Wu Rukang: Winning recognition for China

Originally published in 2008

"I cannot leave my birthplace. Science has no boundaries, but a scientist has his roots."

-Wu Rukang

Editor's Note: Wu Rukang is a paleoanthropologist born in Wujin, Jiangsu Province, in February 1916. He graduated from Central University in 1940. In 1949 he received his doctorate degree from Washington University in St. Louis. In 1980 he was elected a member of the academic committee of Chinese Academy of Sciences. He worked as a researcher at the Ancient Vertebrates and Paleoanthropology Institute of Chinese Academy of Sciences. As an expert on anatomy and anthropology, he pioneered the study of the physical development of humans from apes. Chinese archeolgy in the modern sense, and especially paleoanthropology, started in the early 1920s, when fossils of prehistoric men (called "Peking man") were found in the Zhoukoudian area of Beijing. However, further research on these fossils was carried out by foreigners; many scientific journals would not even mention the name of the Chinese who first discovered the fossils.

As a young man, Wu Rukang could not understand why the Chinese had given away the precious fossils to foreign scientists. He recalled that the excavations at Foundations, and Chinese scientists were excluded. It was this that made him expand his field of study to paleoanthropology.

In the summer of 1949, Wu Rukang and his wife Ma Xiuquan, who had been Wu's classmate in the Biology Department of Central University, received doctorates from the Anatomy Department of the Medical College of Washington University in St. Louis. Their tutors and fellow classmates urged them to stay in Amercia, but they were determined to work for China.

The traveling expenses were sponsored by Kuomintang's embassy in America, and relatives had found suitable jobs for them in Taiwan. But one of his teachers, Wu Dingliang, who was the chair of the Anthropology Department at Zhejiang University, invited Wu Rukang to work in his department. Wu and his wife realized that the future and hope for China depended on the Chinese mainland led by the Communist Party. Also, the Chinese mainland was a vast territory with a huge population, so there must be abundant human and ape fossiles in the earth. These conditions promised a bright future for anthropology research. This choice changed Wu Rukang's life.