Zheng Xueqin, born in July 1929 in She County, Anhui Province, is a natural rubber expert and tropical crop scientist. He served as Vice President of the Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences (CATAS), and Vice President of the South China University of Tropical Agriculture. He was a professor emeritus at Hainan University and the former director of the State Key Laboratory of Tropical Crops Biotechnology. He received the First and Second Prizes of the National Science and Technology Progress Award, the Science and Technology Progress Award of the Ministry of Agriculture, and the Ho Leung Ho Lee Foundation Prize for Scientific and Technological Progress.
In 1948, Zheng was admitted to the Department of Botany at Peking University. He changed his name to “Xueqin” (meaning “diligent in study”) to encourage himself. During his college years, he frequently studied late into the night under the dim light in corridors, excelling in all his courses. On the eve of graduation, filled with deep passion, he and his classmates walked more than 100 kilometers to the Guanting Reservoir then under construction, singing “Go where the motherland needs us most”.
In 1952, 23-year-old Zheng arrived in Danxian, Hainan, to devote himself to rubber research. At that time, the average annual dry rubber yield of seedling trees was only 25 kilograms per mu (about 667 square meters). Without a place to live, he chopped wood to build thatched huts; without a lab, he set up iron pots in the rubber grove to sterilize test tubes; without ladders, he finished hand-pollination by climbing trees. At Lianchang Farm, Zheng found a century-old mother tree of the Hevea brasiliensis introduced by overseas Chinese in 1907. However, years of further seed collection and propagation failed to yield high output, since the latex was a secondary metabolite with a non-heritable feature in high yield. Adopting the mindset of “fear no failure; at worst, tear it down and start over,” he pivoted toward large-scale hybrid breeding.
In the breeding stage, Zheng and his team carried out crossbreeding using the elite clones as the parental materials and evaluated their specific combining ability (SCA), sending the excellent germplasm to 20 test sites across the country in order to evaluate rubber yield, wind resistance, and cold resistance performance. To breed wind-resistant varieties, as soon as a typhoon warning was issued, Zheng and his teammates put on raincoats and boots and went into the rubber grove to observe how the trees withstood the wind. They found that PR107 showed outstanding wind resistance. After nationwide trial testing, it became the most widely promoted elite cultivar at the time and served as an important parental material for breeding wind-resistant cultivars. Nowadays, many rubber varieties in Hainan’s rubber plantations carry genes from PR107. One such variety is 7-33-97, whose yield has increased by at least 30% compared with traditional varieties, and its cultivation area exceeds 3.3 million mu.
In 1981, Zheng joined an international wild rubber expedition and explored the Amazon rainforest for two months, carrying more than 20 kilograms of equipment and supplies on his back each day. Zheng surveyed the germplasm resources of wild rubber trees, and collected more than 6,000 wild Hevea germplasm accessions and built China’s largest field gene bank of wild rubber germplasm.
Since then, Zheng continued to conduct research on rubber, molecular biology of tropical crops, and genetic engineering, achieving a series of breakthroughs in crops such as bananas, pineapples, and seedless lychees. Inspired by Zheng’s cableway-assisted harvesting, grading and packaging technology, Zhang Xiyan, Zheng’s first Ph.D. student, refined and promoted this technology to the banana-growing regions across the country, and contributed to the development of Cambodia’s banana industry.
In 2003, Zheng led his team to discover wild Noni trees in the Xisha Islands and successfully introduced and developed them, filling the gap in the domestic market. The Noni products are now entering the international market. Under Zheng’s guidance, Wang Xiangshe, one of Zheng’s students, cultivated the Noni Cold-Tolerant No. 4, providing a reliable variety for the widespread cultivation of Noni in Hainan.
He often said, besides his research results, his other proud accomplishment was his students. He encouraged the youth to go all out and work hard, believing meaningful achievements would follow.
Original link：https://www.peopleapp.com/column/30051757209-500007416880
Translated by Zheng Kunyu
Proofread by Zhang Ying
