The Qinghai–Tibet Plateau: pilot site for international collaboration in geoscience during China's early period of reform and opening-up

Abstract

In 1978, China ended a decade-long ‘Cultural Revolution’ and began its Reform and Opening-up process. At the same time, China's scientific community also ended its long-term closed state and began to seek ways to integrate into the world. In this study, we take the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau as a pilot site to illustrate the international geoscience collaboration during this time. We first introduce the International Symposium on the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau, the delegation from the United States and the collaboration between China and France on the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau. Then we examine the successful cooperation between the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of London by focusing on their interactions in the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau Project in detail, on the basis of the archives of these two organizations. Since national policies and systems lagged behind the pace of international cooperation then, there were contradictions between national policies and the needs of specific research projects. We attempt to understand the flexible manner in which Chinese scholars solved these contradictions. We will also explore some of the reasons and contextual factors that shaped such Sino–foreign scientific exchanges early in the Reform era. This study also reflects the opportunities and challenges faced by China's scientific community during the process of social transformation.