The basic research is the motive force of the mankind's progress in civilization, the fountain and backing of science, technology and economy developments, the precursor of new technology and new invention and also the cradle for training and bringing up the talents of science and technology.
   The basic research is an important part of China's scientific and technological work, one of the three levels of the strategic deployment of scientific and technological researches. In China, it generally includes the pure basic research mainly for the purpose of understanding natural phenomena and revealing objective laws, the oriented research for exploring new principles and opening up new fields towards a major or widely applied goal, and the research for systematically inspecting, gathering, appraising, synthesizing and analyzing the basic scientific data and exploring their basic law. The Chinese nation has a long history, our ancestors created brilliant and dazzling science and culture which have played a great role in world civilization progress. But in modern times, China's science and technology fall far behind.
   Since the founding of the People's Republic of China 50 years ago, the basic research has been vigorously developing, and a lot of bases and facilities mainly for the basic research have been set up, thereby forming a relatively complete discipline system and a relatively rational layout of scientific researches. A high-level team for scientific researches has been trained and a lot of advanced achievements in scientific researches have been obtained. The steady development of the basic research has significantly promoted the economic construction and social progress of China.
   The country incessantly strengthen the support to the basic research, especially in recent a decade more, the input to the basic research has been steadily increased. The support to the basic research by the Central Finance is realized through the national natural science foundation, climbing plan, state Key Basic Research Development Program, State Key Laboratory Plan, major scientific projects and various talent people plans and special funds, etc.. The departments and localities concerned also take effective measures to continuously enhance the input to the basic research, and a pattern of the basic research supported in many ways is being formed. At present, scientific and technological personnel engaged in the basic research in China amount to about 50 thousands (converted into full time), including 585 academicians of Chinese Academy of Sciences, 437 academicians of Chinese Academy of Engineering Sciences. The basic research level is continuously raised, and the actual strength enhanced step by step. The number of papers published by Chinese scientists in important international publications rises year by year. In 1997,China (excluding Taiwan) published 35,311 papers (including those both in periodicals and on conference) in international publications, ranking the 9th in the world, and the 12th in SCI.
   The comprehensive actual capability and level of the basic research are at the forefront in the developing countries.
   Among the lots of excellent research achievements, over 600 were awarded the state prize of natural science; a batch won the Einstein Prize, the Third World Science Academy prizes and other high-level international scientific prizes.
 
 
 
All the previous state prizes of natural science