Research in China

In January 2001, I accepted a longterm lectureship offered by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD; Bonn, Germany), which, with further support from CAS, allowed me to create my own research group within the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences (SIBS). During the next five years, 32 German and seven Chinese students worked in my laboratory, including three PhD students—two Chinese, one German—seven German diploma students, one Chinese Master student and one Chinese Bachelor student, as well as several Chinese and German undergraduate students. As the rules of the German diplomatic service state that activities in foreign countries must be limited to five years, my contract with SIBS expired in January 2006. In 2005, the Max Planck Society (Munich, Germany) had established a Partner Institute with CAS that was dedicated to computational biology, and which extended the cooperation that had begun 20 years earlier with the Max Planck Guest Laboratory in Shanghai. I joined the Institute in May 2006 to participate in the development of the ‘Toponome Center’—a microscopy facility for mapping protein patterns (Schubert et al, 2006). This project eventually failed owing to difficulties in establishing the necessary facilities, and I decided to terminate my activities in China in late 2008. During more than 20 years in Shanghai, I naturally became engaged in several additional projects that have furnished me with first-hand experience of many aspects of Chinese universities and research facilities, as well as the Chinese education system. I have also met many Chinese families privately and have discussed their problems and views with them. In addition, one of my main tasks has been to interview Chinese candidates for PhD programmes and postdoctoral positions on behalf of DAAD and several European universities and research institutes; in total, more than 1,000 interviews. As such, one of my most unexpected experiences has been that—contrary to the often-cited cultural differences—both Chinese and European students share much the same basic attitudes and ambitions.