LIU Shen’e

He was elected as deputy to the first, second and third NPC, the chairman of the NLD Shenyang Municipal Committee, the deputy mayor of Shenyang, the deputy director and first-class researcher of the Institute for Forestry & Soil Research (IFS) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (the predecessor of the Institute of Applied Ecology, CAS), and died in 1975.

Mr. LIU Shen’e is one of the pioneers and founders of botany, geobotany and forest ecology of China. He developed theories of dynamic geobotany and made outstanding contributions to plant & forest protection and desertification control & management in China. When reading his writings and stories in his career, we shall be deeply moved by his unrelenting scientific pursuit, spirit and strong will to protect plant & forest resources and control desertification.

Survived the Dangers in the Scientific Investigation

Mr. LIU Shen’e was born in 1897, from a farmer's family in Muping County, Shandong Province. In 1918, he was admitted to the High School of Baoding. In 1920, he was chosen to go to France to continue his study. In 1929, he obtained a doctorate degree in science from the University of Paris. In the same year, with ambitions to develop plant science for his motherland, Mr. LIU returned to China and accepted a position as researcher and director of the Institute of Botany of the Peking (i.e., Beijing) Research Academy (IBPA). At that time, IBPA had only a few staff members and very few specimens and books. He then led people to collect specimens everywhere.

In 1931, LIU participated in the Sino-French Northwest Academic Investigation Group. They departed from Beijing, crossed Inner Mongolia and finally arrived in Xinjiang. In Urumqi, where should be the ending point of their investigation, LIU asked someone to send two boxes of specimens to IBPA in Beijing, and himself, without giving any thought to his personal safety, continued to move forward. The roads were quite rugged, so he hired donkeys to carry his luggage and specimens.

In 1932, LIU arrived in the Tibetan Plateau (5, 500 a.s.l) and had collected more than 2,500 specimens. One day LIU ran into bandits on the way and was finally released because he wore ragged clothes, with a beard and long hair, and had no valuables but some old newspapers and plant specimens.

For more than a year after LIU had left Xinjiang, IBPA had no news from him. His colleagues thought that he might have died in an accident. Until he sent a telegram from India asking for traveling expenses, people knew that he was still alive. After that, LIU returned to Shanghai from India. During the two years of field investigation, LIU collected large numbers of valuable specimens and accumulated knowledge about geographical distribution of flora, vegetation type and plant geography of Xinjiang and Tibet, which provided the earliest precious study materials for our country. In the third year after IBPA was founded, LIU, as the editor, published the book “Illustrated Flora of North China”, which greatly contributed to the botany study in China.

Protected plant specimens in the war

For Mr. LIU Shen’e, plants and plant specimens were as valuable as his own life. As long as conditions permitted, he organized people to establish botanical gardens.

In 1929, the year when LIU returned to China, he established a botanical garden in IBPA. In 1936,  because of the invasion of Japanese army, the IBPA was moved to Wugong County, Shaanxi Province, where IBPA and the Northwest Agricultural College merged and became the Northwest Plant Survey Institute. At the same time, a botanical garden was established there. LIU personally led people to dig plant seedlings and collect specimens in the mountains. In 1941, the Peking Research Academy was moved to Kunming, Yunnan province, wherein LIU established another botanical garden.

LIU fought against bad behaviors destroying trees, flowers and botanical gardens. In 1935, YUAN Liang, who was the mayor of Peking then, wanted to replace trees that had been planted in the botanical garden with cabbage. Mr. LIU was very angry. He wrote letter to ask for help, hoping to save the botanical garden. In his letter, he wrote the following down: "The Beijing municipal government attends to trifles and neglect the essentials, retroacts, pushes a reactionary policy, in the name of increasing farmland (by growing vegetables), is now destroying and closing down the only one botanical garden in China (which has been in existence for five years). As this matters to the plant science of China, I can’t do nothing … but the Beijing government insists to destroy the botanical garden, with thousands of green plants being in danger.” Although LIU tried to prevent the botanical garden from being devastated, it couldn’t be helped.

In 1948, on the eve of the peaceful liberation of Beijing, the Kuomintang (i.e., National Revolutionary Army) soldiers broke in the botanical garden and destroyed a great number of plant specimens. Mr. LIU organized the staff of the institute, taking a risk of losing their lives, and moved plant specimens to the Huairen Hall inside Zhongnanhai. At times the pieces of bombs flew down to the yard of the institute, LIU and his colleagues still stayed with their equipments and books and finally had the institute preserved.

Being Active in Exploration, with Courage to Practice

In 1956, the Baolan (Baotou - Lanzhou) Railway was under construction by the Ministry of Railways (MOR). But a 140-kilometer-long section across Zhongwei County, Ningxia province, ought to pass through the Tengger Desert. IFS was commissioned to undertake the sand control task along the railways. In March of the same year, LIU Shen’e and LI Minggang led the young- and middle-aged scientific researchers came to the Shapotou sandy area.

Because of the inconvenience of traffic, LIU Shen’e, who was already 60, had to rode a donkey or a camel to get to the work sites. When being faced with the bad natural conditions (e.g., the huge, active sand dunes, the strong winds and the low precipitation), all people were worried about whether plants could survive and whether the task of sand dune stabilization could be achieved successfully. When Mr. LIU and his colleagues stood on the top of a huge sand dune, looking towards the south bank of the Yellow River, he found that there were some sand dunes covered by vegetation (Artemisia ordosica). He said to his colleagues: "this will be a prototype of fixed sand dunes. If the cover of vegetation could reach this level, there is no problem in passing the train. Now we have already seen our prototype, and we must have confidence to have our task done.”

Subsequently, LIU and his colleagues crossed the Yellow River by taking sheepskin boats so as to observe the vegetation carefully and figure out the succession rules on the south bank of the river. These sheepskin boats were too small and looked very unsafe to cross such a big river. When the little boats were bobbing up and down in the choppy Yellow River, people who for the first time took a ride in this kind of boat were very scared. LIU, at the moment, in order to alleviate people’s feeling of fear, laughed and talked the scientific theories of sandy vegetation succession.

In the process of studying desertification control, Mr. LIU conducted in-depth researches and incisive analyses on Artemisia, which is now considered as important sand-fixing plants. He applied theories of dynamic botany and proposed measures combining species of herbs (e.g., Artemisia) and shrubs (Caragana intermedia, Hedysarum scoparium, etc.). Using the measures he proposed, the sand control task was completed successfully. With the joint efforts of scientists and engineers from the IFS of CAS, the Scientific Research Institute and the No.1 Design Academy of the Ministry of Railways, after nearly two year’s construction, the 990-kilometer-long Baolan Railway was successfully opened to traffic in 1958. Mr. LIU Shen’e contributed a lot to this achievement.

In 1978, Mr. LIU was awarded the Key Scientific and Technological (S&T) achievement medal because of one of his research achievements — the Dynamic Geobotany-based Theory Study of Forest Harvesting and Regeneration as well as the jointly accomplished research achievement — the Design and Construction of Railways in the Northwest Desert Area. In 1987, due to the sand control measures used for the Baolan Railway protection, Mr. LIU won the top-class prize of National S&T Progress Award. Mr. LI Minggang, the late deputy captain of the desertification control team of the Lanzhou Institute for Desert Research, CAS, praised Mr. LIU as the founder of the desertification control research of China. Now, Shapotou has become a 5A-level tourist scenic spot, a national-level desert nature reserve and one of 'the top-500 areas of global environmental protection’.

Although Mr. LIU Shen’e has been dead for 44 years, his scientific attitude and spirit, especially his contribution in exploring and protecting plant and forest resources for our country are worthy of learning by the majority of S&T workers, especially eco-workers. Mr. LIU had no fear of hardships and always showed courage to do pioneering work in a spirit of self-reliance, and explore the domain of plant science in a way integrating theory with practice. All of these are worthy of our memory forever.

(The author is a researcher at the Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences)

The article was originally published in the Journal of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2019-02-19, on the 7th page about Ecological Environment).