Stimulated by market-oriented management systems, research institutes are developing high value-added techniques ranging from health and food safety to agriculture and industry.

In the Zhejiang Academy of Agricultural Science, researchers are talking about the popularization of "green agriculture" -- using ecologically friendly organic manure to minimize and phase out chemical fertilizers.

"Our academy has 10 laboratories that are engaged in the research of high-yield vegetables, fruit, flowers, medicinal plants and genetically modified fish. I want to set up a research centre for 'green agriculture' based on the 10 laboratories to commercialize new agro-techniques," said Vice-President Xu Bingqing.

The academy has conducted cooperation projects with British counterparts to develop pollution-free agriculture, said Xu.

Xu's academy is not alone in industrializing technological discoveries.

Since research institutes were encouraged to run businesses in the late 1980s, many of them have bid farewell to closed-door academic research, the result of the previous planned economy.

Today, they have become technological firms, intermediate service agencies or have set up shareholding companies, according to the Ministry of Science and Technology.

Even in the landlocked northwestern Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, the Ningxia Institute of Forestry and other research institutes have set up shareholding companies, according to the region's science and technology administration.

The Zhejiang Academy of Medical Science set up the Pukang Biotechnology Co. in 1992. The company has greatly stimulated research enthusiasm for developing new technologies, since it became a shareholding company early last year and began to include technological discoveries as a part of researchers' income and bonus distribution.

The company's chief-researcher Mao Jiangsen and his colleagues developed a new hepatitis A vaccine in 1978.

The vaccine has helped reduce the rate of hepatitis A by 22 percent per year, according to the academy's statistics.

Mao has been awarded with more than 20 million yuan (US$2.4 million), or a 29 percent share of the company's capital stock.

Such big award has broken records in Zhejiang Province and is rare in domestic scientific circles, said Mao Guanglie, director of the Zhejiang scientific and technological administration.

(People's Daily 10/09/2000)