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SCMP Reporter

From the depths of the ocean to orbiting the moon, China's army of scientists and engineers made great strides forwards last year.
And, well, backwards, too.
China produced the world's darkest dark-matter detector, the longest long-range quantum teleporter, the deepest deep-sea exploration submarine and a superlative supercomputer that leaves overseas competitors standing.  
But there were also academics who got it wrong, cases of pseudoscience and technology that caused more harm than good. One revolutionary technology claimed to extract cooking oil from restaurant waste - but not only did the oil taste  repulsive but it turned out to be carcinogenic.
The good and the bad all benefited from cash allocated at last year's National People's Congress. The latter, of course, will be absent from Premier Wen Jiabao's next Government Report.
On the upside, China continued to make progress in space last year. On October 1, it launched its second lunar probe, the Chang'e II, to pinpoint a suitable landing site for a future mission. More than 500 senior mainland scientists chose the Chang'e II as the year's biggest scientific event, according to a survey by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. 
 This year China aims to further improve on that with the launch of Tiangong I, China's first space-station module. 
The ocean is another frontier where China made breakthroughs. In August, the manned deep-sea submarine Jiaolong, or Sea Dragon, planted a national flag on the  floor of the South China Sea. 
Its mission is to seek natural resources, such as minerals. And it is charged with going beyond the South China Sea and into the Pacific, challenging US dominance in the world's largest body of water.
While the world struggled with recovery from the financial crisis, China stimulated its economy with high-speed rail projects. 
The world's longest high-speed rail line, between Shanghai and Beijing, has been completed and is being tested. On one such test run, the train reached more than 480 kilometres per hour, a world record for an unmodified conventional commercial train.
There was also progress in the energy sector. While most fast reactors in developed countries such as Britain and the United States were suspended or scrapped, China fired up one in a nuclear-research facility south of Beijing, paving the way for commercial use. 
Fast reactors can burn up uranium fuel thoroughly and produce little radioactive waste, but they are challenging to build and maintain.
China's communication sector also caught the world's attention. Aware that its existing military and economic communication network was prone to be hacked, China poured money into quantum communication technology that, in theory, kept transmissions secure.
Nature magazine published a cover story in June reporting the success of a 16-kilometre quantum teleportation experiment in China, in which information was transported using unentangled photons. It was a distance more than 20 times longer than had ever been achieved before.
Other notable scientific and technological breakthroughs that China achieved last year included finding a gene that can boost the production of rice; an innovative and promising treatment that aims to starve cancer cells to death; drawing the first complete map of panda genes; and liquefying coal at low cost.
Meanwhile, academic scandals also  went to new levels.
Dr Li Liansheng, former professor of Xian Jiaotong University, lost his job and a National Science Award for stealing other researchers' work. The scandal shocked the mainland's scientific community because Li was the first to lose the top science prize on the mainland. Many said others had done worse things but had not been found out ... yet.
Dr Xiao Chuanguo, a former professor of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, hired hitmen, who  attacked science critic and blogger Dr Fang Shimin in August because Fang had exposed Xiao's academic faults to the media. 
 Xiao was arrested in Beijing and sentenced to five months' imprisonment in October, in the first verdict of its kind on the mainland.
Ordinary citizens have  fallen victim to bad ethics within the scientific community. Last year, some mainland parents made their children prepare for IQ tests in the misguided belief that it would turn them into Einsteins; young women swallowed bottles of pills in a useless attempt to make their body odour more attractive to men; and many people, misled by unproven claims by so-called experts, took a chemical called L-carnitine to lose weight.
Fang said that in a country where government bureaucrats controlled most research funds, scientists had no freedom to  follow their passions. 
He said this was the reason why a recent campaign launched by China to attract world-class scientists to study there has met with little interest. Chinese 21st-century science had been kidnapped by the ethics of the Dark Age, Fang said, adding: 'What has been exposed is only the tip of an iceberg.'



China reaches for the moon - and gets it