Zhu Xi (; 1900), born Zhu Yongchang, courtesy name Yu Wen, was a Chinese biologist, anarchist and a pioneer of cell biology and experimental embryology in the People's Republic of China. He was a public opponent of the Eliminate Sparrows campaign in the 1950s, for which his grave was desecrated during the Cultural Revolution.
Zhu Xi was born in 1900 to a farming family in the village of Dianqian (), Linhai, Taizhou, Zhejiang Province. He began his studies at a private school at the age of eight. In 1915, he entered Huipu Higher Primary School, where he was elected chairman of the student council and head of the public welfare department. In June 1918, he graduated second in his class from the fourth graduating class of Huipu Higher Primary School. In the autumn of 1918, he entered Zhejiang Provincial Sixth Middle School (the predecessor of today's Taizhou Middle School). In the early summer of 1919, the May Fourth Movement broke out. Nineteen-year-old Zhu Xi participated by inciting student unrest and advocating for a strike, for which he was subsequently expelled.
Upon learning that Cai Yuanpei, Li Shizeng, and other anarchists were recruiting young people in Shanghai to study in Europe as part of the Work-Study Movement, Zhu Xi traveled from Linhai to Shanghai. In Shanghai, he worked as a typesetter at The Commercial Press for a year, and met Wu Zhihui and other influential Chinese anarchists of the period. He went to France for work-study in the summer of 1920.
In France, he became fascinated by anarchism, which would have a lifelong influence on him, and visited French anarchist leader Jean Grave in 1923. He was an apprentice and worker in several factories, working during the day and studying French and other subjects at night. In the winter of 1925, he was admitted to the Department of Biology at the University of Montpellier in Paris, where he studied under Eugène Bataillon, a French embryologist. The two of them conducted research on parthenogenesis in frogs. In 1931, Zhu Xi passed the examination of the French Academy of Sciences and received his French doctoral degree, with his academic paper "Cellular Research on Hybridization of Tailless Animals".
In the winter of 1932, Zhu Xi returned to China and subsequently went to Guangzhou. From 1933 to early 1935, he served as a professor in the Department of Biology at Sun Yat-sen University. In the spring of 1933, Zhu founded Dianqian Primary School in the ancestral hall of his hometown, the village of Dianqian; he funded the school himself, serving as principal and personally teaching classes. When he returned to Guangzhou to keep teaching at Sun Yat-sen University, the school was managed by his younger brother.
During his time at Sun Yat-sen University, he collaborated with professors (head of the Biology Department), , , (head of the Geology Department), and Lin Chunnian from the School of Medicine to expose the fraudulent claims of Luo Guangting, a professor at , who falsely asserted that he had invented âÂÂbiological spontaneous generation.âÂÂ
In early 1935, Zhu left Sun Yat-sen University after accepting a position as a research fellow at the Institute of Zoology of . From 1935 to 1937, Zhu Xi worked at the Institute of Zoology while serving as a professor at the . In 1937, at the suggestion of Li Shizeng, director of the Beiping Research Institute, Zhu founded the Shanghai Institute of Biology, serving as both research fellow and director. After the Battle of Shanghai broke out later that year, Zhu found himself in difficult circumstances. His laboratory work was forced to stop, and his source of income was almost cut off. He stayed with friends and continued to write.
In 1942, following the outbreak of the Pacific War, Zhu was forced to return to his hometown of Linhai, where he founded the Linshan Agricultural School. From 1942 to 1945, he served as both principal and teacher there.
In 1945, following the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japan, Zhu Xi returned to Shanghai, serving as a researcher and director at the Shanghai Institute of Biology, and as a researcher and director at the Institute of Physiology of . Shortly afterward, at the invitation of Luo Zongluo, president of National Taiwan University, he concurrently served as professor and head of the Department of Zoology at National Taiwan University.
In the spring of 1949, Zhu Xi returned to Shanghai from Taipei. After the establishment of the PeopleâÂÂs Republic of China, from 1950 to 1952, he worked as a researcher and head of the Department of Developmental Physiology at the Institute of Experimental Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. From 1953 to 1957, he served as researcher and deputy director at the same institute. During this period, in 1955, Zhu Xi was elected as an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. From 1958 to 1962, he served as researcher and director of the Institute of Experimental Biology. In 1956, he was awarded the title of National Advanced Producer by the State Council. In 1958, he was elected as a delegate to the 2nd National PeopleâÂÂs Congress. From 1954 to 1962, he was also a representative of the Shanghai PeopleâÂÂs Congress and a member of the .
On July 24, 1962, Zhu Xi died of bronchial cancer in Shanghai.
Zhu Xi conducted long-term studies on the maturation and fertilization of oocytes in amphibians, fish, and silkworms. He discovered that the degree of egg maturation was closely related to the normal development of the embryo, and that the mucous membrane produced by the oviduct played an important role in fertilization. He also developed a method for inducing ovulation in isolated toad ovaries.
In 1959, working with associate researcher at the Institute of Experimental Biology, Zhu succeeded in cultivating the worldâÂÂs first âÂÂfatherlessâ female toad. In 1961, he enabled artificially produced parthenogenetic female toads to mate with male toads and successfully produce offspring, demonstrating that higher animals engaging in parthenogenesis still retained hereditary capacity. His research on mixed-sperm hybridization in domesticated silkworms revealed that supernumerary sperm from different breeds could influence the genetic traits of the offspring.
In applied science, Zhu and his collaborators solved key problems in the introduction, domestication, overwintering, and selective breeding of the castor silkworm. They also applied chorionic gonadotropin to induce artificial spawning, egg hatching, and fry cultivation of pond-bred fish such as silver carp and bighead carp.
Zhu Xi's papers were compiled and published in two volumes called the Collected Papers of Zhu Xi (). He authored and translated more than 20 books, including the monograph The Evolution of Life (), and the translations Zoology, co-authored with , and Vertebrate Development (). In addition, he published eight popular science books in the Biology Series ().
As an anarchist, he also translated Peter Kropotkin's ' and frequently referenced Kropotkin's ideas in his writings.