Chinese Academy of Sciences
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The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS; Chinese: 中国科学院) is the national academy and largest public research organization of the People's Republic of China. Founded on November 1, 1949, exactly one month after the founding of the PRC, it reports directly to the State Council and is headquartered in Xicheng District, Beijing. With 106 research institutes, two universities, roughly 71,000 full-time staff and around 79,000 graduate students, CAS is widely described as the world's largest research organization by some measures, and it has topped the Nature Index global institutional ranking every year since 2014. Through its Institute of Computing Technology, Institute of Automation and dozens of other affiliated institutes, CAS has become a central player in Chinese artificial intelligence research, producing foundation models like ZidongTaichu and incubating chip companies such as Cambricon and Loongson.
| Field | Details |
|---|---|
| Founded | November 1, 1949 |
| Headquarters | 52 Sanlihe Road, Xicheng District, Beijing |
| Parent body | State Council of the People's Republic of China |
| President | Hou Jianguo (since December 2020) |
| Vice president | Wu Zhaohui |
| Members (academicians) | ~873 domestic, ~150 foreign (after the 2023 election) |
| Research institutes | 106 |
| Affiliated universities | 2 (USTC and UCAS), with ShanghaiTech jointly run |
| Full-time staff | ~71,300 (2023) |
| Graduate students | ~79,000 |
| Annual budget | CN¥171 billion (2023) |
| Branches | 11 regional branches across mainland China |
| Website | english.cas.cn |
CAS was established by the Government Administration Council of the Central People's Government on November 1, 1949, only thirty days after the founding of the PRC. It absorbed many institutes that had previously belonged to the Republican-era Academia Sinica and the Beiping Academy. Premier Zhou Enlai pushed the new state to pool national resources behind the academy, telling officials to "empower the Chinese Academy of Sciences to make it the locomotive that leads the country in advancing the development of science and training young scientists."
The poet, historian and Marxist theorist Guo Moruo became the first president and held the post until his death in 1978. During those nearly three decades, CAS doubled as the country's top scientific advisory body and as a science and technology administrative organ. It played the central role in drafting the Twelve-Year National Long-term Outline for Science and Technology Development (1956 to 1967), which set the agenda for early PRC science.
The academy expanded rapidly in the 1950s, often with Soviet assistance. The Institute of Computing Technology was set up in 1956 in Beijing as China's first dedicated computer research body. It produced the country's first general-purpose digital computer, the Type 103, in 1958, and the Type 119, China's first self-developed large digital computer, in 1964. The Type 119 carried out calculations that supported China's first nuclear weapon test (Project 596) the same year.
In 1958 CAS founded the University of Science and Technology of China in Beijing to train scientific talent for its own institutes. USTC was relocated to Hefei in Anhui province in 1970 during the Cultural Revolution.
The Cultural Revolution (1966 to 1976) hit CAS hard. Many institutes were closed, downgraded or merged with provincial bodies, and senior scientists were sent down to the countryside or to factories. Basic research collapsed in favor of "production tasks" linked to industry and agriculture. Deng Xiaoping later mocked the situation by remarking that the Academy of Sciences had become "an Academy of Cabbage" rather than an academy of sciences.
When Deng returned to power in 1977, CAS was rebuilt as part of the broader "science is the first productive force" agenda. The Outline Report on the work of CAS, originally drafted in 1975 and then suppressed, was revived as official policy. International scientific exchanges resumed and basic research returned to the agenda. In 1977 the academy's Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences was spun off as the separate Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
In 1978 CAS opened the country's first graduate school in Beijing, originally as the Graduate School of USTC. This institution was renamed the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2000 and then upgraded to the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS) in 2012. UCAS now backs its programs with more than 110 CAS institutes spread across over 20 cities.
In 1998 the State Council approved the National Knowledge Innovation Program (KIP), proposed by then-president Lu Yongxiang. KIP poured large amounts of central funding into CAS over more than a decade, with the explicit goal of building a smaller number of stronger institutes capable of competing with leading foreign labs. The reform cut headcount, raised salaries for top researchers, set up new key labs and pushed institutes toward more focused research themes. By the time KIP wound up in 2010, the publication output and international ranking of many CAS institutes had risen sharply.
On August 18, 2014, then-president Bai Chunli announced the Pioneer Initiative (also translated as Pioneer Action Plan), a 15-year roadmap for further institutional reform. The plan reorganized CAS research units into four categories: innovative academies, centers of excellence, mega-science research centers and feature institutes, each with a distinct mission and management style. The Pioneer Initiative is the framework under which CAS has pursued its current AI-related work, including foundation model and chip programs.
Hou Jianguo, a chemical physicist and former president of USTC, took over from Bai Chunli as president of CAS in December 2020. Hou had earlier served as Deputy Minister of Science and Technology and as a CAS vice president from 2018 to 2020. Wu Zhaohui serves as vice president.
| Term | President | Background |
|---|---|---|
| 1949 to 1978 | Guo Moruo | Poet, historian, Marxist theorist |
| 1979 to 1981 | Fang Yi | Politician, Vice Premier |
| 1981 to 1987 | Lu Jiaxi | Physical chemist |
| 1987 to 1997 | Zhou Guangzhao | Theoretical physicist |
| 1997 to 2011 | Lu Yongxiang | Mechanical engineer |
| 2011 to 2020 | Bai Chunli | Chemist, nanoscience |
| 2020 to present | Hou Jianguo | Chemical physicist |
CAS academicians are grouped into six academic divisions, which set scientific direction and elect new members:
| Division | Scope |
|---|---|
| Mathematics and Physics | Pure and applied mathematics, physics, astronomy |
| Chemistry | Chemistry and chemical engineering |
| Life Sciences and Medical Sciences | Biology, biomedicine, agriculture |
| Earth Sciences | Geology, geography, atmospheric and ocean sciences |
| Information Technical Sciences | Computer science, electronics, communications, automation |
| Technological Sciences | Engineering, materials, energy and other applied technologies |
The headquarters in Beijing's Sanlihe district houses the president's office, the Bureau of Frontier Sciences and Education, the Bureau of Major R&D Programs, the Bureau of Science and Technology for Development, the Bureau of International Cooperation, the Bureau of Personnel and Education and several other support units.
CAS operates 106 research institutes organized under 11 regional branches: Beijing, Shenyang, Changchun, Shanghai, Nanjing, Wuhan, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Kunming, Lanzhou and Xinjiang. Institutes are spread across 23 provincial-level administrative areas. The largest concentration is in Zhongguancun in Beijing's Haidian district, sometimes called "China's Silicon Valley," partly because so many CAS institutes (Physics, Computing Technology, Software, Automation, Microelectronics, and many others) sit within walking distance of one another there.
A representative selection of CAS institutes:
| Institute | Location | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Institute of Computing Technology (ICT) | Beijing | Founded 1956; built China's first computer; spinoffs include Lenovo, Loongson, Sugon, Cambricon |
| Institute of Automation (CASIA) | Beijing | AI, computer vision, biometrics, NLP, foundation models |
| Institute of Software (ISCAS) | Beijing | Programming languages, operating systems, formal methods |
| Institute of Physics | Beijing | Condensed matter, lasers, high-temperature superconductors |
| Institute of High Energy Physics | Beijing | Particle physics, Beijing Electron Positron Collider |
| Institute of Microelectronics | Beijing | Semiconductor processes and design |
| Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology | Shanghai | Sensors, RF chips, integrated systems |
| Shanghai Advanced Research Institute | Shanghai | Energy, IoT, low-carbon technology |
| Hefei Institutes of Physical Science | Hefei | Plasma physics, EAST tokamak, intelligent machines |
| Suzhou Institute of Nano-Tech and Nano-Bionics | Suzhou | Nanomaterials, nano-bionics |
| Computer Network Information Center (CNIC) | Beijing | National supercomputing, e-Science infrastructure |
| Wuhan Institute of Virology | Wuhan | Virology, BSL-4 lab |
| Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology (SIAT) | Shenzhen | Robotics, biomedical engineering |
| National Astronomical Observatories | Beijing | FAST radio telescope, observational astronomy |
CAS owns or co-runs three universities, all of which are research-heavy and tightly tied to its institute system:
| University | Founded | Location | Relationship |
|---|---|---|---|
| University of Science and Technology of China | 1958 | Hefei | Owned by CAS, co-funded with Ministry of Education and Anhui government |
| University of Chinese Academy of Sciences | 1978 (as graduate school); 2012 (as university) | Beijing, with branches in Shanghai, Chengdu, Wuhan, Guangzhou, Lanzhou | Owned by CAS, started undergraduate admissions in 2014 |
| ShanghaiTech University | 2013 | Shanghai (Pudong) | Joint venture between CAS and Shanghai Municipal Government |
USTC, UCAS and ShanghaiTech all rank inside the global top tier of the Nature Index, alongside CAS itself. UCAS in particular has produced China's first PhD in science, first PhD in engineering and first female PhD.
CAS academician (院士, yuanshi) is the highest academic title in China. Members are elected for life; the title was formally restored in 1955, briefly relabeled "learned member" (学部委员) in some periods, and re-styled as "academician" in 1993. Elections are normally held every two years. After the 2023 election, CAS had about 873 domestic academicians and around 150 foreign academicians, with 59 new domestic members and 30 new foreign members elected that year. The 2025 selection cycle capped the number of new domestic seats at 100.
308 CAS members appeared on Clarivate's 2024 Highly Cited Researchers list, the largest contingent from any single institution in the world. Notable academicians have included Hua Luogeng (mathematics), Qian Xuesen (rocket and missile science), Zhou Guangzhao (theoretical physics), Tu Youyou (medicine, Nobel laureate 2015) and many other figures central to Chinese science.
CAS sits at the center of Chinese AI research. It runs the institutes that trained many of the country's senior AI researchers, hosts several state key labs in AI and machine learning, and incubated some of the most important Chinese AI chip and software companies.
The Institute of Automation in Beijing is CAS's main AI institute. It hosts the State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems and a Foundation Model Research Center. CASIA's research areas include pattern recognition, computer vision, biometric identification (it is one of the largest iris and face recognition labs in the world), natural language processing, brain-inspired computing, robotics and control theory.
CASIA's flagship AI release is ZidongTaichu (紫东太初), a multimodal foundation model first released in 2021 as the world's first three-modality (image, text, audio) pre-trained model. ZidongTaichu was developed jointly with Huawei (using its MindSpore framework) and the Wuhan East Lake high-tech zone. The 2.0 version, unveiled at the 2023 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on June 16, 2023, expanded the modality set to include video, signals and 3D point clouds. The 3.0 version, released in 2023, scaled the model up to about 100 billion parameters and unified encoding across modalities.
CASIA also runs significant work on speech recognition, machine translation, autonomous vehicles and the AI-assisted control systems used in spacecraft and high-end manufacturing. Its biometrics group, led for many years by Tan Tieniu, built one of the largest iris databases in the world and supplied technology to public-security and border-control deployments across China. The institute has also produced widely-used Chinese-language NLP toolkits, the LTP (Language Technology Platform) being a notable example outside CAS itself, and trains a large share of China's senior pattern-recognition researchers through its UCAS-affiliated graduate programs.
A separate Foundation Model Research Center inside CASIA, set up around 2022, coordinates the academy's larger-model work and serves as the host for ZidongTaichu development. The center collaborates with the Pengcheng Laboratory in Shenzhen on training compute and with the Wuhan AI Computing Center on the Huawei Ascend hardware that runs ZidongTaichu.
ICT is the cradle of Chinese computer science. Its modern AI-related work centers on the Loongson general-purpose CPU family, designed by a team led by chief architect Hu Weiwu since 2001, and on AI accelerator research that produced the DianNao family of papers (DianNao, DaDianNao, ShiDianNao, PuDianNao) by Chen Yunji and Chen Tianshi, presented at ASPLOS 2014 and other top architecture conferences. The DianNao paper, titled "DianNao: A Small-Footprint High-Throughput Accelerator for Ubiquitous Machine-Learning," won the best paper award at ASPLOS 2014 and is one of the most-cited papers in AI hardware. The project led directly to the spinoff of Cambricon Technologies in March 2016, which now makes the MLU series of AI chips and listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange STAR Market on July 20, 2020. Cambricon's IPO opened more than 230% above its listing price and briefly valued the company at around US$12 billion. The Cambricon-1A neural network IP block was used in Huawei's Kirin 970 mobile SoC in 2017, the first commercial smartphone chip with an on-device AI accelerator.
ICT also runs the High Performance Computer Research Center, which co-developed several generations of the Sugon-branded supercomputers that have appeared in the global TOP500 list, and operates several national engineering labs in CPU design, processor verification and high-performance interconnect.
| Institute | Main AI work |
|---|---|
| Institute of Software (ISCAS) | Programming language design, software verification, AI infrastructure |
| Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology (SIAT) | Medical imaging AI, robotics, brain science |
| Computer Network Information Center (CNIC) | National AI/HPC computing platforms, scientific data |
| Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology | Edge AI sensors, neuromorphic chips |
| Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (Institute of Intelligent Machines) | Industrial robotics, intelligent agriculture |
| Aerospace Information Research Institute | Remote sensing AI, geographic intelligence |
| Institute of Microelectronics | EDA tools and AI chip back-end design |
CAS institutes have released a range of open-source AI artifacts, including the Zidong Taichu reference implementations on Hugging Face and GitHub, the COSA vision-language model from CASIA's IVA Lab, several Chinese-language NLP datasets and code for biometric and remote-sensing benchmarks. These releases sit alongside, but are organizationally distinct from, those of the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, which is funded by the Beijing municipal government rather than by CAS, although the two organizations frequently share authors on papers.
CAS does not run a single "flagship" LLM the way OpenAI runs GPT, and the very large Chinese models that get the most international press, such as Wu Dao from BAAI or Pangu from Huawei, come from organizations outside CAS. Instead, CAS's AI footprint is broad and infrastructural: training the researchers, supplying the chips, running the supercomputers and publishing many of the most-cited Chinese AI papers. Researchers from Tsinghua University, Peking University and other universities frequently co-author with CASIA, ICT and ISCAS scientists, and CAS-trained PhDs are heavily represented at companies like Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and the various large model startups.
CAS has incubated several hundred enterprises through its institutes and a state-owned holding system. The most internationally recognizable are listed below.
| Company | Founded | Origin institute | Business | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lenovo | 1984 (as Legend) | Institute of Computing Technology | PCs, smartphones, servers | Founded by 11 ICT engineers led by Liu Chuanzhi with a 200,000 yuan loan from CAS |
| Legend Holdings | 1984 onward | ICT | Investment holding | Parent of Lenovo |
| Sugon (Dawning) | 1995 | ICT | Servers, supercomputers | Built several of China's TOP500 supercomputers |
| Loongson Technology | 2010 | ICT | General-purpose CPUs | Spun off from ICT's Godson project; backed by CAS and Beijing municipal government |
| Cambricon Technologies | March 2016 | ICT | AI accelerator chips (MLU series) | Listed on Shanghai STAR Market July 20, 2020 |
| GoLaxy | 2010 | ISCAS | NLP, big data | Specialized in Chinese-language analytics |
| China Science Industrial Group | 2003 | CAS holding | Diversified | Umbrella for many smaller spinoffs |
| Guoke Quantum Communication | 2017 | USTC and CAS | Quantum networking | Tied to Pan Jianwei's quantum work |
CAS maintains long-running scientific exchanges with national academies in over 60 countries, including the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society, the French Academy of Sciences, the German Max Planck Society and the Russian Academy of Sciences. It is a founding member of the InterAcademy Partnership and hosts the secretariat of TWAS, The World Academy of Sciences, in Trieste, Italy. Inside China, CAS often co-runs joint laboratories with other ministries, including with the State Grid, China National Petroleum Corporation, China National Nuclear Corporation and the People's Liberation Army's research arms.
Many CAS institutes also have direct partnerships with foreign universities and companies. CASIA, for example, has run joint labs with Microsoft Research Asia and Samsung; ICT has long collaborated with Intel and HP on chip design topics; and the Institute of Physics partners with CERN through the Beijing Electron Positron Collider and other detector projects.
Geopolitical friction has narrowed some of these channels since the late 2010s. Several CAS-affiliated institutes and people appear on U.S. export-control entity lists, and U.S. and European universities have tightened scrutiny of joint projects with CAS. Most basic-science exchanges nonetheless continue.
CAS has topped the Nature Index global institutional ranking every year since the index was launched in 2014. In the Nature Index 2024 Research Leaders, based on 2023 publication data, CAS ranked first in the world overall and first in chemistry, physical sciences, and earth and environmental sciences, and second in biological sciences. CAS also ranked first in the 2025 SCImago Institutions Rankings.
Reuters ranked CAS among the world's most innovative public research organizations in several years of its now-discontinued list, and Clarivate's Highly Cited Researchers report consistently lists CAS as the institution with the most members on the global most-cited list. Six other Chinese institutions, including USTC, UCAS, Peking University, Nanjing University, Zhejiang University and Tsinghua University, joined CAS in the global top ten of the Nature Index for 2024.
CAS receives core institutional funding directly from the central government as a State Council ministerial-level body. On top of that base, individual institutes compete for project grants from the Ministry of Science and Technology, the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the National Development and Reform Commission, as well as from provincial and municipal governments where they sit. Total CAS expenditure for 2023 was about CN¥171 billion. A growing share of funding for AI-relevant institutes also comes from industrial contracts with Chinese firms and from CAS-linked venture investments through Legend Holdings and other spinoff holding companies.