For China, Nobel Prize in science is still a big leap away

For one week every October, a serious bout of anxiety grips China. But it is not purely down to nervousness over which prominent dissident is in the running for the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded to the Dalai Lama in 1989 and Liu Xiaobo in 2010.

Rather, it reflects the Chinese government's unsated craving for a home-grown scientist to win a Nobel science prize; cast-iron proof of technological power to match its economic might and a reassertion of its capacity for innovation, first demonstrated by the so-called "Four Great Inventions" of ancient China: the compass, printing, gunpowder and papermaking.

This year, though, the trophy cabinet again lies empty. China has resorted to celebration by association. One of the Nobel Prize winners for medicine, announced last week, is Thomas Südhof, a professor of molecular and cellular physiology at Stanford University School of Medicine and husband to Chen Lu, a high-profile Chinese neuroscientist. The University of Science and Technology of China, Chen's alma mater, enthusiasti-cally cheered a Chinese son-in-law and, in this way, China is at least related to the honour.

It is a familiar tactic. In 2008, an excitable Chinese media celebrated the chemistry prize of Roger Y. Tsien, an American citizen born in the US but also a nephew of Qian Xuesen, known as the "father" of China's space programme.

Ethnic Chinese do feature among China's Nobel laureates for science. But the glaring fact is that not one is a product of the education system of Communist Party-led China.

Winners of the physics prize in 1957, Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee held passports issued by the Kuomintang government, which was overthrown by the Communist Party in 1949. They both attended the National Southwestern Associated University, an institution formed during the second world war by an amalgamation of Peking, Tsinghua and Nankai universities in Kunming , Yunnan province, before moving to the US.