Xia Peysu: mother of Chinese computer science

The computer industry is inseparable from world history. However, in our time it is customary to talk about the appearance of computers and the development of networks, primarily in the USA and Europe, and the east and, in particular China, today's leader in the production of everything and everything, often remains on the sidelines. One gets the impression that the Chinese built their first computer around the same time that they invented paper and gunpowder. Nothing unusual or surprising. Is it so?
In fact, China's path to computerization and developed industry was long and thorny, and a woman played one of the key roles in it. Her name was Xia Pace.




Several times she had the opportunity to leave the country and join research in more developed countries. Nevertheless, the first thing she did when she became acquainted with computer research in the USSR was translating thousands of pages of manuals and documentation in order to build her own course on this basis and train engineers in China.
You can start telling this story at the same time from several episodes, and it will not lose the plot relatedness. We will periodically step back from the main story in order to clarify or illustrate some details.

Model 107

Yes, in the rest of the world, computers appeared much earlier. In previous articles, we talked about Mark computers and the formation of the computer industry in the USSR. But this does not apply to China at all. Isolation, in particular ideological, practically did not give Chinese scientists a chance to exchange experiences with their Western colleagues.

Due to many years of war with Japan and many internal conflicts, the country's technological progress was extremely lagging behind the global one. The newly formed People’s Republic of China was completely cut off from engaging with capitalist countries. Of course, periodically, students from the PRC went on international internships, but the whole computer industry required much more. Only the Soviet Union could become a serious and, what can I say, ideologically loyal partner of China in this situation.

The BESM-2 computer manufactured in the mid-1950s was extremely interesting for Chinese scientists. In the framework of cooperation between the USSR and China, a plan was developed to create a scientific and technical base in the PRC for the development of computer technology, thus, over the next few years, China developed its own analogue of BESM-2.


BESM-2

At the end of the 50s, a Soviet-Chinese split occurred, called in the PRC “the Great War of Ideas between China and the USSR,” and China was again forced to look for ways to continue development, but without the intervention and help of foreign experts. The first step towards the implementation of this plan was the creation of Model 107, a computer that largely continued the ideas embodied in BESM-2, but more or less independent. But, before talking about machines, let us pay attention to the person who did everything and even more so that China's computer industry becomes the way we know it.

The story of Xia Peysu

Xia Peysu was born on July 28, 1923 in the southeast of Chongqing Municipality in a family of teachers and received a brilliant education. At 4, she entered elementary school, and at 8 she received individual homework lessons. In 1940, she graduated with honors from a national school.

Then China was torn to pieces by the second Sino-Japanese War, an eight-year conflict that devastated the country and claimed the lives of millions of civilians. At the beginning of the war, in 1937, the Japanese captured Nanjing, the capital of China. Residents were evacuated, including to their hometown Xia, Chongqing. Together with the refugees, the National Central University was located in Chongqing, which, in spite of everything, continued to educate students. In 1941, Xia entered this university as an engineer.


Xia Peysu's house in Chongqing during an airstrike in Japan in 1940.

In 1945, she received a bachelor's degree in electronic engineering and met another university graduate, a refugee from Nanjing, Yang Limin, who, after graduation, became a physics teacher. They were united by a lot: love of science, indifference to the fate of their native country. Even during the forced breakup, when Xia went to Shanghai to enter the graduate school of the Jiaotong University Telecommunication Institute, and Yang left the country to study physics under the direction of Max Bourne, Nobel Prize winner at the University of Edinburgh, their communication did not stop.

Two years later, Xia went to a doctorate in electronic engineering in Edinburgh, and they met again. In her doctoral dissertation, “On Parametric Oscillations in Electric Circuits and Graphic Analysis of Nonlinear Systems,” Xia developed a number of methodologies that could accurately predict frequency and amplitude oscillations in electronic systems, which has found wide application in almost all devices, from radio and TV to computers.



In 1950, Xia was awarded a doctorate in Edinburgh and finally married Jan Limin. A year later, they returned to China, where they received positions at Tsinghua University, and Xia gained the long-awaited opportunity to work for the benefit of the country's technical development.

To understand what China was like during this period and where Xia and Yang actually returned, we rewind time a couple of years ago. In 1949, during the Civil War, the Chinese Communist Party defeated the Chinese National People's Party (Kuomintang), ousting the Republic of China to Taiwan and effectively replacing it with the People’s Republic of China led by Mao Zedong. After the Second Sino-Japanese War and the shuffling of political parties, China's economy and industry were still in a deplorable state and could not compete with the “advanced” West.

The Second Sino-Japanese War hit the country especially hard. All higher education institutions, financial centers, including the main industrial production center and the Chinese government, fled first to Wuhan, and then, when Wuhan was lost, to Chongqing in the remote and very poor Sichuan province. The Chinese government, having difficulty finding resources to support the country, could not invest in electronics, training, and weapons development.

The Communist Party, which came to power in the country, tried to restore the destroyed infrastructure, but it was extremely difficult. During the war, the USA supported the losing party and, of course, along with other capitalist countries, denied any help to communist China. Mao and the Communist Party appealed for support to the USSR. Seeing China joining the communist bloc a lot of new opportunities, the USSR entered into an alliance with him and agreed to help in the restoration of the economy and the development of science and technology, including computers.



In 1953, mathematician Hua Luogeng invited Xia to his group for computer research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). So she became one of the founders of China's first computer research group. CAS became the very base necessary for the emergence of computer technology in the country, and Xia, according to many eyewitnesses, was his heart.
Despite the fact that for three years the Xia and Luogenga group developed their own plans for computerizing the PRC, the party did not officially participate in research until 1956, when the Sino-Soviet agreement on the development of science and technology was drawn up. Computer technology, according to this plan, was one of four areas of science and technology that are key to strengthening China’s national defense.

In the near future, computers were destined to receive widespread use in the country's infrastructure, from national defense, including the development and testing of nuclear weapons, to the management of complex transport systems and the development of satellite and space programs. The Chinese authorities were well aware that in order to continue research effectively, it was necessary to enter the global computer community as firmly as possible, so in the 1950s a huge number of Chinese students did internships at the largest technical universities in the world, including the USSR, the USA, Great Britain and France.

However, it was too early to talk about developing your own computer. Neither industry was ready for this due to the lack of necessary physical resources and technological processes, nor Chinese engineers. To build your own computer, it was necessary to adopt someone’s successful practice, train personnel and prepare the technical base. At that time, even the release of standard “finger-type” radio tubes in the USSR was impossible in China, let alone more complex components. It is easy to guess that the USSR, seeing China as a profitable military and industrial ally, offered its help.

Delegations of specialists rushed to Moscow, Leningrad and other cities. While China was restoring and modernizing its economy and industry at an extreme pace, gaps in computer components and a lack of personnel were compensated by the USSR Academy of Sciences. With the support of the Union, the PRC was developing and equipping new enterprises with dozens of Soviet specialists, and by 1958 the first radio components “Made in China” appeared.
The next step, following the creation of the element base, was to obtain the production technology of a modern computer, which could become the starting point for all further research.

Xia Peysu was an almost perfect specialist for this part of the plan. Back in 1956, she joined a delegation in Moscow and Leningrad to study the structure of Soviet technical enterprises and the programs of educational institutions specializing in computer technology. Immediately upon her return, she began to translate a huge array of Soviet computer documentation, books and manuals from Russian into Chinese, in order to organize her own course for the training of internal specialists. In the same year, under the auspices of the Institute of Mathematics and the Institute of Physics, CAS, Xia created the country's first computer science course, helping along the way to form the Department of Computer Science at the Institute of Computational Technologies (IWT).

At the suggestion of the Soviet side, the Chinese Communist Party confirmed the economic feasibility and rationality of choosing the BESM-2 computer as the first computer for production by the PRC.

Work was in full swing. Missing radio components were sent from the USSR in order to reduce time costs and rather build a computer. Nevertheless, they did not manage to finish the car by the 10th anniversary of the People's Republic of China (October 1, 1958). Partially affected were the increasingly deteriorating relations between the USSR and China, and partly the gaps already mentioned above, both in knowledge and in the production of parts.

By 1959, China had successfully completed the creation of a copy of BESM-2 and had already begun testing it in production mode. The qualifications of personnel in ICT also increased markedly: communication with Russian colleagues, the return of trainee students to the country, and the first real experience in building and debugging computers affected. The new machine, capable of performing 10,000 operations per second, received the title of “Fastest Computer in Asia”.

By 1960, relations between the countries had deteriorated completely and the Soviet Union withdrew all material and advisory support from China. Evil languages ​​prophesied to China a complete halt and the death of the computer industry, but this was far from the case. The USSR gave China a movement vector, and purposeful engineers developed it to an unprecedented scale. It is a completely different matter that China, in fact, acted alone, without dedicating anyone to its internal technological kitchen.



CAS scientists continued to do computer technology on their own. Model 107, created by Xia, was the first computer that China developed after breaking with the USSR. The party actively supported the developers, and soon the mass production of the 107s was launched for placement in educational institutions throughout China.

During the 1960s, China continued to develop more powerful and sophisticated CAS-based computers, isolated, moving from tube circuits like those of 107 to transistors and, in the 70s and early 80s, to integrated circuits. When the American delegation visited China in 1972, the scientists included in it were amazed at the scale of the Chinese computer industry.



Throughout this time, Xia continued her research in the field of high-speed computers, as well as training more and more computer specialists throughout China. In 1978, with the active participation of Xia, the first Chinese computer magazine was created, as well as Computer Science and Technology magazine, also the country's first English-language publication on computer technology. In 1981, Xia developed an array of high-speed processors called the 150AP. Compared to the earlier “Soviet” model, which performed 10,000 operations per second, its 150AP increased computer performance to 20 million operations per second.

Largely thanks to Xia, the country's computer industry, despite many difficulties, has become what we know it now. It is no exaggeration to take off the hat to her courage, perseverance and devotion to her country.

Despite all its importance, the Model 107 remained just a computer. Xia Peysu's main achievement was her students, the first cohort of technical specialists who laid the foundations for the creation of the computer industry in China. One of her students became the chief architect of the Loongson processors and in 2002 honored his mentor, naming the new chip “Xia 50”.

Xia Peysu lived a long and eventful life - more than 90 years. She died in August 2014. Xia's children followed in the footsteps of their parents and also found their calling in the computer field.
In China, Xia is called the "mother of Chinese computer science." The China Computer Federation annually awards the Xia Pace prize to women scientists and engineers, "for outstanding contributions and high achievements in the field of computer technology, education and industry."