Flashback

20 years ago in Chemistry in Britain

The first meeting of the Chinese Chemical Society (CCS) was held in Nanjing University in 1932, attended by 46 chemists, some of whom had travelled thousands of miles. The second in Shanghai in 1934 was attended by 582 scientists. Against all the odds, the CCS managed in some form to survive successively the Japanese invasion, the Civil War and the Cultural Revolution, and is now active in the modernisation of China. 

The current president of the CCS is You-Chi Tang (left), director of the Institute of Physical Chemistry in Beijing University. Professor Tang was a graduate of Tong-ji University in Shanghai and did his PhD at Caltech under Linus Pauling. In 1951 he elected to return to China and a year later was offered a post at Beijing University. During the cultural Revolution in the 1960s Professor Tang was exiled for a time to the countryside. 

Following the death of Mao Tse-Tung and the collapse of the Gang of Four, the CCS held its first post-cultural Revolution meeting in Shanghai in 1978. Professor Tang has been president of the CCS since 1986 and is also a member of the Academia Sinica and sits on executive committee of Iupac (Chemistry in Britain, November 1987). 

Ed: The RSC signed an International Cooperation Agreement (ICA) with the Chinese Chemical Society (CCS) on 20 October 2006.  Chemistry World Chinais a tangible result of this cooperation. For further details of the RSC-CCS agreement see www.rsc.org/Membership/Networking/InternationalActivities/China/ICA.asp. See also the website.

CCS visit to the RSC

29 May 2007, Burlington House, UK