Popular Science Books by CAS and CAE Members, a series published under the joint sponsorship of CASAD, CAE and other science institutions in China, received a National Award for S&T Progress in 2005. Over the past seven years, a total of 107 CAS and CAE members had been devoted themselves to the writing of 100 popular science booklets in four series. CAS President LU Yongxiang chaired its editorial committee. Mr. JIANG Zemin, then Chinese president, personally wrote the foreword to the Series in the title “To raise the scientific literacy of the whole nation.??xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
Among the 100 books in the anthology, one third are creative writings to interpret issues on frontiers of contemporary world science, so they are of pioneering signification in nature; the two thirds are explanations of “hot issues?and solutions to “hard nuts?in current China’s socio-economic development on the basis of the authors?long-time research work, so they are of practical value. The anthology is then widely acclaimed by the mass media as “books written by celebrated scientists for the rank and file.?Its success plays a demonstrative role in encouraging scientists engineers to throw themselves into the popular science writing.
The book series produces favorable and wide repercussions from the public. Apart from repeated prints on the mainland China, the edition copyright of its first series in the original complicated form of Chinese characters had been bought by Newton Press in Taiwan and it hence was made available in the marketplaces of China’s Taiwan Province and Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. The Department of Organization under the CPC Central Committee decreed it to be enlisted into the reference bibliography selected for the Party & governmental cadres in their in-service studies while the Ministry of Education recommends it as a compulsory item catalogued in the libraries of middle and primary schools across the country. In the current program to send key books to the countryside, a nationwide drive co-sponsored by the Ministry of Culture, Ministry of Finance and the National Library, nine booklets from the Anthology are chosen to be sent to 300 county-level libraries and 3,000 township libraries in the underdeveloped rural areas on which the national campaign of poverty elimination is concentrating its priority efforts. In addition, a booklet entitled the Water-saving Agriculture in the Anthology has been chosen by the Northwest S&T University for Agriculture & Forestry to be used as one of teaching references. The principles on the relationship between the water’s evaporation and transpiration introduced by the booklet has been adopted by a Xinjiang firm of water-saving irrigation at Shihezi City to develop the droplet-irrigation technology for cotton plantation, which has been popularized across the region.
