分享一篇文章: Early October is Nobel Prize announcement week. It is often an agonizing and even humiliating period for some Chinese who see the prize as the yardstick of our nation's scientific and educational development. When the occasional overseas Chinese person wins the prize, it somehow accentuates the pain, as it appears to show the Chinese as a race are capable of the highest achievements in science, but we are somehow handicapped by something else, say, our system. This obsession with the world's best-known awards reflects both our aspirations about being part of the world club and a deep-rooted insecurity about self-worth. We want to be recognized and what could be better than a world-renowned prize? Take the Oscars, for example. Winners of Chinese ethnicity are so thoroughly embraced in China they are almost guaranteed top salaries and lifetime employment. On the other hand, some Chinese filmmakers, like Feng Xiaogang, who have not been similarly anointed justify their exclusion by dismissing the Oscars as the United States' "domestic affair". But this line of reasoning does not apply to the Nobel Prize. After all, the winners are rarely Swedish. What gives the prize special cachet for many Chinese is not the cash prize, nor the prestige within the science community. As strange as it may sound, the gravitas of the Nobel Prize is hammered home by the State-run media that constantly cites the handful of overseas Chinese winners. The names Tsung-dao Lee, Samuel C.C. Ting and Chen Ning Yang are lauded in hundreds of millions of Chinese homes. |