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In 1978, China ended a decade-long ‘Cultural Revolution’ and began its Reform and Opening-up process. At the same time, China's scientific community also ended its long-term closed state and began to seek ways to integrate into the world. In this study, we take the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau as a pilot site to illustrate the international geoscience collaboration during this time. We first introduce the International Symposium on the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau, the delegation from the United States and the collaboration between China and France on the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau. Then we examine the successful cooperation between the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of London by focusing on their interactions in the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau Project in detail, on the basis of the archives of these two organizations. Since national policies and systems lagged behind the pace of international cooperation then, there were contradictions between national policies and the needs of specific research projects. We attempt to understand the flexible manner in which Chinese scholars solved these contradictions. We will also explore some of the reasons and contextual factors that shaped such Sino–foreign scientific exchanges early in the Reform era. This study also reflects the opportunities and challenges faced by China's scientific community during the process of social transformation.

In the 1950s, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) engaged in close cooperation with the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The CAS sent scientists to the Soviet Academy to work as interns, study for advanced degrees, or engage in academic cooperation, and a large number of Soviet scientists were invited by the various institutes of the CAS to come to China to give lectures, direct research, help make scientific plans, and collaborate. The comprehensive cooperation between the two academies was launched at a time when the CAS institutes were in their embryonic stage, which suggests that the better-established Soviet scientists had the opportunity to play a dominate role. But the reality is not so straightforward. The case studies in this paper suggest that besides the influence of compatible political movements in China and the Soviet Union and bilateral ties between these two nations' scientific institutes, disharmony in actual working relationships prevented Soviet scientists from playing the role they might have envisioned within the CAS institutes. The rapid development of the cooperative relationship in a short span of time, combined with lack of experience on both sides, made for a disharmonious collaboration.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) started the natural resources surveys during the heyday of “Learning from the Soviet Union” campaign in China in the 1950s. Therefore, the CAS entered into extensive collaborations with its Soviet counterpart, the Soviet Academy of Sciences (SAS), in the planning and organizing of these surveys. This paper aims to illustrate the role of Soviet scientists in China and the impact of Sino-Soviet scientific cooperation in this period through a detailed examination of the joint natural resources surveys undertaken by the two academies in 1950s.

In the history of science during the cold war, the International Geophysical Year (IGY) 1957–58 often has been viewed as a great success story of global scientific collaboration across the Iron Curtain, with the only exception being the withdrawal of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from the endeavor when the IGY organizers admitted Taiwan in 1957. Thanks to research by Ronald Doel, we now know that the U.S. State Department played a central role in the controversy by prompting Taiwan to apply for IGY membership, but little is known about the mainland Chinese side of the story.2 In this essay we propose to examine Chinese sources to reconstruct the considerations that led China to join the IGY in the first place and the reactions to the Taiwanese issue that eventually led to its withdrawal. We will also examine the impact of the IGY on Chinese geophysical research even after its formal withdrawal from the collaboration.