A Michigan chemistry professor enthuses about China’s changes:

“As American scientists, my colleagues and I have been accustomed to thinking of the United States as the destination for scientific training for the past 60 years. The caricature of science in China is what we disparagingly call doing ‘turn the crank’ experiments: no invention, perhaps not even a strong sense for the fundamental theory behind the buttons being pushed on the equipment, and the generation of experimental data without a strong critical sense to sort out the wheat from the chaff. In fact, this was neither universal nor the norm. Placed in the context of history, the progress made by Chinese science was spectacular. Especially when you consider that it effectively did not exist from 1949-1980, a time during which Western science grew enormously. In twenty years’ time, 1980-2000, much of science had rebooted to levels that were in places only about a decade behind us, and in other places right up to date. In the past eight years, this gap has narrowed.

Politically and socially, I was not prepared for the openness I found. As an elementary school kid in the 1960s, I learned how to crouch under my desk to protect myself from the fallout from Commie bombs. I think I still had lingering impressions of what life in a Communist State would look and sound like. I had lots of frank questions for my hosts and guides, and the candid answers surprised me. I recall being particularly curious about the one-child policy, and the endless array of exceptions to it. The provision that mixed marriages were excluded, for example, seemed at least consistent with the obvious number of young Chinese girls on the arms of Western boys.”