About Chinese Astronomical Society

Chinese Astronomical Society

The Chinese Astronomical Society is China's national society for astronomy and one of the country's oldest scientific societies. It is the adhering body through which China belongs to the International Astronomical Union, and it coordinates the professional community of Chinese astronomers — the researchers of the observatories, universities and planetariums whose work stands behind facilities such as the FAST radio telescope and the LAMOST survey. Since 1949 its secretariat has been hosted by the Purple Mountain Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Nanjing, Jiangsu. This profile concerns the Society itself: its founding, its moves, its membership, its meetings and its publishing functions.

Founding in Beijing on 30 October 1922

The Society was founded on 30 October 1922 in Beijing, when more than forty scholars held a meeting at the Beijing Ancient Observatory to establish it. Its pioneers acted under the impulse of the May Fourth Movement, which had called for science to renew Chinese intellectual life, and they set its purpose as promoting the advancement of astronomical research and popularising astronomical knowledge — a double mission of research and outreach that the Society has kept ever since. Its early secretariat was set up at the Beijing Ancient Observatory, the Ming and Qing dynasty observatory whose bronze instruments still stand in the capital. Gao Lu (1877–1947), who had studied in Belgium and would direct the Academia Sinica's astronomical institute from 1928, was the leading figure of this founding generation.

A Society Older Than Modern Chinese Observatories

The Society's seniority is part of its identity. It was founded before China possessed a modern research observatory of its own: the Institute of Astronomy of Academia Sinica was established in Nanjing only in 1928, and the Purple Mountain Observatory, then the biggest observatory in East Asia, was completed in 1934 under Yu Qingsong. The Society therefore came first, creating the professional community that then built the institutions. It is counted among China's oldest scientific societies, founded two years before the Chinese Meteorological Society and a quarter-century before the Chinese Geophysical Society, at a time when modern astronomy in China was just beginning to replace the imperial astronomical tradition of the old observatory where the founders met.

The Move to Nanjing in 1932

In 1932 the Society moved to Nanjing with the Academia Sinica's astronomical institute, transferring its secretariat from Beijing to the institute that was then building the Purple Mountain Observatory. The move tied the Society's administration to China's new national observatory, a connection that has endured for more than ninety years. During the war years the observatory community withdrew westward — the Purple Mountain staff evacuated to Kunming in 1937 ahead of the Japanese invasion and returned in 1946 — and the organised life of Chinese astronomy contracted with it. After 1949 the Society's secretariat was located at the Purple Mountain Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, where it remains, at the observatory's address on Yuanhua Road in Nanjing's Qixia District.

Joining the International Astronomical Union in 1935

The Society joined the International Astronomical Union in 1935, the year of the IAU's fifth General Assembly in Paris, becoming the union's 26th national member by the count given in centenary histories. China has belonged to the IAU through the Society ever since, making the Society the country's adhering organisation — the body that represents Chinese astronomers in the international union, nominates individual members and connects China's observatories to the IAU's commissions and naming and standards work. A historical brief published by the Purple Mountain Observatory records that by the time of its writing 401 Chinese astronomers were individual members of the IAU. The representation later took the dual form documented in IAU centenary accounts, with mainland astronomers represented by the Chinese Astronomical Society located in Nanjing.

Membership and the Professional Community

The Society's membership comprises the professional astronomical community of China: researchers and professors at the observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, university astronomy departments, and planetarium and popularisation staff. An IAU symposium account of Chinese astronomy recorded that the Society then had 2,481 members, including about 400 researchers and professors and some 1,300 graduate students, figures that convey both the Society's scale in that period and its role in incorporating students into the profession. Its institutional world includes the Purple Mountain Observatory, the National Astronomical Observatories of China in Beijing, the Yunnan and Shanghai observatories and the university departments that have multiplied with China's investment in astronomy. Membership growth has tracked the expansion symbolised by FAST, the Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope, and the LAMOST spectroscopic survey, facilities whose user communities the Society's meetings serve.

The Annual Meeting

The Society organises national astronomical conferences and specialist symposia across fields from solar physics and celestial mechanics to astrophysics and space astronomy, and its annual meeting is the discipline's national congress. The 2015 annual academic meeting, hosted by Peking University's Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics and Department of Astronomy from 19 to 21 October 2015, attracted a record approximately 800 registered participants from Academy institutes and universities, with plenary lectures in the university's Centennial Hall, eight parallel scientific sessions ranging from solar system science to cosmology, sessions on the history of astronomy and on teaching and outreach, and the Society's council meeting held alongside. A decade later the 2025 annual meeting was scheduled for 31 October to 4 November 2025 in Xiamen, with a main conference and nine sub-conferences covering radio astronomy, the Sun and planets, stars and galaxies, instruments and time-frequency, high energy astrophysics, galaxies and the universe, astronomy history, education and popularisation, and artificial intelligence and astronomical big data — a programme that maps the discipline's present breadth.

Awards and Professional Life

At its meetings the Society honours achievement within the profession. At the 2015 meeting, for example, the Huang Runqian Prize, described as a newly established senior research prize of the Chinese Astronomical Society, was awarded to Xuebing Wu of Peking University for his excellent work on quasars and black holes. Such prizes, together with the council elections and working-group sessions held at the congresses, structure the professional life of the community: they mark senior distinction, bring younger researchers into national visibility, and let the Society's specialist groups plan their work face to face. Public lectures at the annual meetings, such as the well-attended evening lecture in 2015, carry the Society's founding popularisation mission into the host city.

Publishing as a Function of the Society

Publishing is a standing function of the Society, exercised through sponsorship. The Society sponsors Acta Astronomica Sinica, the earliest Chinese-language astronomical journal, started in 1953 and undertaken by the Purple Mountain Observatory; the journal, whose English translation version appears as Chinese Astronomy and Astrophysics, moved from semiannual publication in 1953–1978 to quarterly in 1979–2010 and to bimonthly from 2011. The journal is mentioned here only as the Society's sponsored publication: it is a separate periodical with its own editorial office at the observatory, publishing research across astrophysics, celestial mechanics and astrometry, astronomical instrumentation and the history of astronomy. Older accounts of Chinese astronomical publishing list the Society's journal alongside Progress in Astronomy and the popular magazine Astronomy Amateur within the publication system the Society oversees, reflecting its twin research and popularisation purposes.

The Society in Its Second Century

The Chinese Astronomical Society passed its centenary in 2022, one hundred years after the forty scholars met at the Beijing Ancient Observatory. It has survived the moves from Beijing to Nanjing, the war years in the southwest, and the reorganisation of Chinese science after 1949, and it remains what it was founded to be: the national organisation of Chinese astronomy, adhering to the International Astronomical Union since 1935, secretariat at Purple Mountain Observatory, convening the annual meetings and specialist symposia of a community that now operates world-leading facilities. Through its membership of observatories, universities and planetariums it continues to coordinate the professional community behind China's astronomy.