QA_Vol 24_No 1_July 2007 - Australasian Quaternary Association

Interview withProfessor Liu Tungsheng,May 24, 2007Early years, youth and the rise of patriotismI will begin with personal experiences while in my hometown. I was born in the year 1917. The hometown of mygrandfather was in the north of China, Tianjin, but I wasborn in Shenyang in the northeast. My father hadbecome a station master of Shenyang. The station,Huanggutun, was where the Japanese bombed therailway and killed the warlord, Zhang Zuolin, who at thattime was the governor of northeast China. That was thestart of the Japanese military invasion from 1928.My father was a self-educated man, and paid muchattention to the education of his children. I learned frommy father the qualities of diligence, hard work, honestyand generosity. All these virtues or characters were alsotaught at primary school. My mother, a traditionalwoman, came from the countryside from a family offarmers.My lasting impression of my primary school educationand of that age, during the 1920s and 1930s, is a kind ofnational humiliation. At primary school we had ‘nationalhumiliation days’ because of the unequal treaty betweenChina and Japan, Britain and other countries likeFrance, Russia and Italy. So, for the primary school stageof my life there were two major impressions. There wasthe traditional education from school and also fromfamily about diligence, hard work, honesty and generosity.On the other side was patriotism through beingunder Japanese control.In 1930, the Japanese military first occupied the northeasternpart of China, so my family fled from Shenyangto live in Tianjin and Beijing. We moved to the interiorpart of China during the second World War.Twenty years later I went back to Shenyang, and Idiscovered that in the 20 years from 1930 to 1950 noengineers had been educated. China had universitiesand high schools; medical doctors were trained but nocivil engineers, no mechanical engineers, and of courseno geologists. So all the geology was being conducted byJapanese geologists. They had trained only some of theirsubordinates to look for the outcrops of some ores ormineral deposits. The information was collected so theJapanese geologists could decide whether the depositswere useful or not. So it seems there was a degree ofintellectual control of China through the JapaneseFigure 1: Memorial stamp and envelope struck by China’snational government to commemorate the award of China’sNational Science Prize, awarded and presented to Prof. LiuTungsheng in 2004.occupation. That’s why most people of my age groupdeveloped a strong sense of patriotism.The bombing of Shenyang in 1928 killed the leader ofChinese government in the northeastern part, the fatherof Zhang Zueliang. Zhang Zueliang then took control ofthe military in the northeast and retreated into northernChina. When the Long March passed through northernChina to the northwest he was in Shaanxi Province andJiang Jieshi [Chiang Kai-shek] was controlling thesouthern part of China, and the communist army passedthrough the eastern and northern part into Yan’an. Theson of the older marshal (Zhang Zueliang) talked withChiang Kai-shek during a visit to his headquarters, thenthey had negotiations between the communists and thegovernor. From that time in 1937 the Japanese resistancereally began, after they had occupied Beijing, Tianjinand Shanghai.We left Shenyang, my hometown, for Tianjin and mymiddle school. This school recently celebrated its onehundredthyear; Nankai Middle School. The school isvery proud of its alumni because two prime ministerswere graduates, one being Premier Zhou Enlai, the otherPremier Wen Jiabao.Many of my generation shared similar life experiences.I learned quite a lot about nature when I was very youngbecause we lived in the countryside where there was noentertainment such as movies or theatres. The onlything we did enjoy was nature, so at the small river wecould swim and catch insects or other animals.3 | Quaternary AUSTRALASIA 24 (2)