About Chinese Optical Society

Chinese Optical Society

The Chinese Optical Society (COS) is China's national learned society for optics and photonics, the professional association of individuals with an interest in optics, optical engineering and photonics across the People's Republic of China. It is affiliated with the China Association for Science and Technology, is based in Beijing's Haidian district, and maintains its official website at cncos.org. The Society links the academic optics community — in universities and in the institutes of the Chinese Academy of Sciences — with China's large optical-instrument and optoelectronics industries, and it represents Chinese optics internationally. This profile concerns the Society itself: its founding, membership, committees, meetings and representative role.

Founding on 20 December 1979

The Chinese Optical Society was established in Beijing on 20 December 1979 by the pioneers of Chinese optics Wang Daheng, Gong Zutong and Qian Linzhao. The date matters: the Society was founded in the first years of China's reform and opening, when scientific societies were being rebuilt and new ones created to organise disciplines that had grown up inside state institutes and defence programmes. Optics was such a discipline, strong in research institutes but lacking a single national professional home. The three founders embodied its main traditions — applied optical engineering, optical glass and instrument making, and the academic study of optics — and their joint initiative gave the new society authority across all of them.

The Founders and the Making of Chinese Optics

Wang Daheng (1915–2011), the Society's first president, is widely considered the father of optical engineering in China. A graduate of Tsinghua University's physics department in 1936 who studied in Britain, he returned to China in 1948 and in 1952 founded the Changchun Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, where his teams produced China's first optical glass, its first electron microscope and its first laser. He was a founding academician of both the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1955 and the Chinese Academy of Engineering in 1994, chaired SPIE symposia, and in March 1986 joined Wang Ganchang, Yang Jiachi and Chen Fangyun in the letter to Deng Xiaoping that gave birth to the 863 Program for strategic high technology. Gong Zutong, who had studied at the Technical University of Berlin, had led the wartime trial manufacture of China's first military binoculars at Kunming in 1939. The Society the three men founded was thus the organisational heir of the generation that created Chinese optics.

Membership and Scale

As of 2019, the Society had more than 15,000 individual members. Its members are researchers, engineers, teachers and students working in optics and photonics, drawn from universities, Academy institutes, state laboratories and industry. Membership on that scale makes the COS one of the substantial national optical societies in the world, comparable in function to Optica and SPIE in the United States and the European Optical Society, though operating within China's system of learned societies supervised through the China Association for Science and Technology. The Society's presidents have succeeded Wang Daheng through a line of leading optical scientists, among them Mu Guoguang and Zhou Bingkun; in recent listings its leadership has included Gong Qihuang of Peking University, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences known for ultrafast optics, as chairman.

Specialised and Working Committees

The Society works through its committees. As of 2019 it had 21 specialised committees and 7 working committees, covering fields from lasers and fibre optics to optical engineering and biomedical photonics. The specialised committees organise the discipline's sub-communities: laser technology, optical materials, spectroscopy, holography, colour science, optical testing, integrated optics, nonlinear optics and laser processing, among others, each holding its own meetings and maintaining its own expert networks. Committee officers visible in professional listings illustrate the breadth — the laser processing committee, for example, has been led by figures such as Yao Jianquan of Tianjin University, an academician known for laser and nonlinear optics research. The working committees handle the Society's standing functions such as organisation, publication, education and international liaison.

Conferences and Academic Exchange

The Society convenes China's principal optics congresses and academic exchanges. Its national conferences bring the committees together, while specialised symposia serve each sub-field. The COS also appears as a co-organiser of major international-facing gatherings held in China: the Light Conference at Changchun, for example, was co-hosted in 2023 and 2024 by the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics together with the Chinese Optical Society, the IEEE Photonics Society and other partners, gathering scholars across themes from laser manufacturing and micro- and nano-photonics to optical imaging, metrology and communications. Within that conference, the Wang Daheng Optical Prize ceremony honours the Society's founder and recognises achievement in the field. Through such meetings the Society provides the main domestic forum in which Chinese optical research is presented, debated and connected to international work.

International Representation

In 1987 the Society joined the International Commission for Optics (ICO) as China's representative body, the role recorded in the Society's standard histories. The ICO is the international commission uniting national optical communities, so membership made the COS the formal voice of Chinese optics in that forum. The Society's international links developed in the same period with the international optics societies; the Chinese Optics Letters journal entry records that in 1987 the Society also interconnected with the International Society for Optical Engineering, SPIE, in a combined relationship styled COS/SPIE in some sources. Its leaders have chaired international symposia, and its congresses regularly host foreign plenary speakers, reflecting the Society's function as the bridge between China's optics community and the world's.

Publishing as a Function of the Society

Publishing is one of the Society's standing functions, exercised through sponsorship rather than through the Society acting as a journal itself. The Society sponsors Chinese Optics Letters, the monthly English-language journal founded in 2003 and published by Chinese Laser Press, which was established in 2009 by the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics together with the Chinese Optical Society. The journal's sponsorship is a publishing function of the Society: it gives Chinese optical research an international English-language outlet under the Society's name. The Society's wider publishing environment, through Chinese Laser Press and the optics journals associated with its community, is mentioned here only in that sponsoring capacity; those journals are separate publications with their own editors and histories.

Industry, Standards and Public Roles

Based in Haidian, Beijing's university and research district, the Society links the academic community with China's optical-instrument and optoelectronics industries, whose trade gatherings — such as the China International Optoelectronic Expo, whose presidium honours Wang Daheng as honorary chairman and lists the Society's chairman — draw on the same expert community the Society organises. Its committees supply the expert pools from which conference programmes, prize juries and advisory panels are drawn, and its working committees carry its educational and popularisation activities. In a country where optics underpins telecommunications, laser manufacturing, remote sensing and defence instrumentation, the Society's quiet organisational work — maintaining who the experts are and where they meet — is itself a piece of national infrastructure.

The Society Today

More than four decades after its founding, the Chinese Optical Society remains the single national home of Chinese optics: founded by the discipline's creators in 1979, grown to more than 15,000 members in 21 specialised and 7 working committees by 2019, representing China in the International Commission for Optics since 1987, and convening the congresses through which the field renews itself. Its history mirrors that of Chinese optics itself — from optical glass and the first lasers of the Changchun institute to today's photonics industry — and its committees, meetings and sponsorships continue to organise that community under the China Association for Science and Technology.