About Chinese Society of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics

Chinese Society of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics

The Chinese Society of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (中国力学学会, CSTAM) is China's national learned society for mechanics — the science of motion, force, deformation and flow, and the discipline that underlies aerospace engineering, civil structures, hydrodynamics and much of modern manufacturing. It was founded in 1957 by Qian Xuesen (Hsue-Shen Tsien, 1911–2009), the founder of China's rocketry and space programme, who served as the Society's first president from 1957 to 1982. The Society is attached to the Institute of Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing — the institute Qian founded in 1956 on his return to China — and its headquarters stand at 15 Beisihuanxi Road in the Haidian District of Beijing, the same address as the institute. Through its journals, above all Acta Mechanica Sinica and the Chinese Journal of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, its biennial national congress and its awards, the Society anchors the professional life of Chinese mechanicians, a membership recorded at more than 20,000.

Few learned societies anywhere are so completely the creation of one person, or so closely identified with a national technological programme. Qian Xuesen regarded mechanics — "engineering science", in his preferred framing — as the bridge between basic science and engineering practice, and he built the Society, its institute and its journals together, in a single burst of institution-building between 1956 and 1957, as the organisational machinery of that idea. To understand the Society is therefore to understand Qian's project for Chinese science, and the Society has never hidden the connection: its senior award carries his name.

Qian Xuesen and the founding of 1957

Qian Xuesen was born in Shanghai on 11 December 1911, graduated from Shanghai Jiaotong University in 1934, and left China for the United States in 1935. He took a master's degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology within a year, then moved to the California Institute of Technology to study aeronautical engineering and aerodynamics under Theodore von Kármán, receiving his doctorate in 1939. After years in which return was blocked, he finally came back to China in 1955. In 1956 he established the Institute of Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and held the post of its director; in 1957 he founded the Chinese Society of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics and was elected its first president, a presidency he held until 1982. In the same year he started publishing China's first mechanics journal, Acta Mechanica Sinica in its Chinese series, as its first editor-in-chief, setting it, in the words of the memorial editorial published by the Society's journal after his death, "as a journal of engineering science" and determining its aims and scope.

A study of Qian's educational work records the same tenure from the teaching side: during his presidency of the Institute of Mechanics (1956–1982) and of the Society (1957–1982), Qian supported the Society's academic activities, promoted its journal, and organised study classes on engineering cybernetics and engineering physics within the Institute and the University of Science and Technology of China. The Society was, from birth, one leg of a tripod — institute, society, journal — designed to create a self-sustaining Chinese mechanics community: researchers employed by the institute, a profession organised by the society, and results published in the journal.

The Institute of Mechanics connection

The Society remains attached to the Institute of Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the two share the Beisihuanxi Road campus in Haidian, Beijing's university district. The attachment is more than administrative. The Institute's own journal pages list the Society as co-sponsor of its core titles, the Society's editorial offices use the institute's address — the Acta Mechanica Sinica editorial office is recorded at No. 15 Beisihuanxi Road, Beijing 100190 — and the Society's congresses are guided by the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the two national bodies through which Chinese learned societies connect to the state research system. Qian's framing of mechanics as a "technical science" — his 1957 essay on the subject is still cited in the Society's journals — gave this institute–society pairing its intellectual charter: basic research conducted with engineering application consciously in view.

The Chinese journal: Acta Mechanica Sinica in Chinese

The Society's first journal requires careful naming, because one title-root serves two journals. The Chinese-language journal founded by Qian in 1957 — the Chinese series of Acta Mechanica Sinica, known in English as the Chinese Journal of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics — is sponsored jointly by the Institute of Mechanics and the Society. Its line of chief editors is a roll of Chinese mechanics itself: founded under Qian Xuesen as first chief editor, it passed through Yonghuai Guo, Zhemin Zheng, Tongji Lin, Kezhi Huang, Chengkang Wu, Ziqiang Wang, Wei Yang, Gengdong Cheng and Quanshui Zheng to Yuegang Wei, with Xiyun Lu of the University of Science and Technology of China recorded as the current chief editor in the Institute's listing. By the time of the 2010 memorial to Qian, 41 volumes of the Chinese series had been published. The journal publishes in Chinese the research of the domestic mechanics community and remains the senior Chinese-language periodical of the discipline.

The English journal: Acta Mechanica Sinica

The English series followed a generation later. Acta Mechanica Sinica in English was first launched in June 1985 in Beijing, after five years of preparation and with the approval of CAST and the support of the Society, expressly "aimed at delivering the cutting-edge progress and achievement in mechanics in China to the world" and at supplying an international forum for the field; its early contents were drawn selectively from the pool of its Chinese counterpart. Published by Springer and sponsored by the Society, it is today an international journal welcoming, in its stated aims, "high-quality original papers in all aspects of mechanics and mechanical sciences from contributors throughout the world", covering not only the classical subdivisions — solid mechanics and fluid mechanics — but also dynamics and control, biomechanics, interdisciplinary mechanics and data-driven mechanics. By its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2010, 25 volumes of the English series had appeared. The journal's contents are open to the Society's members, a membership the journal's community page puts at over 20,000 — the most-cited published figure for the Society's size.

Further journals: reviews, letters and practice

Around the two flagships the Society and the Institute maintain a small publishing system. Advances in Mechanics is a comprehensive review journal supervised by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and jointly sponsored by the Institute of Mechanics and the Society. Theoretical and Applied Mechanics Letters was launched in 2011, sponsored by the same pair, as a letters-format outlet for rapid communication of new results. Mechanics in Engineering, the Society's practice-oriented Chinese journal — the title that carried the study of Qian's talent-cultivation work cited above — addresses mechanics as it is used and taught in engineering. Together the titles divide the labour of a discipline's literature: archive journal in Chinese, international journal in English, reviews, letters, and a journal for practice.

Committees across the discipline

The Society's committee structure spans solid and fluid mechanics, dynamics and control, biomechanics, explosion and impact mechanics and experimental mechanics, together with other specialist areas — a map of the discipline as it is actually practised in China's aerospace, civil-engineering and defence programmes, the sectors where mechanicians are most heavily employed. The breadth is characteristic: mechanics is a service discipline as well as a pure one, and the Society's committees place university researchers in the same rooms as the engineers of the space and construction industries. Committees also guard the discipline's memory: the Society's Professional Committee on the History and Methodology of Mechanics marked its twentieth anniversary in 2023, with its chroniclers reviewing two decades of research on the history of Chinese mechanics — much of it, inevitably, the history of the Society and its founder.

The biennial congress and the awards

The Society's largest gathering is the Chinese Congress of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (CCTAM), founded in 2005 and held every two years, described by its hosts as the largest, most comprehensive and influential event in the field of mechanics in China. The 2019 congress, held in Hangzhou from 26 August, gathered more than 4,300 scholars from universities and research institutions, with 23 parallel sessions, 95 workshops and over 3,600 accepted papers; it was guided by CAST and the National Natural Science Foundation, sponsored by the Society and Zhejiang University, and presided over by Yang Wei, then chairman of the Society, with academician Zheng Xiaojing, a vice-president of the Society, chairing the opening ceremony.

At the opening ceremony the congress awarded the Society's prizes in mechanics: the Qian Xuesen Mechanics Award, named for the founder; the Zhou Peiyuan Mechanics Award, named for another founding figure of Chinese mechanics; the Science and Technology Award of the Society; its Youth Science and Technology Award; its Excellent Doctoral Dissertation Award; and the award of the Zhou Peiyuan National College Student Mechanics Competition — the national student competition through which the Society reaches down into undergraduate teaching. The pairing of the two named awards neatly encodes the Society's lineage: Qian the institution-builder and Zhou the elder statesman of the discipline, honoured together at the discipline's own congress.

Why the Society matters

The Chinese Society of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics matters for the completeness of its founding design and the durability of what was built. Institute, society and journals were created together in 1956–1957 by a single founder with a coherent philosophy of engineering science, and all three still operate, from the same Beijing address, nearly seventy years later. Its journals carry Chinese mechanics in two languages; its congress assembles more than four thousand mechanicians; its awards carry the names of the discipline's founders into each new generation. For the record, the essentials are: founded 1957 by Qian Xuesen, first president 1957–1982; attached to the Institute of Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences at 15 Beisihuanxi Road, Beijing; journals founded 1957 (Chinese) and 1985 (English); biennial congress founded 2005; and a membership recorded at more than 20,000.