A photo shows the city lounge of Huairou Science City in Beijing on Oct 22, 2024. CHINA DAILY
Emails from overseas scientists keep arriving in Li Gang’s inbox, often carrying the same message: when will the experiment station reopen?
The associate researcher at the Institute of Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences is currently overseeing the platform for quantum control at one of China’s most advanced research facilities — Synergetic Extreme Condition User Facility in Beijing’s Huairou Science City.
Among those waiting are research teams from some of the world’s leading institutions, including the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in England.
“We hosted our first international users in 2023, and the Cambridge team was among them,” Li said. “Based on experiments conducted here, they have already published two high-level papers. Their fourth visit to Huairou is already scheduled for September.”
The growing queue reflects the rising international profile of China’s expanding network of large-scale scientific facilities, which are increasingly attracting foreign researchers seeking access to experimental conditions unavailable elsewhere.
One of the facility’s most sought-after platforms is the low-temperature superconducting quantum device control station, which can generate extremely low temperatures.
Operating under such conditions is the Quafu Quantum Cloud Platform, a cloud-based quantum computing system.
Since its debut, the platform has attracted around 3,000 researchers from around the world, who have executed more than 1 million computing tasks and contributed to over 10 major scientific achievements, according to Liu Guangtong, a researcher at the institute of physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
“The platform is open year-round for measurement services,” he said.”Demand for experimental time consistently exceeds supply.”
The system allows scientists to remotely access superconducting quantum devices and conduct experiments without traveling to China, extending the facility’s global reach.
The popularity of the platform highlights China’s growing ambition to become a major provider of scientific infrastructure, not only for domestic researchers, but also for the international scientific community.
That ambition is particularly visible in Huairou Science City, a sprawling research hub on the northeastern outskirts of Beijing.
Often described as China’s answer to large-scale science campuses such as CERN in Europe or national laboratory clusters in the United States, Huairou Science City has become one of the country’s most concentrated collections of advanced research infrastructure.
The city has built six national major science facilities alongside 17 scientific and educational infrastructure platforms and 14 interdisciplinary research platforms. Together they form the highest-density cluster of scientific research facilities in China.
By the end of 2025, 29 facilities and platforms had entered operational status, providing more than 1.77 million hours of research access to over 1,000 universities, research institutes and companies from China and abroad.
The facilities cover a broad range of disciplines, from quantum physics and materials science to energy research, life sciences and advanced instrumentation.
For international researchers, access to such facilities is increasingly valuable as scientific experiments become more complex and expensive.
Large-scale scientific infrastructures often require years of construction and billions of dollars in investment, making global collaboration essential.
China’s strategy is to position Huairou Science City as an open platform within that ecosystem.
As scientific competition intensifies globally, Beijing is simultaneously trying to strengthen its own innovation capabilities while attracting international talent and research partnerships. The steady stream of returning foreign users suggests that the approach is gaining traction.
For Li, the emails arriving during maintenance periods are a sign that the facilities have become more than national assets.
“They’re becoming part of the global research infrastructure,” he said.
And as China’s scientific ambitions continue to expand, researchers from around the world appear increasingly willing to make Huairou Science City a regular stop on their research calendars.
Tanks to chinadaily.com.cn
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