China’s new president is a scientist

Yesterday Xi Jinping officially took over as China’s president, general secretary of the ruling Communist Party, and chairman of the central military commission. In other words, he became China’s new leader.

Given China’s increasing importance—in 2010 it overtook Japan as the world’s second largest economy—and the fact that the ascendance of the country’s new leader had been anticipated for some time, Xi has attracted a lot of media coverage. Still, I was surprised to discover in a recent Wall Street Journal profile of Xi that the subject he studied at Tsinghua University was organic chemistry. (Xi’s Wikipedia entry , however, says chemical engineering.)

To mark China’s Science Popularization Day of 15 September, Xi Jinping attended a science fair at China Agricultural University. The appearance marked Xi’s first return to public view after a brief and mysterious absence.

My surprise was limited to learning Xi’s major. That China’s leader should have a scientific background isn’t surprising. Xi’s predecessor as president and general secretary, Hu Jintao, studied hydraulic engineering, also at Tsinghua University. And Hu’s predecessor, Jiang Zemin, studied electrical engineering at National Central University in Nanjing and at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Whether Xi’s exposure to science at university will influence his policies is a matter of speculation. But it’s certainly the case that China invested heavily in science during Hu’s and Jiang’s presidencies. Last year China devoted 1.84% of its GDP to R&D—$251.8 billion (adjusted for purchasing power). Only the US spent more.

On the physics front, that investment reached a culmination earlier this year. On 8 March scientists working at the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment in China’s Guangdong Province announced they had measured θ₁₃, a neutrino parameter whose larger-than-expected value could help answer one of the biggest questions in physics: Why does the universe contains more matter than antimatter? Robert McKeown, a Daya Bay team member from the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Virginia, told Science magazine’s Adrian Cho, “This is arguably the most important physics result ever to come out of China.” I agree.

Of course, world leaders do more than determine how much their countries invest in science. Could Xi’s scientific background influence his policies in other areas? It might—if Xi has retained a scientist’s respect for data.

There’s at least one encouraging precedent. Like Xi, Margaret Thatcher studied chemistry at Oxford University’s Somerville College. Her government’s response to the AIDS crisis of the early 1980s was to print and drop in every UK household’s mailbox a pamphlet about the disease and how to avoid contracting and spreading it. “AIDS: Don’t die of ignorance” became the official slogan.

Thatcher’s response to the threat of global warming was also scientifically sober: She funded the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, a world leader in climate science.

Given that some US politicians persist in denying that climate change is happening, despite the evidence, let’s hope the China’s new president takes a more scientific approach to that issue. Let’s hope, too, that he studies tables of GDP data, notices that the world’s wealthiest and healthiest countries are democracies, and institutes political reform in his country.