Returned Overseas Chinese Scholars In Modern China And National Natural Science Award

Originally the National Natural Science Award was the prize established by China Academy of Science in 1955. The projects and their supervisors that had been awarded in 1956 became the first National Natural Science Award winners. The award was ceased in the Cultural Revolution. Since the year 1978, when the National Science Conference was held, China restored its awarding system to the scientific development. The National Natural Science Award is supposed to grant those projects that take leading edge internationally, enjoy relatively high academic level and application prospect. The returned overseas Chinese scholars are the founders of China's modern science and technology. Based on this concept, the thesis chooses the group of returned scholars who has been studied abroad from 1840-1949 as sample, analyzed their places in the National Natural Science Award and reflects the important role they have been playing in their respective field.The first part of the thesis recalled the eight campaigns of study abroad in China from the Opium War to the Revolution of 1949. It also briefly introduced development of the National Natural Science Award and presented the historical background these award winners positioned.The second part chooses 159 award winners who have overseas study background from 514 winners, and forms a data base. These data includes the following items: name, sex, birthplace, life-span, graduating year in the domestic college, graduating college, the year of going abroad, graduating year in the overseas college, the destination countries, universities they chose, specialties they study, the degrees they received. The data base also collected the award winners' working places, titles, award given specialties, ranks of award. The analysis move from aspects to a specific item and go back from the item to the aspect.The statistical analysis attempt to fully confirm the important position of these returned overseas scholars winning the National Natural Science Award. It also tries to investigate the influence of micro, macro andsubjective condition on the development of talented people. The thesis hopes to offer some lessons to China's mode of cultivating talented people and to the perfection of this system.