Jim Bowler
(University of Melbourne, Melbourne，Australia)
To Professor Liu Tungsheng I owe a great debt, both personal and scientific, spanning our two continents over 32 years. In his lifetime’s contribution, a generous heart and insightful mind combined to define a man of great scholarship and exemplary nobility. While his contribution as a most distinguished scientist inside and outside China is best addressed by others, his close and sometimes special relationship with Australia is of special interest. (See contribution by Donald Walker, this volume)
Australia’s links with China's Quaternary science began in 1975 with the surprise invitation from China’s Academy of Science to five members of the Australian National University to join a visit to that country. That invitation was organized by Professor Liu in his position as senior scientist in the Academy. For the six of us who responded, Donald Walker, Joe Jennings, Jeanette Hope, Alan Thorne, Ian McDougall, and myself, the occasion was like entering an entirely new world.
We were entering a land and people that have been entirely closed to foreigners since the Russians left some 10 years earlier. Cities and doors where being opened to us for the first time. The occasion was almost over-whelming. It took us to Guiyang, Guilin, Yan’an, Guangzhou as well as Beijing. The China and the scientific institutes that welcomed us in 1975 are almost unimaginable by today's standards.
The 1975 tour was remarkable for a number of reasons.
1. Timing. Although virtually closed to the outside world, China was still enduring the final stages of the Cultural Revolution. For us visitors, it was often hard to see the reality behind the scenes that confronted us.
2. The scale and complexity of the tour to remote regions in the southwest (Guiyang) and central China (Yan’an) implied immense, and to us unimaginable, organizational complexities. These difficulties had been resolved by the direct organizational ability of Liu Tungsheng.
3. The genuine warmth and bonds of common humanity nurtured by convivial banquets, lubricated by liberal amounts of pijou, and positively dangerous maotai, established between us a new sense of common purpose, a friendship of lasting duration. It formed the beginning of collaborative dialogue between scholars, young and old from both countries. Following the 1975 visit, Professor Liu and Madame Wang Zunji (Department of Earth Sciences) paid a visit to Australia during which a formal agreement was signed providing a vehicle for structural exchanges for the next 10 years between scientists in Canberra and China.
In my own area of Quaternary stratigraphy, exchanges with the Salt Lake Institute in Xining were associated with return visits involving collaborative training in Australia of China scholars, An Zhisheng, Chen Kezhao, Yuan Baoyin, Huang Qi and others.
The end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 began a new phase of China's emergence into the modern world. Although the guidance of Premier Deng Xiaoping is generally seem as the architect of China's open door policy, these changes had already been anticipated in science. They had been effectively begun and put into practice by Liu Tungsheng and colleagues in the Academy.
Professor Liu’s foresight and anticipation, matched by his positive action, demonstrate that level of remarkable ability to identify the need, to get things done, an ability that has resulted in a huge impact of China's loess on the Quaternary world, a contribution to the organization of science that characterised that flowering of knowledge. At that level of science organization, Australia collaborated closely, strongly supporting China's entry into INQUA (Moscow, 1982), a collaboration that culminated in the 1991 Beijing meeting with election of Professor Liu as president of that international body.
One important occasion in our mutual exchange program involving Prof. Liu is especially memorable, not always entirely for the reasons we might have expected.
In 1978 the Australian National University conferred on him an honorary Doctorate of Science degree. While in Australia to receive that degree, we invited Professor Liu to give a seminar in the Department of Geology, University of Melbourne, where I was then located. Complaining of stomach pain, our medical exerts diagnosed appendicitis. Under the care of a senior surgeon at Melbourne’s leading Alfred hospital, the surgeon, Dr. John Masterton, a Scotsman with meticulous attention to detail, opted for a precautionary X-ray, a procedure not normally required for a relatively straightforward appendix operation. To everyone’s amazement, the result was not what was anticipated. The X-ray revealed a large stone, a concretion, in a duct near the appendix.
The operation went ahead; the stone was removed without incident. Professor Liu recovered quickly from hospital to convalesce in our house in suburban Melbourne. There he devoured every book on my shelf relating to the French palaeontologist, Teilhard de Chardin (德日进), relating to his time in China and his wider philosophical publications. Meanwhile we, in the Geology Department, secured from John Masterton the problem stone. A spherical carbonate concretion 2.1 cm diameter, it represented a new type of calcrete with a startling resemblance to small carbonate concretions, “ginger stones” in some loessic soils! It was to be added to our mineral collection. However, the Alfred hospital requested its return to a special place in their anatomy museum. In this remarkable way, Professor Liu has contributed physically to an entirely new item of anatomical history. In later years, we often laughed about that memorable occasion.
Our mutual relationship provided a focus in which I felt comfortable in 2003 requesting the opportunity to interview Professor Liu and record his memories. His positive response was qualified by typical modesty “That’s alright, but I don't know why anyone would be interested in what I have to say”.
That interview, an edited version of which is included in this book, provided one of the most memorable moments, in some ways a closure of my own links with China. In its delivery, expressed in six stories, Professor Liu presents a moving summary of a life’s journey, a life that spanned a truly remarkable phase of that great nation’s history, events of epic proportions so little understood by those of us outside China looking in through a small window into that complex world. As one reflecting on that dialogue, several messages delivered by Professor Liu are especially noteworthy.
1. His passion for his country, his patriotism tinged with a sense of long injustice in China’s treatment by the outside world remains an abiding theme, A magic moment emerges at the beginning, Story 1, the story of “the Golden Frog”, a brilliant parable of foreigners’ attitudes to China. It must be read in Liu’s own words! (See interview transcript this volume).
2. From his interviews and comments, two separate events converge as milestones in China's emergence as a leading player in the international Quaternary scene.
The first was the discovery of the Peking skull by Pei Wenzhong at Zhoukoudian at the very end, indeed on the last day of the 1929 excavation season! This was no mere symbolic event. Despite the collaboration of a major international team, it was a Chinese member that made the monumental discovery! Pei showed that China could do it!
The second moment was the 1991 election of Professor Liu as President of INQUA. In a private letter to me after that rather hectic INQUA executive election meeting in Beijing, he specifically identified that occasion as the first time China’s science had been acknowledged by the outside world at that level of international scientific leadership. After decades of sometimes dark and difficult years, this was obviously a moment of great pride and satisfaction. Perhaps even more importantly than the international implications, the moment spoke volumes to China’s leadership back home, an opportunity not wasted on Professor Liu as his successful efforts involving major growth in Quaternary research institutions now testify.
These two events, separated by 62 years, stand as benchmark occasions from which innovative and creative changes have swept through China’s scientific landscape.
3. From the 1954 discussion with visiting Russians, Professors Gerasimov (Грасимоф) and Kovda (Кофда), the long-running controversy of loess origins stands as a monument to that unfolding story. The Gerasimov view, published after the 1961 Warsaw INQUA congress, proposed pluvial origins of loess rather than Liu’s aeolian interpretation. Becoming entrenched in Russian orthodoxy, the pluvial theory persisted with lingering ramifications even to the turn of the century. For Liu Tungsheng, it was the early recognition of the red beds as soil horizons that provided the key to cyclic interpretations, an event again timed to near the 1961 INQUA meeting.
4. In a remarkable way, Liu Tungsheng’s links with Teilhard de Chardin warrant attention. In these two, of most unlikely backgrounds, one a French Jesuit palaeontologist, the other a product of communist tradition, their remarkable paths of convergence were recognized by Liu himself. The interest with which he devoured Teilhard’s writings while convalescing in our house sent us a message. While Teilhard had been banished by the Vatican from Europe to China, he found there a fantastic field of Cenozoic geology open and awaiting exploration. His geological efforts were widely acknowledged in China where today, his name appears frequently in museum collections.
Paradoxically, it is perhaps more in those philosophical views banned by the Vatican, that Liu found such resonance. Teilhard shared with Liu Tungsheng a dedication to planetary evolution as the dominant role in both biological and humanitarian worlds. The notion of Teilhards “Noosphere’, the new layer of consciousness, found immediate resonance with Liu’s support for the “Anthropocene” proposal, the period of humans as geological agents. Both these remarkable men, from totally antithetical backgrounds, were one in their notion of progress toward a new sense of global unity. In that sense, the modern notion of globalization was nothing new to Liu Tungsheng. His philosophy of science had already led him far down that pathway towards international unity and amity.
Finally, in the many facets of Professor Liu’s memorable life, his pioneering and creative contributions to the many stories of China's loess, his ability to anticipate and manage change, will identify him as the outstanding pioneer of this globally unique window into climatic change, He recognised within his Quaternary records, clear messages for the future. His scientific insights and their generous transmission to others, live on in the legacy of those students and scientists of many persuasions who came under his influence.
As one thus privileged, it was a sad but memorable occasion to share in the final chapter of his life, his funeral in Beijing in March 2008. As China farewelled this national scholar, I could but marvel at how swiftly the China we saw in 1975 is now unrecognizable. So much of that debt must be attributed to Liu Tungsheng who, in a mere 30 years (1954 ~ 84), brought his Quaternary science into the forefront of the international world, a change so fast and so great. His vision for future unity of purpose, a unity of hearts and minds across scientific, religious, cultural and national boundaries, remains as his most enduring challenge to us today.
