My Urumqi Experience in the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, CAS

Blank D.A

Research Center for Ecology and Environment of Central Asia (Bishkek)

　　It was difficult to know why, but I desired to visit China for a long time, as far back as my school days, when I lived in Kazakhstan (still part of the USSR). Actually, I wanted to travel to many exotic countries of Asia and Africa, because my main interest was always nature and wildlife, while most of modern achievements of current civilization and cities attracted my lively imagination significantly less. On a wall in my room at home, I had a large geographical map of Kazakhstan with a large part of Xinjiang.  Many times I looked that map and examined the geography of Xinjiang and imagined walking across those large deserts and climbing up the ranges of Tien Shan and visiting inaccessible rivers and lakes. My imaginary journeys invariably ended in Urumqi where unquestionably mysterious people lived with their unusual traditional life. Usually, at this moment my fantasy was stopped because I was sure that such a trip would never be possible for me, because at that time, trips abroad trips were inaccessible for ordinary people. In addition, the relationship between the USSR and China was not very friendly during that period.  

　　Many years passed from my school days, and I found myself in Israel, although I never wanted to emigrate from Kazakhstan to any other country. There, I worked in the Haibar Nature Reserve and observed  amazing desert animals of the Middle East, including gazelles, antelopes, ostriches, kulans and wild asses. It was very interesting for me, but I did not forget my dream about China. Then suddenly, I found the possibility to visit the Kulan International Conference in Mongolia, where I met Prof. Yang Weikang. By luck, I was able to present several of my own published papers to him, hoping to speak with Dr. Yang later during the trip with other conference participants to the Gobi Desert. Unfortunately for me, he refused to join us for the trip and our more personal contact was lost, though I was able to get his name-card which helped me to not lose this relationship completely. Two years later, I contacted him to visit Xinjiang, and he organized with a Sichuan friend of mine a very good trip to the Kalamali Nature Reserve. During that journey, we saw a lot of goitered gazelles, kulans and an introduced herd of Przewalski’s horse, as well as we visited Turfan and made the acquaintance of the fascinated Uighur culture. 

　　Soon I returned to Israel, but very colorful memories from my Chinese experience appeared in my head frequently. I did not see a way to go back to China, though I dreamt about it and imagined that one day somebody from China would invite me to return to work. I understood that this was just my fantasy that not connected to reality at all. But suddenly one day I received a message from Prof. Yang Weikang who informed me that there was a possibility to join his zoological team in Xinjiang. He asked me if I wanted to work with him in case my Israeli work position was not rewarding for me. Since my  position at the zoo was really disappointing to me and I was still constantly thinking about returning to  China, I agreed with great anticipation. I had to wait several more months for my project to be approved, but at last, I was able to leave my work in Israel a job in China. This was a really “lucky ticket” in my fortune, though this invitation was just for one year. First, I flew for 9 hours to Beijing with the Israeli airline of ELAL and then changed to a China Southern airline to and back-track for 4.5 hours in the opposite direction to Urumqi. Thus, our airplanes flew 6-7 hours above the territory of China from west to east and then back east to west, but this was the only way I could arrive to Urumqi from Israel. I was surprised by the great differences in service personnel between the two airplanes: in the Israeli company, stewardesses were larger sized women of middle age with stern-faced expressions, while the Chinese company had very young, slender women with continuous smiles and a genuine wish to help. 

　　At last, I arrived in Urumqi and started my life in Xinjiang that was like paradise to me, because the Chinese people seemed to look at me as if I were a deity who stepped down from the sky: everyone wanted to speak to me and take pictures with me; they always smiled and tried to anticipate and satisfy any my every whim. I asked Prof. Yang Weikang if one his student could accompany me for lunch and  dinner, as my Chinese language vocabulary consisted of several useless words and when I tried to pronounce any of them, people looked at me with great attention but without understanding what I wanted to say. The intonation and right accent are most important in Chinese pronunciations, more like singing sentences than and I need not so talking words. If you will not speak with the proper intonation, no one can understand your words. So, I remained silent rather than talking on Chinese; therefore, a translator was always very necessary for me, otherwise I was doomed to starvation. Prof. Yang agreed to give me a student to accompany me for eating and reasonably deduced that such help would be necessary and available to me for my first 3-4 days, though my thinking was more for about several months at least that  I would need a translator, but I did not say this to him, because I was afraid that he would be shocked from my idea and hoped, in time, he would agree to extending my assistance period with students. The first week, a student who knew English better than the others accompanied me for a lunch with what I though was a great wish. At least, I thought in such way. We visited Uighur restaurants, because I preferred the Uighur style of food that is less spicy with more meat, bread and dough, pilaf and shish kebab. The Chinese style of spicy food that contained less meat (but more chicken) and cocked with great amounts of vegetation and tremendous variety of smells and spices. Chinese food was prepared in various, complicated ways, but all this food with its various admixtures were not tasty for me and the smell did not stimulate my appetite. In contrast, the Uighur style of food was quite close to dishes that I ate in my childhood.  

　　We ate Uighur food and discussed different problems. It was very interesting, pleasant and comfortable for me. I thought that my companion had the same feelings, because I paid for both our dishes. I thought: “Students have limited scholarship and financial assistance so my paying for dinner would help them to save their money.” I was proud by my decision and supposed that my student felt happy and grateful. After several days, my student changed and another one accompanied me for a lunch. I felt that possibly something was not right, but my guess stayed in my head. The second student spoke less fluent on English and I understood him with some difficulty, as well as my speaking looked like it was not always clear to him. However, after several days of our conversations, this student spoke English better already and responded to almost everything we spoke about. After that, I found that people can understand each other, even if they speak different languages, but only when they each want to understand the other. It was also clear that the study of foreign languages is not a big problem; the main point for success is a strong desire to talk with that language and to do it every day. We continued to visit restaurants together for one or two weeks more, when suddenly Prof. Yang said to me, by the way, students prefer to eat Chinese food, but because they were accompanying me to my dinners, they were having to eat Uighur food with me every day, and they suffered very much from this. And quickly I understood that the students hated to assist me with my choice of Uighur restaurants and my selection of specific dishes. This thought really transfixed my brain and shocked me completely. But I learned from this case that good things are only good when both parties agree.  

　　The task of my work consisted in helping students prepare papers for publication. So, I started to fulfil my duty. I read students’ manuscripts and gave them instructions to solve this or that problem. They followed my guidance, but I felt that my assistance in writing their papers was not always helpful and all our papers, one after another, were rejected. Several weeks later, I felt that my advices for improvement of these papers were not appropriate or effective, because I do not understand many things about writing English papers for international English journals.  Previously, I wrote papers mainly in Russian that had different form, style, and construction, but writing English papers was very different. In the cases of rejection, I was saying to my students that the editors of international journals were unprofessional and definitely foolish people, because they refused our good quality papers, and I advised them to send their papers to another journal.  But inside I was myself not so sure that this would be successful and felt deep uncertainty. I started feeling that Prof. Yang invited the wrong man to his team, because in fact I did not know myself about writing English papers. However, I tried to make a play that everything was alright, and that my statements were correct. I thought that my performance was good and that everyone believed it until Prof. Yang declared that many foreign people are very deficient and always receive too high a salary but accomplish nothing. I was sure that he spoke about me. And the worst thing in this situation was that he was absolutely right: I was not improving the papers of his students and my invitation looked like it had been a mistake. It was my feeling that everything related to me irritated Prof. Yang very much: my words, actions and even just my presence could destroy his mood. My paradise life changed to dismay and constant depression. I thought more and more often that maybe I should gather all my things and prepare my suitcase for returning home to Israel. But the fact that any zoological work would be impossible to find there and at best case only heavy work, along with rude and unfriendly people, stopped me from leaving Xinjiang.   

　　Prof. Yang understood that my assistance to his student papers was completely useless, so, he suggested to me to write my own paper. Apparently, in another way at least, he could have additional papers generated for his team. When I finished the paper, he asked me to present to our whole team. Before this presentation, Prof. Yang told his students to look carefully at my paper and take the best examples of how to write papers from this presentation. He said this in Chinese, but I understood clearly, though this language was always obscure to me. Complete silence set in when my presentation began, but several minutes later, Prof. Yang began to criticize my paper heavily and did not stop until the end of my presentation: he exclaimed that I should rewrite this or that statement and that many sentences were wrong. It was a complete rout and he razed both me and my paper to the ground. After that, I could not look into the eyes of my students. But there was nothing for me to do because he was absolutely right in his hard evaluation. After consideration, I arrived at the decision to never show my papers to anyone before publication. I started to study writing modern papers from my students. They thought I taught them to write their papers, but in fact we taught each other. I liked my students very much, because they presented me with a lot of things, but most importantly, they were trusty, true friends. 

　　Only toward the end of my first year at the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, a journal accepted the first paper of one of my students; after that, a second paper was approved for publication. Prof. Yang ran to my workroom and began to speak very loudly as he usually did when he was very happy and excited. He said a lot of good thins to me and added that he would apply for an extension of my project, because he wanted me to work several more years on his team. Prof. Yang stood by his words and did what he needed to do to extend my project. As a result, I worked on his zoological team for more 4 years. During this time, there were a number of successes and a few faults and mistakes, but many new papers were published for the team of Prof. Yang. And I got the reputation as a man who writes a lot of papers during a short time. Most important was that Prof. Yang was happy that he invited me to his team for several years. I was also glad that my duty was fulfilled successfully. 

　　While working with my team, I found a strange situation: students and professors spoke only about publishing papers and rarely on collecting materials in the field. They seemed to see their main working task as producing as many papers as possible. I understood this because their managers asked them to publish mainly English papers in international journals. The number of published papers in high- indexed journals was the only evaluation criterion of a good student or professor. I, too, had been sure that the number of published papers was the best indication of a scientist’s success, but here I saw that, under great pressure, scientists were not interested in field work to find something interesting in wild nature pursue, but instead tried to publish based on only a small amount of materials, because their futures was directly dependent on it. In contrast, Prof. Yang’s zoological group started to pay a great deal of attention to collecting of field materials to support publishing, but not all teams were the same. 

　　In the Soviet Union, another approach was used. I started my zoological career in the Academic Institute of Zoology in Kazakhstan while Kazakhstan was still part of the USSR. Our managers thought that our main task was to collect good materials in the field, and only then plan to write a paper. They expected that a scientists could only write a good paper after 2-3 years of hard field work. Great amounts of materials were collected before writing and publishing a paper, which was not a difficult challenge and rejected papers were quite rare. In that time, there were no computers, internet, access to published papers, or indexing of papers, and we had no scientific sources, excepting scientific libraries, where finding foreign journals was an almost impossible task. Nevertheless, we wrote fairly good papers, though we were cut off from the international scientific community and did not know what other foreign scientists wrote and thought.

　　Now we have a lot of resources for writing good paper and you can get any paper published in international journals. Your papers are also advertised through internet websites and many researchers from around the World can read your work. In international English journals any manuscript passes a strict and detailed review and analysis from several reviewers. Consequently, you would be right to expect that only the best papers are published in English journals, but in fact this is not quite true. Indeed, editors and reviewers of international English journals reject many papers, but they base their conclusions on their personal opinions, and they are not obligated to substantiate their decisions. Theoretically, they must be objective, because they are not affiliated with you or your project, but in fact many subjective factors influence a reviewer’s decision: different points of view, attitudes toward a country, nationality, and affiliations of authors that are disagreeable to a reviewer, as well as the occasionally wish of reviewer to humiliate someone else as he was humiliated previously. In general, assistance editors must find the closest specialist to an issue that was considered in a paper, but this happens very rarely; apparently, in reality, a widely used a method is of blind choice from internet websites. As a result, I have personally received a lot of papers on medical, geographical, technical and even economic topics for reviewing or requests on which to write a paper; evidently my name is taken from some internet sites and nobody checks what my published papers are about and what my field of expertise is. In addition, reviewers tend to not tolerate to other opinions and are sure they know better than anyone else. As a result, you do not end up publishing own paper, but rather the opinions of reviewers. I do not think that this is the best way for science to develop, because this approach leads to publishing many papers that are more informative noise than real scientific investigations. Most important for successful paper publication is consideration of the most popular hot topic, compliance with the generally accepted formats, adhere to commonly  accepted mainstream points of view and be no stranger to the scientific community. This is why we have a large number of useless published papers.  

　　Grant program systems have been developed in most developing countries. Indeed, this system allows organizations to spend resources for useless investigations and stimulate the most important research projects that will generate the quickest positive economic effects. I also was once a big proponent of such a scientific management structure. Therefore, it is not without reason that most large  developed countries have rebuilt their science under this system of support. The Chinese Academy of Sciences prefers to work under a grant system, as well. In the zoological group of Prof. Yang, we also worked according to grants that were winning support.  It wasn’t our choice; it was the way the whole country worked. There are several kinds of grants based on duration: numerous short grants of less than one year, less often mid-sized grants for a period of 1-3 years, and very rarely long duration grants of 4-5 years or longer. We were busy with academic research which takes years to find something new, so it  was difficult to do fundamental research during even a 3-year period, when you need to collect materials in the field, do analyses, prepare several papers and present these papers at the end of your grant. In addition, you need to prepare and apply new grants which will support you after ending of previous grant end. I found after my Chinese experience that the grant system gives a lot of works to scientific teams, and most of the time they are busy with writing papers, reports and new projects, and have no time for collecting data and thinking critically on the results of their research. My work in the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography makes me sure that the grant system is absolutely unsuitable for fundamental academic investigations. Fundamental science does not net quick economic effects like applied science, but rather uplifts our knowledge to a higher level and produces a lot of new technologies and approaches to solving problems that can give a great economic result. Therefore academic projects are available only for large rich countries, but even they unfortunately have changed their practices to a grant-based system of management for developing their scientific futures.

　　Another important experience from my scientific work in the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography is knowledge on journal indices, mainly impact factors of various journals. In the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the main evaluation score was the impact factor of a journal where a paper was published. At first sight, this is a good idea: the impact factor increases as more people use this published information which raises the citation index. But soon I understood that apart from the citing level, various journals have a lot of additional indexes, which increase or decrease the main impact factor. For example, journals publishing papers on global warming and climate change have unnecessarily high indices; medical journals have the highest rates among all kinds of journals, technical publications are appreciated with lower rates; while biological journals have unexpectedly low-level indices, especially morphological and taxonomic topic journals. In this situation, if you consider a specific topic and you choose a purely zoological problem, then you are doomed to get only low scores. Many people use various fraudulent schemes to increase their citation indices, such as: asking students and colleagues to cite your paper, pay money for companies with specific services to artificial increase citing and others. In short, the impact factor is not really a fair index of real influence and importance of this or that journal, though many scientists believe in the truthfulness of these indices. And in the Chinese Academy of Sciences also accepts the impact factor of these journals as a real level of quality of published papers. On the other hand, since impact factors are an important instrument for management of science development, more scientists start their investigations of problems which have higher chances for getting the maximal scores. As a result, most researchers become invested in problems which are interesting to an entire country, as well. Therefore, through such indices, governments can create more efforts for solving important problems for an entire country.  It is not clear, why many other countries accept American and European indices as their own. Instead, countries have to create their own system of indices and manage the development of their national sciences according to their own interests; otherwise the sciences are managed by interests of foreign countries.  

　　My Xinjiang experience lasted during 5 years and I learned not only modern scientific methods, statistics, writing English papers, and collecting field materials, but also Chinese and Uighur culture and food traditions. It was an interesting journey to another world for me which I’ll never forget.  

　　Main points of my life:

　　In 1958, I was born in Alma-Ata city (capital of Kazakhstan), where graduated from the Kazakh State University in 1980. After that, I worked in the Institute of zoology of Kazakh Academy of Sciences until 1991. Then I migrated to Israel and worked in the Israel Nature Reserve Authority. In 2005-2007, I participated in the UNDP conservation project in the Sichuan Province. Later (2010-2015), I came back to China and worked in the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography of CAS.  Currently, I am working in the Research Center of Ecology and Environment of Central Asia, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.