There is a heated debate among the Chinese science blogosphere science.net/blogs about scientific instruments. Research of physcial sciences in China has long been suffereing from expensive imported equipments. As I estimate over 90% instruments used in China are imported from abroad. It seems quite reasonable if we look at specific type of instruments like DSC or TEM. The best brands of thermal analyzer may be TA or Netzsch, for example, and for rheometers there are Anton Paar, Malven, and also TA. JEOL, Phillips and Hitachi lead the market of electron microscopes. None of these companies are China based. Import is inevitable for not only China but countries other than those the above companies belong to. However, for years the national education investment in China have been lower than 3% of the GDP, and a large number of young Chinese scientists do feel great finacial pressure to start their own laboratory. What’s worse, laboratories here always charge a high price for sharing their own instruments. All of these stimulate discussion of the absence of domestic products available in the market.

The obstacle for China’s own scientific instrument companies is intuitively the low status of manufacturing industry, especially high precision, high sensitive parts production. There are indeed a number of allegedly domestic DSC or even TEM but surely these are assembly of imported parts. You will immediately understand what I mean if you think about the made-in-China products in your country: there is no high quality production in China now. Manufacturers are reluctant to invest in technology innovation because simple copying and assembling things makes enough money.

Why? Because there is no protection of innovation here! Discourage of innovation has also created bad atmosphere for youth. Graduate students from China tend to use any equipment passively, according or even not according to the user manuals. They only press the buttons on the panel or use the beginner’s wizard of the softwares. They may know little or none about the principle, structure, electric circuits inside the instrument, and have no disire and base to modify the equipment for better experimental aim or result. They lack the ability of DIY. There is also no workshops in most labs in China. Even you want to DIY something you find huge difficulty in getting all the tools and materials from the lab or market.

My boss told me that when he was a PhD student in Japan there used to be the “uncle Chimpanzee” (チンパンジーのおじさん, chinpanjī no ojisan, using Google Translate) who came to their lab from time to time. Any requirement of modified parts or DIY project could be discussed with him, who know a little of nearly everything. Personalized stuffs could thus realized most of the time. Now as I know every labs in the US have a properly designed workshop. Tools and materials are available from all kind of catelogues. Parts are all standardized. These exist because people need them. There will be none if they are needless, as is the case in China.

I think our people should use less Microsoft software and turn to free, open-source product to avoid the necessity of piracy and harm to IP rights, and in the long run culture the culture of innovation. In this way, Google should not be ban by China. It is more a friend than Microsoft because many of Google’s products are free and cutting edge. I wish one day all Chinese computers suddenly shift to Chrome OS and a large money will released from paying for the software licsense and used instead in domestic intellectural properties.