In the autumn of 2020, Fu Qiaomei brought one of the oldest research topics to a scientists' symposium in Beijing.

As Fu said that she was dedicated to using ancient DNA to seek answers to the fundamental questions of who we are and where we come from, President Xi Jinping asked, "Have you figured it out yet?" She responded, "We're working hard to."

Fu, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, had once faced doubts about the practical use of her work. While struggling to keep her lab afloat, there were moments when she wondered whether she should shift to a more popular field.

But her response at the symposium reflected the determination shared by many basic researchers. She was further motivated by Xi's remarks.

"How should we view niche fields? By conventional standards, some niche areas may seem useless. Yet such a perspective could end up holding back an entire field," Xi said. "When evaluating scientific research, we must adopt a long-term perspective, a global perspective and a truly scientific perspective."

Xi's thoughtful reflection on niche fields was not off-the-cuff, but rather a consistent thread in his vision for science — that basic research is vital, and serves as the ballast to secure China's technological independence and innovation strength.

The emphasis he places on boosting basic research took root early. In July 2013, just months after taking office as Chinese president, Xi made an inspection tour to the CAS.

At the academy's Institute of High Energy Physics, he walked into a laboratory to inspect the Beijing Electron-Positron Collider. The particle collider, which is China's first large-scale scientific facility, functions like a giant microscope. It helps scientists take a peek into the subatomic world and decipher codes based on which future technologies are built.

Xi carefully examined the collider, exchanged ideas with researchers and shook hands with academicians Ye Minghan, Fang Shouxian and Chen Senyu who helped to build it in the 1980s.

Recalling their decades of dedication to the facility, Xi acknowledged their contributions to the nation and expressed gratitude for their perseverance. He noted a pivotal moment in the lab's history: it was former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping who shoveled the first spadeful of earth onto the cornerstone at the groundbreaking ceremony. "A nine-story tower was built from a pile of earth," Xi added.

On April 30 this year, at a symposium in Shanghai on strengthening basic research, Xi expressed his thoughts on the subject more firmly.

"Basic research is the source of the entire scientific system and the master switch for all technical problems. We must strengthen basic research with greater efforts and more concrete measures, and further consolidate the foundation for building China into a leading science and technology power," he said.

Behind this strategic leap from "shoveling earth" to the "master switch" lies a consistent understanding of how basic research works, which is now expanded by a mandate to serve national strategic priorities.

Du Peng, a researcher at the CAS' Institutes of Science and Development, said, "The returns on basic research are often seen down the road."

To illustrate his point, Du cited the history of electricity. Centuries ago, Benjamin Franklin from the United States captured lightning merely out of curiosity. This was later cemented by British physicist Michael Faraday's deduction of the laws of electromagnetic induction and Scottish mathematician James Clerk Maxwell's formalization of the theory. Together, these advancements laid the foundation for electrical science, giving birth to generators, power grids and the entire modern electrical industry.

While the historical pattern underscores the need for patience, the intensifying global competition and rising national strategic demands over the past decade have propelled the evolution of the approach to basic research from solely curiosity-driven inquiry to placing equal emphasis on both traditional research and organized, mission-oriented research, Du said.

"This shift is facilitated by China's institutional strengths, which allows for the concentration of resources to tackle major challenges from end to end, while enabling researchers to focus on their work," he said, highlighting the importance of maintaining a tolerant environment and providing room for error in niche fields.

Du cautioned against confusing mission-oriented planning with rigid micromanagement, emphasizing that true basic research requires the freedom to explore the unknown.

Such an institutional edge, Xi has underlined on various occasions, must be translated into tangible support on the ground. He has emphasized the need to increase funding for basic research to boost original innovation, cut red tape to guarantee time devoted to research, and adopt merit-based, category-specific evaluation systems instead of measuring everything with the same yardstick.

For Sun Xiangnan, a researcher at the National Center for Nanoscience and Technology, what has sustained his decadelong focus on organic spin transistors — an "uncharted area" at the frontier of nanomaterials aimed at controlling the output signal via electron spin at room temperature, with potential implications for future quantum information processing — is a combination of his own resolve in the face of uncertainty and a national environment that fully recognizes and supports basic research.

"Basic research is much like groping in the dark," Sun said. In his case, the first three years of his work were devoted entirely to building experimental setups from scratch, as commercial equipment for such a novel field simply did not exist. His work was made easier by the center's exemption from rigid assessments during those initial years.

The following three years saw the start of actual experiments, although new ideas often faced intense scrutiny from the academic community, a period underpinned by crucial funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, which guaranteed the team's current scale and research progress.

Today, his team has grown from a single researcher to 15 members, and a global community of scholars is emerging.

"To implement the spirit of the symposium on strengthening basic research held in Shanghai this year, the National Natural Science Foundation of China has significantly increased funding for youth-focused basic research projects in 2026, expanding the quota by an expected 12,000 projects, a year-on-year rise of more than 50 percent, which will further support and encourage a new batch of young scholars in basic research," Sun added.

limenghan@chinadaily.com.cn