Why did Yang Zhenning choose to return to China? What did he go through?

Yang Zhenning became an American citizen in the spring of 1964. Prior to this, New China issued a clear signal several times, inviting it to return to China; His father went to Geneva, Switzerland three times to meet him, and one of his tasks was to persuade him to return home. Investigating Yang Zhenning's contacts with China before 1964 is beneficial to understand the mental journey and difficult choices of Chinese intellectuals stranded overseas in that era.

Furthermore, we can get a glimpse of Yang Zhenning's mental journey because of his celebrity effect. However, what is the mental journey of Qian Qian's thousands of Chinese sons and daughters who stayed overseas like Yang Zhenning at that time? Obviously, this is a grand question that this article cannot answer. However, one thing is certain, that is, we have no moral superiority to plausibly accuse them of "why didn't they return to China in the first place".

Yang Zhenning

Yang Zhenning was born in sanhe town, Hefei, Anhui Province on October 1, 1922. He is a professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies of Tsinghua University and a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is an academician of the China Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Sciences, the Academia Sinica, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, the Venezuelan Academy of Sciences, the Royal Spanish Academy of Sciences and the Royal British Society.

In p>1945, Yang Zhenning went to the United States to study after being admitted to Tsinghua University. He served as a lecturer at the University of Chicago, a researcher at Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, a professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and director of the Institute of Physics. In 1949, in cooperation with Enrico Fermi, the first composite model of elementary particles was put forward. In 1956, he cooperated with Li Zhengdao to put forward the theory of parity non-conservation in weak interaction, and won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957.

He returned to Chinese mainland in p>1971, and was one of the earliest Chinese American scholars to visit the mainland after Sino-US relations began to thaw. In 198s, he promoted the establishment of the Theoretical Physics Laboratory of Nankai Institute of Mathematics, and he also promoted the establishment of the Yilida Youth Invention Award and other awards to promote the development of China in a wider field of science and education.

In p>1997, the Purple Mountain Observatory named an asteroid with the international number of 3421 as "Yang Zhenning Star".

In February, 217, Yang Zhenning, a former foreign academician of China Academy of Sciences who had renounced his foreign nationality and became a citizen of China, officially became an academician of China Academy of Sciences.