I am an old friend of China, I have been visiting scientific research institutions and universities in China since 1988, when I joined the University of Hong Kong. At that time, China was just starting the exponential rise in research output that still continues today. Research was starved of funding and few Chinese scientists had the international experience needed to publish in the top English-language journals. Most research was applied and there was a strong focus on the physical sciences. Obviously, things have changed dramatically since then. China surpassed the UK, Germany, and Japan in the total number of SCI publications a decade ago and is now second only to the USA. Total research expenditure has rocketed, science degrees are popular in the massively expanded university system, support for biological sciences is increasing, and pure science is receiving much more attention. China is universally recognized as a global scientific power.

Despite these successes, however, there are still some problems. Language is a general problem, although the much greater English-language output from China than from India, where English is much more widely used, suggests that it has not had a very serious impact. When China overtakes the USA in scientific output, there may be a temptation to say “Let them learn Chinese!”, and to reduce the emphasis on English. While not unreasonable, this would almost certainly harm Science in China and elsewhere. Science is global, and both competition and collaboration are necessary to maintain standards and spur innovation. Last century, the Soviet Union maintained high standards in some scientific fields―but by no means all―in Russian-language journals that were read by scientists from Eastern Europe to Vietnam. But in Japan today, low standards of scientific English isolate many scientists from their peers abroad, and both Germany and France have largely given in to English. The best indicator of China’s success in Science is the large number of Chinese students and scientists studying and working abroad and the increasing number of foreigners studying and working in China. This free flow of people and information is also the best guarantee for the future of Science in China.

My research for the last 30 years has been largely concerned with the ecology of the deforested tropics. More than a third of the entire humid tropics and more than half of the East Asian tropics have been cleared of forest over the last millennium and the area increases every year. These are the landscapes in which most tropical people live and work, yet we know remarkably little about their ecology. The focus of my research group has been on understanding which wild species survive in these human-dominated landscapes and what factors determine the potential for landscape recovery when human impacts are reduced. For the last dozen years, I have had a particular interest in the process of seed dispersal, since it is both a rate-limiting step in forest development and one that is particularly vulnerable to local extinctions of bird and mammal species.

I am interested in contributing to XTBG’s role in environmental education. Every conservation biologist dreams of having a platform to change public opinion and influence real-world conservation outcomes. XTBG receives more than half a million visitors a year and there must be some way that we can leverage on this success for the benefit of wild species and natural ecosystems in China.

Prof. Richard Thomas Corlett 

Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, CAS 

Menglun, Yunnan 666303 

E-mail: Corlett@xtbg.org.cn