When I landed in Peking one cold night last November I was warmly greeted by Kuan Wei‐yen, a low‐temperature physicist who runs Academia Sinica's Institute of Physics. It was the start of a three‐week tour of the People's Republic of China as the guest of Academia Sinica, in which I met with Vice‐Premier Fang Yi and other leading science officials, visited six physics institutes and five university physics departments.