“We are too anxious for a Nobel Prize,’’ the Chengdu Daily quoted Chinese-American physicist and Nobel laureate C.N. Yang as saying on a visit to a school last month.
More than another milestone, a Nobel would be proof that the country is retaking what many Chinese see as its rightful place as one of the world’s leading civilizations. For much of the past century, science assumed religiouslike proportions in the minds of China’s elite, admired as a key to resurrecting a country that had fallen behind the West.
“China’s Nobel mania has been fueled by a sense of urgency,’’ said Cao Cong, an expert on China’s scientific endeavors and a fellow at the Levin Institute, a division of the State University of New York. “Only with accolades such as the Olympics and winning a Nobel Prize will China feel it can convince the world it has moved from the periphery to the center.’’
Nine ethnic Chinese have won Nobel Prizes, including Yang in 1957 for his work on subatomic particles. But none is a Chinese national, reinforcing a sense of failure among many Chinese.
The government has disowned other Nobels associated with China. It excoriated the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 to the Dalai Lama, the exiled leader of China-controlled Tibet. It disavowed author Gao Xingjian, who left China for France in the 1980s to escape censorship, when he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000. This year it has tried to dissuade the Norwegian Nobel Committee from giving the Peace Prize to imprisoned democracy campaigner Liu Xiaobo.
Yet winning a Nobel has been an avowed goal, and the lack of one, especially in science, gnaws at an increasingly confident China.
Visiting Nobel winners such as geneticist Oliver Smithies and RNA researcher Craig Mello are treated like stars, packing lecture halls in Chinese universities.
The government invested $3.75 billion in 147 long-term science projects in 2007. It is spending lavishly on a cosmic ray observatory, a subatomic particle accelerator, and other cutting-edge research. Science policy czars and state media speak of an unofficial deadline to win a Nobel in five to 10 years.
Chinese authorities also have wooed Nobel jurors, inviting members from the medicine, chemistry, and physics committees to Beijing in 2006 and 2008 and asking them what it takes to win the prize.
But unlike the Olympics, where China charted a path to dominance by spending heavily on medal-heavy sports such as weightlifting, those who study the issue say that money can go only so far in securing a Nobel.
China’s biggest hurdle is a science and academic structure that is hampered by plagiarism, bureaucracy, and a traditional deference to authority.
