About Zhangjiang Laboratory

Zhangjiang Laboratory

Zhangjiang Laboratory, usually shortened to Zhangjiang Lab, is a national laboratory in Shanghai, jointly established by the Shanghai municipal government and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It was unveiled on 26 September 2017 in Zhangjiang Science City, in the Pudong district of Shanghai, as a comprehensive national science centre for basic science. The laboratory was created to bring together, under one national-laboratory framework, the major scientific facilities that had already been built in Zhangjiang — above all the Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility and the National Center for Protein Science Shanghai — and to build new facilities alongside them. Its first director, Wang Xi, set out its founding approach at the unveiling: to focus first on building up major scientific facilities in order to make breakthroughs in fundamental science, particularly in photonics, life science, information technology and brain-inspired intelligence. Officials set the laboratory a target at its launch: to become a world-class national laboratory by 2030, and, in photon science in particular, to become the world's largest and most comprehensive cluster of photonic science facilities by that date.

Unveiling on 26 September 2017

The laboratory's public beginning is precisely dated. Reports by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and its Shanghai Branch record that Zhangjiang Lab was unveiled on September 26, in Pudong's Zhangjiang Science City, at a ceremony attended by Shanghai Party Secretary Han Zheng, the President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Bai Chunli, and Shanghai's Mayor, Ying Yong. The Academy's account described the unveiling as a giant stride in Shanghai's ambition to be a global innovation and science hub. The timing was presented as part of a wider national direction: the Academy noted that, in developing the area into a national science centre of global influence, the Academy and the Shanghai Municipal Government worked closely together, introducing innovative policies and adopting practical measures to ensure the development of the lab. On the same day, a separate innovation and research institute for microsatellites of the Academy was also inaugurated in Zhangjiang, underlining that the laboratory's unveiling belonged to a broader building-out of Academy institutions in the district. A later report of the laboratory's management committee meeting, held on 14 February in the year following its first full year of operation, recorded that the committee met to summarise the achievements and experience of the past year and to work out a development plan for the year ahead, with the presidents of the two founding partners again addressing its direction.

Jointly Built by Shanghai and the Chinese Academy of Sciences

Zhangjiang Laboratory has two founders, and both have remained publicly involved in its direction. It was, in the words of the Pudong government's report of its early progress, a project jointly carried out by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Shanghai government in September 2017. At its management committee meeting, Bai Chunli, as president of the Academy, said the Academy would further support the laboratory in system and mechanism exploration, help it establish an effective national laboratory management system and recruit top scientists worldwide. Shanghai's mayor, Ying Yong, said at the same meeting that the laboratory should focus on major projects and tasks in key areas such as integrated circuits, artificial intelligence and biomedicine, and try to become a national laboratory at an internationally advanced level. That dual sponsorship explains the laboratory's character. The Academy brought the research institutes and the big science facilities, most of them operated through its Shanghai Advanced Research Institute. The city brought the Zhangjiang site, the ambition to build a global scientific innovation centre in Shanghai, and a large share of the investment in the facility cluster: reporting on the Zhangjiang cluster put the total investment in its eight major projects at around 13.8 billion yuan, 71.2 per cent of which would come from the municipal government of Shanghai. The laboratory was therefore designed from the start as a national laboratory rooted in a city science district, rather than as a single Academy institute.

Location: Zhangjiang Science City, Pudong

The laboratory is inseparable from its place. Zhangjiang Science City, in Pudong, on the eastern side of Shanghai, is the district the city has developed as its principal concentration of big science facilities, research institutes and high-technology industry. The Academy's Shanghai Branch described the lab as unveiled in Pudong's Zhangjiang Science City, and the laboratory's researchers publish from 99 Haike Road, Pudong, the address associated with the Shanghai Advanced Research Institute campus around which the facility cluster is built. Zhangjiang itself was reported in 2021 to house 14 mega science projects either in operation or under construction and 330 national research and development institutions, including the Tsung-Dao Lee Institute and the National Center for Protein Science Shanghai, within a national innovation demonstration zone approved by the State Council in 2011. Later Shanghai reporting described Zhangjiang as home to two national-level laboratories, more than 20 national and municipal research institutes and over 100 incubators, with its company base concentrated in integrated circuits, biomedicine and artificial intelligence. The laboratory's role within that district is to serve as its comprehensive national science centre: the institution that connects the district's largest facilities to a common basic-science mission.

Leadership and the Shanghai Advanced Research Institute

The laboratory's first director was Wang Xi. Contemporary Academy reports identify him in both of his roles at once: director of Zhangjiang Lab and president — in another Academy rendering, head — of the Shanghai Advanced Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, known as SARI. That dual appointment was structural, not incidental. The Academy reported at the unveiling that several national-level major science facilities in Zhangjiang, including the Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility and the National Center for Protein Science Shanghai, would be integrated into the Shanghai Advanced Research Institute to make the lab better serve the science community. In other words, the laboratory's operating core was the Advanced Research Institute, which already ran the synchrotron and hosted the protein facility, and its president became the laboratory's director. Wang Xi's account of the laboratory's initial development, given at the unveiling, was that it would focus on building up major scientific facilities to make breakthroughs in fundamental sciences, naming photonics — explained in the Academy's report as the physical science of light — life science, information technology and brain-inspired intelligence technologies, and an interdisciplinary field between life science and information technology. That facility-first philosophy has shaped everything the laboratory is publicly known for: its identity is defined less by a single building than by the cluster of large facilities assembled around it.

A Comprehensive National Science Centre

Both founding partners described the laboratory in the same terms at its launch: it would serve as a comprehensive national science centre to promote basic science. The Shanghai Branch of the Academy added that it aimed to attract top researchers from across the world, and officials set the target of becoming a world-class national laboratory by 2030. The Pudong government's report of the laboratory's first year added a more specific photon-science ambition: by 2020 the lab was expected to make a series of breakthroughs in the fields of photon science, life science and information technology, and it would strive to become the world's largest and most comprehensive cluster of photonic science facilities by 2030. The Academy, for its part, said it would support the laboratory in exploring systems and mechanisms and in establishing an effective national laboratory management system, language that reflects the laboratory's place in China's programme of building national laboratories as a new kind of research institution, distinct from a conventional institute. President Xi Jinping was quoted in the Academy's unveiling report as saying that China would facilitate the setting up of innovation platforms and that national laboratories would play a leading role in those platforms. Zhangjiang Laboratory was one of the laboratories created to play that leading role, and its comprehensive brief — spanning photon science, life science, microelectronics, artificial intelligence and biomedicine — follows from that design.

Photon Science and the Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility

Photon science is the laboratory's first research direction, and its foundation is the Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility, or SSRF. SSRF is a third-generation synchrotron light source in the Zhangjiang High-Tech Park, described in Shanghai reporting as the largest scientific device and public experimental platform in China and, when it opened, China's costliest single science facility. Construction of SSRF began on 25 December 2004, after a proposal first made in 1993 by three academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the facility was officially opened for its first users on 6 May 2009. It operates at 3.5 GeV, with a circumference of 432 metres, in a building with a distinctive snail-shaped roof, and it produces beams hundreds of millions of times brighter than a normal X-ray, in the Academy's phrase at the laboratory's unveiling. Its uses, as described by its director Zhentang Zhao in a National Science Review interview, span the disciplines a comprehensive centre is meant to join: biologists use it to determine the structures of proteins and other biomacromolecules, materials scientists to analyse the internal structures of materials, physicists to explore basic states of matter, and physicians for medical imaging. By the mid-2020s SSRF had been used by more than 60,000 researchers from about 700 research institutions and companies, supporting over 20,000 projects, and it had clocked over 340,000 hours of experiments since entering service in 2009. Since its opening to users, in Zhao's assessment, SSRF bred many significant scientific achievements and laid the foundation for the Shanghai Zhangjiang Cluster of Big Science Facilities, the cluster Zhangjiang Laboratory was created to lead.

The Wider Facility Cluster: SHINE, SULF and the Free-Electron Lasers

Around the synchrotron, the Zhangjiang cluster adds the light sources of the next generation. In 2018 the laboratory reported that construction of photonic science facilities for hard X-rays, ultra-short and ultra-intense lasers, and synchrotron radiation was running smoothly. The largest of the new projects is SHINE, the Shanghai High repetition rate XFEL and Extreme Light facility: a hard X-ray free-electron laser facility based on an 8 GeV superconducting linear accelerator, to be installed in a tunnel 3.1 kilometres long and about 30 metres deep, crossing the west part of the SSRF campus underground. The project was launched by the central government in April 2017, its groundbreaking took place in April 2018, and it was designed to cover photon energies from 0.4 to 25 keV with a light pulse repetition rate as high as 1 MHz, with three undulator lines, three beamlines and ten experimental stations in its first phase, developed by ShanghaiTech University, the Shanghai Advanced Research Institute and the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics. Alongside SHINE, the cluster described by Zhao includes the Shanghai Superintense Ultrafast Laser Facility, known as SULF, the soft X-ray free-electron laser facilities, and the Protein Science Facility, with future facilities planned including an electron microscopy centre and ultrafast electron diffraction and microscopy facilities. Zhao's conclusion was that the technologies of free-electron lasers and synchrotron radiation would in future be combined to upgrade SSRF into a coherent synchrotron light source. For Zhangjiang Laboratory, this cluster is the substance of the claim to be a comprehensive national science centre: no single instrument defines it, but the concentration of photon facilities in one district is intended to be, by 2030, the largest and most comprehensive of its kind in the world.

Life Science and the National Center for Protein Science Shanghai

Life science is the laboratory's second founding direction, and its facility anchor is the National Center for Protein Science Shanghai, also known as the National Facility for Protein Science in Shanghai. The facility, in the Zhangjiang High-Tech Park, was completed in March 2014 with a total investment of 756 million yuan and was officially opened after passing review by a state panel of experts, as one of China's key science infrastructure projects. At its opening its director, Lei Ming, said it had already helped analyse more than 370 protein structures, and the centre aimed to house 40 young researchers from around the world for advanced protein science research and technology development. The protein facility's equipment, as described in accounts of the Zhangjiang cluster, includes electron microscopes, nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometers and mass spectrometers, and Shanghai reporting on the 2026 World Laureates Forum described it as housing China's only 900 MHz nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer, able to observe protein molecules in solution at the microscopic level. Its beamline at the synchrotron, BL17B, was originally designed for diffraction experiments including single-crystal diffraction, powder diffraction and grazing-incidence wide-angle X-ray scattering. The integration of this facility, together with SSRF, into the structure around Zhangjiang Laboratory joined structural biology directly to photon science: the same district that produces the X-rays provides the national facility that uses them to determine how proteins are built.

Microelectronics, Artificial Intelligence and Biomedicine

Beyond its two facility-anchored directions, the laboratory's stated brief extends to the applied fields Shanghai has prioritised. In its first year, the Pudong government reported, major research directions such as microelectronics and life science were set up and a number of research institutions were established. Mayor Ying Yong's instruction at the management committee meeting named the key areas as integrated circuits, artificial intelligence and biomedicine, and the laboratory's recorded research directions span photon science, life science, microelectronics, artificial intelligence and biomedicine as a set. The life-science side of that brief took institutional form in July 2018, when the Shanghai municipal government and the Academy jointly unveiled three scientific research platforms in Shanghai. One of them, the Zhangjiang Laboratory of Pharmaceutical Science, aimed to independently develop new drugs that are affordable and effective for patients and have minimal negative side effects. The other two platforms unveiled the same day — a brain intelligence innovation park drawing on the Academy's cloned monkey technology for the diagnosis, intervention and treatment of key brain diseases, and a collaborative innovation centre for immune intervention in infectious diseases, working on anti-infection antibodies and new vaccines — belonged to the same Academy–Shanghai programme of building research platforms in the city, and Bai Chunli described their launch as a significant step for Shanghai's goal of becoming a scientific and technological innovation centre and developing Zhangjiang into a national science centre. Zhangjiang's wider economy gives these directions their context: more than half of the sales revenue of the district's 22,000-plus companies was reported to come from integrated circuits, biomedicine and artificial intelligence, the three emerging industries the laboratory's applied directions mirror.

Role in Shanghai's Global Innovation Ambition

Zhangjiang Laboratory was created as an instrument of a city ambition as much as of a national one. Shanghai's stated aim, repeated by its officials at the laboratory's unveiling and at the platform launches that followed, is to become a science and technology innovation centre with global influence — in Mayor Ying Yong's words, the source and origin of new academic ideas, new scientific findings, new technologies and new industrial models. The Pudong government described the laboratory as a comprehensive research base expected to become a driving force in Shanghai's campaign to become a global scientific innovation centre. Within that campaign, the laboratory occupies the basic-science apex: it is the comprehensive national science centre that promotes basic science, attracts top researchers from across the world, and organises the district's largest facilities toward breakthroughs in fundamental science, while the institutes, universities and companies around it carry research toward application. Its progress is therefore reported in those terms — facilities under construction, research directions established, breakthroughs expected in photon science, life science and information technology — and its success is to be judged against the target its founders set in 2017: a world-class national laboratory by 2030, hosting the world's largest and most comprehensive cluster of photonic science facilities. For a directory of research institutions, Zhangjiang Laboratory is the Pudong institution that binds Shanghai's synchrotron, its free-electron lasers and its national protein facility into a single national laboratory.