the vice dean of the Shanghai Medical College and president of Zhongshan Hospital, added a third major administrative duty as the “founding president of the Shanghai Chest Hospital, a newly established specialty center for thoracic surgery.” The Shanghai Chest Hospital quickly became one of the largest operations of its kind in China and included “the first Chinese made heart-­lung machine.” Somehow, in the midst of these major leadership positions, Huang Jiasi found time to edit a surgical textbook, the first of its kind in the Chinese language. It was distributed nationwide in 1958 with enough success to warrant additional, reedited runs in 1960 and 1964 (Wan and Yim 1150).

Huang Jiasi at a dinner with Chairman Mao Zedong, 1951. Courtesy of Chinese University Press Hong Kong.

The year 1958 was a landmark year for Huang for another reason: he “was appointed president of the Chinese Academy of Medical Science,” a platform that would allow him to create an enduring legacy. His primary task as head of the organization was to help “build a top-­notch medical university similar to that of PUMC” (Wan and Yim 1150). This school, China Medical University, the only eight-­year training and education program in the country, opened a year later with Huang as its first president. He held the position for the next 25 years, even through the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution.

Huang’s 1981 overview of medical education in China for the American Journal of Surgery described the roller coaster of progress in the first decades of the People’s Republic. He outlined several successful postrevolution reforms, including the combination and reallocation of medical universities in the hope that their resources might be “more reasonably distributed geographically and their faculties strengthened”; the standardization and “unification of medical educational programs,” a process that put in place a national examination for high school graduates applying to medical school; and “the integration of traditional Chinese medicine with Western medicine,” such that medical schools worked courses on traditional medicine into their curricula (Huang, “Medical Education” 661). One result of these reforms, Huang wrote, was a massive increase in educated medical practitioners: “The total enrollment of students in secondary medical schools in 1949 was only 15,387, but had increased to 15 times that number—­244,695—­by 1980” (662).

This progress came to a halt during the years of the Cultural Revolution. Part anti-­intellectual campaign, part youthful rebellion gone haywire, part retribution against top-­level members of the CCP who had dared to criticize the Great Leap Forward and the famine that followed, Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution was barely controlled chaos. “Education was completely paralyzed for four years,” Huang wrote. It was not uncommon in those years for students-­turned-­Red Guards to harangue and torment their teachers, sometimes to the point of suicide: “No new student was admitted to any college and all the students in schools participated in political movement day and night” (Huang, “Medical Education” 663).

The eight-­year program at China Medical University, once a hallmark of its rigorous education, now came under fire “as the epitome of the overemphasis on professionalism, specialization, and detachment from the real medical problems of a rapidly changing China” (Suttmeier 184). Angry students even composed a song demeaning the school:

Even after the worst had passed, “the ideology of the more you learn, the more reactionary you are” lingered on into the 1970s, hampering education and turning out graduates who were “given responsibility they could hardly bear” (Huang, “Medical Education” 663).

Huang, even as his institution came under fire and his life’s work was being devalued, never gave up. At the end of the 1970s, he revised and redistributed his seminal Textbook of Surgery. He raised funds from the China Medical Board of the Rockefeller Foundation that, by the 1980s, “exceeded $1 million.” He also

Until the end of his life, Huang Jiasi remained a mentor and a leader whose dedication to serving the people of China never wavered, even in the face of tremendous political turmoil.

Huang (third from right) in Beijing, 1981. Courtesy of Chinese University Press Hong Kong.

Zeng Chengkui: Father of Marine Botany

The arc of Zeng Chengkui’s career seems in many ways emblematic of the state of science in mid-­20th-­century China. Driven from a young age by both intellectual curiosity and political activism, Zeng’s enthusiasm for science as a practical discipline aligned him neatly with the goals of the People’s Republic. As with many others in this book, Zeng used his education at the University of Michigan as a means to kick-­start an entire field back home in China, performing pioneering work in phycology and marine botany. And yet, that same Western education was used as an excuse to torment Zeng during the years of the Cultural Revolution. But like Huang Jiasi working in the medical sector, Zeng refused to tear at the seams, holding on resolutely to his synthesis of East and West.

Born just two years before the 1911 revolution that overthrew the Qing dynasty, Zeng grew up in a political milieu that encouraged political activism and empathy for the working poor. While he was sheltered by his family’s wealth from the worst of the chaos during the years of warlordism, Zeng couldn’t help but witness

During his college years, Zeng was expelled from Fujian Christian University for participating in a strike against the administration, which had refused to register with the new Nationalist government.

Leaving Fujian behind and enrolling at Xiamen University, Zeng discovered a discipline that channeled his political leanings into scientific curiosity. Several botany and phycology courses “inspired Zeng’s interest in ‘agriculture in the sea.’” Here was a topic that might directly alleviate the suffering of the peasants and fishermen working on the rest of the island. He wasted no time in becoming an assistant for the Department of Biology, which sent him around the island gathering algae samples. Zeng saw firsthand how coastal villagers were already harvesting and cultivating algae and seaweed for food and fertilizer. A particular species, chicai, caught his attention: “By scraping the rocks with knives and other tools several times a year they eliminated algal competitors and thereby encouraged the natural growth of chicai” (Neushel and Wang 63). Already Zeng’s attention was almost as much anthropological as botanical—­this early research prefigured his later contributions, where the utility of phycology was never far from Zeng’s mind.

Portrait of Zeng, 1946. Courtesy of Scripps Institution of Oceanography Photographs, University of California–San Diego.

He took this interest into graduate school at Lingnan University, where, on a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation (founder of Peking Union Medical College, in which Huang Jiasi was trained), he published his first paper on chicai. During these years of study, Zeng had to build his own foundation of knowledge: “Unlike scientists interested in terrestrial agriculture, Zeng had no body of published information to work from.” He embarked on a long series of trips up and down China’s coast, “often traveling alone under difficult conditions,” with the goal of establishing a taxonomy of China’s marine algae: “Before I could do anything in my choice of seaweed cultivation, I should be familiar with their names,” Zeng said (Neushel and Wang 64).

Zeng earned his master’s of science degree in 1934 and worked for several years as a lecturer before deciding continue his studies in the United States. At the University of Michigan, studying under William R. Taylor, Zeng drove himself to work at breakneck speed, “often spending nineteen-­hour days in the laboratory.” During his years of studying abroad, crises at home drew his attention back to China. His family, still living on the eastern seaboard, was endangered by the Japanese occupation—­Zeng asked “friends to smuggle them to a safer part of the country.” Meanwhile, several marine biological stations, impressed by Zeng’s work and “eager for [him] to return home, offered him directorships” (Neushel and Wang 66). But with the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the United States’ entry into the war, returning home would have been a difficult, delayed process. Zeng decided to stay in the United States, winning a postdoctoral fellowship from U-M to continue his studies on the West Coast. He wouldn’t return home until the war had ended.

Zeng’s interest in applied research flourished in his postdoctorate years. The war with Japan meant that imports of agar, a derivative of red algae, had run dry, and Zeng was approached by the Department of Agriculture and the US Fish and Wildlife Service to help find alternative sources. Zeng embraced this opportunity, even though it meant altering the focus of his postdoctorate research. The move brought some friction between Zeng and his mentor at the University of Michigan, William Taylor, who “did not share his former pupil’s enthusiasm for applied research” (Neushel and Wang 67). In a letter that autumn, Zeng defended the shift in focus:

Zeng dove, literally, into his research, performing underwater surveys of marine algae. Professional divers taught him to use their equipment, and soon Zeng was making monthly dives 30 feet deep in the ocean, despite the near disaster of his first dive, during which “a malfunctioning air valve leaked water into his suit as he stood on the ocean floor” (Neushel and Wang 68–­69). The research was a success—­the United States, he discovered, had a wealth of red algae to rival Japan’s. Moreover, “Zeng’s in-­the-­ocean approach to marine phycology helped transform it from a descriptive to an experimental science. . . . By the end of the war, Zeng was a leading authority not only on the distribution but also on the processing of marine algae” (69).

Zeng as a postdoc at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Courtesy of Scripps Institution of Oceanography Photographs, University of California–San Diego.

After the end of the Japanese occupation and World War II, Zeng returned home to China, accepting a position “as professor and chair of the Department of Botany at the National University of Shandong,” which had “promised to allocate $15,000 for the purchase of research equipment” (Neushel and Wang 71). Still, Zeng was not prepared for the devastation the war had wrought in his home country. “I never realized we had lost so heavily,” Zeng wrote. As the new chair, it was up to him to bring his department back to life. “For many weeks . . . I plunged, body and soul, into organizing the department,” he wrote (72). This meant everything from hiring new faculty to ordering basic equipment to making chairs by hand. When he had the department back in a semblance of working order, he only had to wait for an end to the civil war. In a 1947 letter, Zeng wrote, “Spring is coming, and the flowers of Prunus yezoensis will come out in another week or two. Everything will be lovely, and we hope the same will be true with the Chinese political and economic situation!” (73).

Zeng in a diving suit at Laguna Beach, California. Courtesy of Scripps Institution of Oceanography Photographs, University of California–San Diego.

As the civil war raged, Zeng didn’t find himself strongly aligned with either the Nationalists or the Communists. The former he found to be “corrupt” and inefficient; the latter, a breeding ground for “extremists” (Neushel and Wang 73). Unlike many of his peers, however, Zeng did not flee to Taiwan when it became clear that the Nationalist cause was doomed. He and his department decided to give the new Communist government the benefit of the doubt.

Zeng with Professor Marston Sargent collecting Gellidium seaweed, ca. 1946. Courtesy of Scripps Institution of Oceanography Photographs, University of California–San Diego.

This “wait and see” approach payed immediate dividends. The prompt creation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 1949 “impressed Zeng” (Neushel and Wang 74). He had been invited to attend the conference during which the academy was conceptualized, and soon his department at the University of Shandong was folded into the CAS umbrella as the Marine Biological Laboratory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The early 1950s saw an explosion of research in their new laboratory. Keeping in mind Premier Zhou Enlai’s rejoinder to “bring about close coordination between academic research and practical needs,” Zeng guided the Marine Biological Laboratory in researching several species of algae growing along China’s coastline. In particular, Laminaria japonica (kelp, or haidai) drew his attention for its utility as both a fertilizer and a food source. Over the next six years, Zeng and his research group solved the biological and engineering problems standing in the way of ocean farming. By the mid-­1950s, Zeng was ready to share large-­scale cultivation of Laminaria with the rest of China.

The completion of his research on Laminaria coincided with the People’s Republic’s Great Leap Forward program. By 1958, the Ministry of Fisheries was organizing training regimens for local fishermen, teaching them Zeng’s techniques for Laminaria production. They proved to be wildly successful. Zeng and his team worked closely with local farming groups to “modify cultivation techniques to match local conditions,” with the end result being that

These were life-­saving numbers in years otherwise marked by famine. But by the late 1960s and the advent of the Cultural Revolution, the contributions made by Zeng and his team were forgotten. Mao incited a revolutionary fervor in his young Red Guards, exhorting them to “expose the reactionary bourgeois stand of those so-­called ‘academic authorities’ who opposed the party and socialism” (Neushel and Wang 82). The chaos that followed hit the Chinese Academy of Sciences hard. “Among 170 senior CAS scientists in the Beijing area, 131 were attacked,” and Zeng’s Institute of Oceanology was no exception (83). Zeng himself came under particular scrutiny for having studied in America:

There were, however, moments of hope. One Red Guard, Zhou Xiantong, was an assistant to Zeng who “risked his own life to preserve Zeng’s scientific papers.” The gesture and the risk involved must not have been lost on Zeng—­some 30 years later, Zhou was still working as his assistant.

The intense pressure on academics began to fade by the end of the 1960s, and by the early 1970s, “the charges against [Zeng] were downgraded to ‘historical problems’” (Neushel and Wang 84). Zeng and his institute went back to work. In 1975, as relations warmed between the United States and China after the events of the “ping-­pong diplomacy” era, a delegation of Chinese scientists was arranged to visit the United States with Zeng as vice-­chairman. There, on his first return visit to the United States in 28 years, Zeng met with President Gerald Ford, himself an alumnus of the University of Michigan.

Zeng Chengkui’s life—­from student activist, to ambitious and pragmatic scientist, to inmate starving in a cowshed, to foreign dignitary—­rose and fell with the tides of politics in China. He helped shepherd an entire discipline and industry through the tumult, arriving eventually, as he described it, at oceanography’s “elevation stage” (Zeng xiii).

Although the vagaries of political fortune affected them in different ways, all four graduates of the University of Michigan in this chapter were fiercely devoted to their country, whether that meant building up China’s medical and educational infrastructure, researching new ways to feed her people, or guiding China into the nuclear age and international independence.

President Ford meets with the Scientific and Technological Association delegation from the People’s Republic, 1975. Courtesy of Gerald R. Ford Library and Museum.

Zeng meets US president Gerald Ford, 1975. Courtesy of Gerald R. Ford Library and Museum.

Zeng and his wife (center) with colleagues from Scripps, 2000. Courtesy of Scripps Institution of Oceanography Photographs, University of California–San Diego.

Works Cited

• Horsburgh, Nicola. China and Global Nuclear Order: From Estrangement to Active Engagement. 1st ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015. Print.
• Huang, Chia Ssu. “Medical Education in China.” American Journal of Surgery 143.6 (1982): 660–­663. Web. <http://​www​.sciencedirect​.com/​science/​article/​pii/​0002961082900319>.
• Huang, Chia-­ssu, et al. “Surgery in New China.” Chinese Medical Journal 79 (1959): 253–­283. Print.
• Lewis, John Wilson, and Litai Xue. China Builds the Bomb. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1988. Print.
• Neushul, Peter, and Zuoyue Wang. “Between the Devil and the Deep Sea: C. K. Zeng, Mariculture, and the Politics of Science in Modern China.” Isis 91.1 (2000): 59–­88. Print.
• Ni, Ting. “Cultural Journey: Experiences of Chinese Students of the 1930s and the 1940s.” Master’s thesis, Indiana U, 1996. Print.
• “An Open Letter and Zhu Guangya’s Return Home.” Sohu.com. 12 Feb. 2006. Web. <http://​news​.sohu​.com/​20060212/​n241783744​.shtml>.
• Suttmeier, Richard. “The Academy of Medical Sciences.” Medicine and Public Health in the People’s Republic of China. Ed. Joseph Quinn. Bethesda, MD: Geographic Health Studies, 1973. Print.
• Wan, Song, and Anthony Yim. “Jiasi Huang: ‘A Surgeon and Something More.’” Annals of Thoracic Surgery 82.3 (September 2006): 1147–­1151. Print.
• Wang, Bing. “Wang Chengshu.” Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women. Ed. Lily Xiao Hong Lee. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998. Print.
• Zeng, Cheng-­kui. Preface. Oceanology of China Seas by Di Zhou. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994. Print.
• Zhang, Shu Guang. “Between ‘Paper’ and ‘Real Tigers’: Mao’s View of Nuclear Weapons.” Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb: Nuclear Diplomacy Since 1945. Ed. John Gaddis, Philip Gordon, Ernest May, and Jonathan Rosenberg. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Print.