During the Cultural Revolution he had to toil in the fields, now he’s leading China’s biggest ever Antarctic mission
- The man leading China’s biggest ever mission to Antarctica nearly missed out on going to university
- Chen Dake’s life was transformed after a ban on ‘bourgeois’ figures studying was lifted in 1977 – but he still felt it safer to study science than humanities
When Chen Dake steps onto the Antarctic ice as the head of China’s biggest ever mission to the South Pole he will have travelled a long way from the rice fields of rural Hunan where he used to toil 40 years ago.
Chen was one of the millions of Chinese people whose lives were transformed by the end of the Cultural Revolution and the decision to reopen the country’s universities.
He was one of around 5.7 million students who rushed to take the college entrance exam in the winter of 1977 – a decade after universities were closed at the height of the revolutionary fervour.
The following spring Chen entered Hunan Normal University to study physics, but even then his choice of subject was coloured by the political climate of the era.
“Well, as a kid I was always more interested in literature and history than science, though I did well in all disciplines in school,” Chen told the South China Morning Post.
“Many thought I could make a name for myself as a writer or historian.
