Chinese Academy of Sciences

The Chinese Academy of Sciences was established in Beijing on 1 November 1949, weeks after the founding of the People's Republic, consolidating the research staff and facilities of the Nationalist-era Academia Sinica, founded 1928, and the Beiping Academy of Sciences under the new government. It has no single founder in the way a laboratory has one; it was created by state decree as the country's highest academic institution in the natural sciences. It now runs more than a hundred research institutes across China and elects academicians, a lifetime honorary title, from among the country's leading scientists. Qian Xuesen, who returned to China in 1955 after five years under house arrest in the United States on unproven espionage charges, was a founding academician and became the founding director of its Institute of Mechanics in 1956, going on to lead the country's ballistic missile and space rocket programmes.