On June 1st, 2015, People's Daily published an article entitled "They are listening to the breath of the Universe", based on interviews with eight astronomers at KIAA and DoA on May 27th. Astronomy is still a "cold" discipline in China; only a few universities have astronomy departments. However, Chinese astronomy has been rapidly growing in the last few years. The recent achievements made by PKU astronomers have attracted a lot of attention from the news media, including People's Daily, the most authoritative newspaper in China.
KIAA Director, Luis Ho, briefly introduced KIAA and explained the importance of international collaborations in observational astronomy. DoA Chairman, Fukun Liu, gave an example of doing creative research from his work on supermassive black hole binaries. Two KIAA astronomers, Xuebing Wu and Linhua Jiang, describe the advantages of PKU in training the next generation of scientists. Haibo Yuan, Xuebing Wu and a PhD student, Chengyuan Li, explain the importance of astronomy in developing science and technology, which are seldom realized by other disciplines.
See the link below for the PDF version of the article.
