Chinese Fail to Measure Up in Sciences

China gave the world the compass, the abacus and the printing press. Scientists of Chinese descent have won Nobel Prizes. The current government produces highly sophisticated military hardware.

But despite the widespread Western stereotype of the Chinese as science and math whizzes, the people of this country suffer from serious scientific ignorance, researchers here say.

Out of a population of 1.3 billion, only 1.4% of adults--or 14 in every 1,000--can demonstrate “basic scientific literacy,” according to a study released this week by the China Assn. for Science and Technology.

The vast majority of residents lack an understanding of even simple scientific terms and tenets, the association’s report says. Many cannot correctly answer such questions as whether the Earth revolves around the sun and whether plants produce oxygen. And most Chinese look to television as their main source of scientific information.

The study was based on a nationwide survey of 8,520 people--the first such poll on scientific literacy in China since 1996. Its findings are certain to worry the country’s technocratic leaders, an aging group of mostly engineers and scientists who insist that the key to China’s future lies in its people’s mastery of science and technology.

At the same time, the study provides more unwelcome evidence of the persistent gap in education, attainment and opportunity between China’s increasingly affluent urbanites and its roughly 800 million peasant farmers, between the prosperous east coast and the poor interior, between men and women.

That gap, in turn, suggests the monumental challenge facing Chinese leaders in their quest to improve living standards for most of the population and to lessen the disparities in income and development that fuel social.

The survey showed that agricultural workers ranked rock bottom, with a minuscule 0.04%--or just four people out of every 10,000--demonstrating rudimentary scientific competence as measured by a core test of 90 questions.

By contrast, the rate of scientific literacy among China’s city dwellers is 3.1%, a whopping 78 times greater. Men fare better than women (1.7% compared with 1%), and residents in the east outpace those in the west (2.3% versus 0.7%).

The numbers actually represent a significant improvement from five years ago, said Li Daguang of the association, who headed the survey.

“It’s hard to say exactly what a satisfactory rate would be,” he said. “One hundred percent would be ideal, but that’s just impossible.”

A random (and unscientific) sampling on the streets of Beijing revealed that the Chinese capital may be doing better than other parts of the country but falls far short of Li’s ideal.

Of five adults asked, only two could correctly state whether the Earth’s core is hot, whether oxygen comes from plants and whether the Earth revolves around the sun or vice versa--all questions on the survey. Two of the five were able to answer two questions correctly.

Building painter Nie Lixing, 20, who left school after junior high, got just one answer right, on oxygen and plants. In Nie’s version of the cosmos, the sun revolves around the Earth.

“A lot of people got that one wrong,” Li said.

Indeed, though comparisons are inexact, the Chinese seem dramatically less science-aware than Americans, whose scant knowledge is often bemoaned by educators. Surveys like Li’s are also rare in the U.S. But this year, a study developed by the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco and the polling organization Harris Interactive showed that 47% of 1,011 adults, anyway, knew the correct configuration of the solar system.

One problem in China, as in the U.S. and other countries, seems to be that many people fail to see what relevance basic science has to their lives.

“Science is very important to a nation’s development,” said Yang Zao, 28, who fumbled on the question about the Earth’s core. “But it doesn’t have much to do with me.”

Li said that China’s public school system, which suffers from a chronic lack of funding, must do better in instilling scientific principles in children and training them how to navigate an increasingly technological world.

Currently, schoolchildren are required to take science classes starting in first grade. But the system, which emphasizes learning by rote and stresses exams, “encourages Chinese students to study for the exams,” Li said. “They forget what they learned once the test is over.”