Will China’s historic paper on Chang’e-6 lunar far side samples be in English or Chinese?
The Chang’e-6 mission’s cargo is expected to yield a wealth of research but debate is growing about what language it will be published in first
This article was originally published in the South China Morning Post.
Dannie Peng, June 18, 2024
With China’s Chang’e-6 mission on its homeward journey, carrying the first samples to be retrieved from the moon’s far side, the scientific community’s dream of discovering what secrets they hold is about to become a reality.
But in what language, and where, will the historic findings be written and published after the samples – scooped from the northeastern part of the moon’s South Pole-Aitken basin on June 2 and expected to weigh up to 2kg (4.4lbs) – are analysed?
Within China’s scientific community, there persists a notion that publishing in English is not only a medium of communication, but also a bridge to global recognition. The use of Chinese remains taboo, a silent sacrifice at the altar of international acceptance.
Chinese scientists customarily pen their research findings in English, sharing them with the wider world through esteemed journals like Science magazine in the US or the journal Nature in Britain.
When China’s Chang’e-5 mission in 2020 retrieved the first lunar samples in decades from the moon’s near side, the first research was carried out by a joint team of Chinese and Western scientists and appeared in Science magazine in October 2021.
This was followed by three more scientific papers published by Nature in the same month, according to an editor with the Science China Press, a scientific journal publishing company of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), recalling the global sensation.
The rocks collected in 2020 led to a number of surprising discoveries, as they turned out to be much younger than the samples brought back by the US Apollo and Soviet Luna missions in the 1960s and 1970s.
“We certainly hope that some of our country’s groundbreaking scientific and technological achievements can appear in China’s top journals, so that we can expand our influence,” said the editor, who asked not to be named.
It was not always so. Tu Youyou, who won China’s first Nobel Prize for science in 2015, published her paper on the discovery of artemisinin in the Chinese Science Bulletin in 1977.
The journal, co-sponsored by CAS and the National Natural Science Foundation of China, once published many major discoveries but since the 1990s has suffered from a lack of quality manuscripts.
![Beijing residents watch news footage showing China’s Chang’e-6 lander on the far side of the moon. Photo: Reuters](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd12236a1-51a5-4264-9ca6-8068074008e8_1999x1332.jpeg)
Speaking at a conference in 2018, George Gao Fu – a leading scientist in the field of virology and immunology and former head of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – said Chinese as a language of academic communication “used to be glorious”.
Breakthroughs, including Tu’s achievement and the discovery of high-temperature iron-based superconducting materials, had been published first in Chinese-language journals and then recognised by the world, he said.
However, for three decades China’s important scientific research results were “basically first reported by foreign journals”, Gao noted.
Interestingly, just a few years later, Gao led a landmark study by a Chinese CDC team on the epidemiology of Covid-19 that was first published in January 2020 by the New England Journal of Medicine.
The move caused controversy in China, where the public was eager for any information about the new coronavirus that causes Covid-19 as the country grappled with the early stages of the pandemic.
The response to the overseas publication of the study reflected a broader, uncomfortable dilemma for Chinese researchers: while they recognise the importance or necessity of writing in their native language, it is difficult on a practical level.
Newton’s Principia Mathematica was written in Latin. Einstein’s first influential papers were written in German. Marie Curie’s work was published in French.
Yet, since the middle of the last century, there has been a shift in the global scientific community, with most scientific research now published in a single language – English, which is spoken by only about 18 per cent of the world’s population.
While it is estimated that up to 98 per cent of global scientific research is published in English, the number of papers by Chinese scholars has been climbing.
As early as 2010, Chinese biologist Zhu Zuoyan, a CAS academician, observed that the number of papers published by scholars from China had risen from 0.2 per cent of the world’s total to 10 per cent within a decade, second only to the United States.
But China’s academic evaluation system encourages the flow of excellent papers to foreign journals, which had partly led to the country’s lack of international academic impact, despite having the second largest number of academic journals – more than 4,800 – in the world, he said.
In late 2019, Li Zhimin, former director of the Ministry of Education’s Science and Technology Development Centre, called for papers to be published in the country’s official language if the research is funded by the government.
The requirement would make it easier for funders to review research projects, facilitate exchanges with their domestic counterparts and improve the nation’s scientific literacy, he said.
A CAS physicist, who declined to be named, stressed that the proposal to “write research results on the soil of the motherland” could not simply be understood as submitting and publishing articles in domestic journals and in Chinese.
That would be “parochial”, he said. Rather, the key is to focus research on solving crucial issues or problems in China’s development, rather than blindly following global research hotspots and wasting research funds and resources.
But at an individual level, there are plenty of pragmatic reasons and incentives for researchers to do just that. Under China’s evaluation system, getting articles published in prestigious English-language journals often brings rewards.
In addition to promotion opportunities and academic honours, there is also fame, with overseas scientific recognition tending to attract wide media and public attention.
Last month, for example, biologist Zhu Jiapeng earned a prize from Nanjing University of Traditional Chinese Medicine for his “outstanding contribution” and a grant of 1 million yuan (US$138,000) as one of the lead authors in a study published by Nature.
Astronomer Deng Licai, with the National Astronomical Observatories under CAS, believes that research results from national missions such as the Chang’e programme should be prioritised for publication in domestic journals.
Deng, who has been a team leader on China’s giant telescope project since its development in the 1990s and 2000s, said he insisted that the first batch of studies to emerge from the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fibre Spectroscopic Telescope (Lamost) appeared in domestic journals.
“This can firstly highlight the nationality of these independent and cutting-edge major scientific projects, and also help to enhance the international impact of domestic academic journals,” he said.
But English has become the international scientific community’s lingua franca and should be used as a medium of communication, Deng said, adding that it had nothing to do with politics.
According to Deng, the scientists who study the Chang’e-6 lunar samples could consider publishing in some of China’s English-language journals, such as Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics (RAA).
“All of our pre-research articles on the Lamost programme published in RAA have made it into international lists of highly cited articles,” he said.
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences researcher Zhu Rui, who prefers to publish in Chinese journals – partly because the academy encourages it – said that using his own language when writing academic papers is not an obstacle, as long as the scientific community maintains substantive communication.
Head to The China Academy website to learn more.
Let it be in Chinese, then let them translate! For the Chinese-Russian missions, let them flip a coin... on the moon 🙃