He Xiangjian, a RMB 3 billion public welfare fund, exclusively invests in scientists.

On October 24, at Midea Global Innovation Center in Shunde, Foshan, the 2026 He Xiangjian Young Scientists list was officially announced. A total of 20 young scientists were selected, each receiving RMB 2 million in research grants disbursed over three years. To date, the two editions of the program have accumulated a total grant amount of RMB 80 million, benefiting 40 people. The funding comes from the He Xiangjian Science Fund.

The starting point of this initiative is not investment returns, but public welfare. He Xiangjian has long devoted himself to public welfare in the fields of basic education, rural revitalization, elderly care and health. In May 2023, he extended the boundary of public welfare from "people's livelihood security" to "root-breaking breakthroughs in science and technology", targeting the state-of-the-art basic research fields that are urgently needed by the country and at the global cutting edge.

Yet it is not just a traditional donation. With an institutionalized and sustainable funding mechanism, it turns public welfare into a form of patient capital: it does not take equity, does not follow on investments, does not own intellectual property rights, does not interfere in the review process, and allows high-risk explorations and even failures.

The First Move:

Return the freedom to conduct research back to scientists

On May 21, 2023, the 2023 Greater Bay Area Science Forum opened in Nansha, Guangzhou. He Xiangjian was not present at the scene, and a pre-recorded video was first played on the screen.

In the video, He Xiangjian said: "The purpose of establishing the science fund is to help more scientific researchers settle down to engage in scientific research, and call on young people to strive to participate in the country's scientific and technological progress, transformation and innovation." He, who rarely appears in public, chose to make this first move through a video this time. He contributed RMB 3 billion in his own name to establish the "He Xiangjian Science Fund". This is not a short-term project, nor a one-off donation, but a fund that operates permanently and independently as its tenet, to reward scientists who make breakthrough contributions in basic research in the long run, and promote original, cutting-edge research and achievement transformation.

The fund covers major academic fields including information and artificial intelligence, healthcare and wellness, energy and climate. It selects 20 young scientists every year, providing each with RMB 2 million in research funds disbursed over three years. For He Xiangjian, the starting point of this initiative is not complicated. He has long been engaged in public welfare fields such as basic education, rural revitalization, elderly care and health. This time, he extends the reach of public welfare deeper, to support basic research with long cycles, high risks, no short-term returns, but the potential to change the future.

He Xiangjian does not rush to require scientists to deliver papers, patents or commercial returns. On the contrary, he hopes they can have less short-term pressure and more space to settle down for exploration. The RMB 3 billion is like a move placed deep on the chessboard, seemingly quiet, but aiming to support those original researches that require the most patience and are most likely to be ignored.

The He Xiangjian Young Scientists Program adopts an institutional nomination system, with no open individual application. Candidates are nominated by universities or research institutions specially invited by the fund, and are generated after formal review by the secretariat, peer expert review, final review by the review committee, and approval by the council.

The program targets young scientific researchers working full-time at universities and research institutes in China. In principle, the age of nominees shall not exceed 35 in the year of nomination, the age limit for women is relaxed to 38, and the age limit for those with clinical medicine background is further relaxed.

Its most prominent feature is "weak constraint": there are no restrictions on research directions, no assessment indicators, no specified proportion of fund usage, no mandatory paper output requirements, and no stipulated transformation timetable. The fund does not own intellectual property rights, does not follow on investments, does not enjoy the preemptive right to purchase achievements, the Midea system does not interfere in the review process; the research funding for selected researchers is strictly isolated from subsequent entrepreneurial financing.

This move is designed to fill the gap between government vertical projects and enterprise horizontal projects. Vertical projects usually have clear indicators and restrictions on fund items, while enterprise horizontal projects emphasize short-term delivery. However, many 0-to-1 original researches feature long cycles, high uncertainty and difficulty in generating industrial returns in the short term, and often fall into the "no man's land" between the two types of funding.

RMB 2 million may not be enough to complete industrialization, but it can provide trial and error space for high-risk, long-cycle original researches at the stage when young scholars have the strongest creativity.

Layout:

From two major fields to the new track of intelligent science

Public information shows that in the first selected list, 12 people are in the field of medicine and life sciences, and 8 people are in the field of energy environment and climate change. In the second session, 11 people are selected for medicine and life sciences, and 9 people are selected for energy environment and climate change.

The selected group of the second session is younger on the whole, the proportion of female scientists has increased, and the review orientation also puts more emphasis on application transformation potential. The energy environment direction is more focused on battery materials, high-temperature superconducting coatings, fluorine resource recycling, catalytic characterization, heat dissipation piezoelectric materials and other fields.

In the first two sessions, intelligent technology mostly appears in the form of interdisciplinary integration, attached to scenarios such as medical robots, flexible ultrasound, sensing devices, and brain-computer interfaces. With the gradual emergence of the transformation value of embodied intelligence, sensing hardware, brain-computer interfaces and other directions, the original framework of the two major fields can no longer fully support the long-term funding needs of related technology clusters. Starting from the third session, the program will add the intelligent science field as a new funding direction.

This is not only an expansion of the funding boundary, but also an adjustment of the rhythm of this initiative: taking medicine and energy as the basic plate first, and then using intelligent science to support the next generation of hard technology clusters.

Mid-game:

A layered transformation spectrum from laboratory to industry

Looking at the commercialization paths of the 40 selected researchers, they can be roughly divided into three categories, with high difficulty of crossing between each other, which also reflects the real situation of domestic source innovation.

The first category is pure basic and applied basic research, which accounts for the largest proportion. The researches focus on mechanism exploration, verification of new phenomena and new principles, and the outputs are mostly papers and basic patents, with a transformation cycle usually as long as 5 to 10 years. Directions such as chromatin regulation, perovskite basic mechanism, and C1 catalysis fall into this category. The value of the RMB 2 million grant lies in providing trial and error space and reducing young scholars' dependence on short-term indicators.

The second category is industry-university-research transformation. The team has found a landing scenario, relying on the university technology transfer center to realize value through patent licensing, technology transfer and joint development, while the scholars retain their teaching positions and do not start independent businesses for financing. Its advantage is that it avoids the capital and management pressure of entrepreneurship; its shortcoming is that the technology dominance is mostly in the hands of industrial parties, making it difficult to independently define products and form an independent valuation entity.

The third category is the independent entrepreneurship route. Among the 40 people in the first two sessions, there are few cases that clearly take the independent entrepreneurship route, and the establishment, VC financing and commercial layout of some companies took place before they were selected for the fund. This shows that the transition from scientific research to entrepreneurship is not a natural progression, but a highly difficult paradigm shift.

Endgame: Patent transformation

The realistic destination for most source innovations

Among the selected researchers of the first two sessions, six young scientists including Jiang Yizhou, Dou Qi, Jiao Feng, Chen Hao, Chen Zhuoyu and Jia Ning have either completed patent transfer and industrial landing for their research projects, or formed clear technical reserves and transformation potential, jointly pointing to the typical transformation path of high-barrier technologies in heavy-asset, high-compliance tracks. Most of the transformation actions took place before the establishment of the fund and the selection of the program. The fund's support for these projects focuses on providing long-term and free scientific research resources for continuous research after the transformation is undertaken. For teams still in the potential stage, the fund grant directly promotes them to move from technical reserve to transformation.

In February 2023, Jiang Yizhou's team formed core patents for the multi-omics typing scheme of Fudan classification of triple-negative breast cancer, and transferred them to Asker Bio at a price of RMB 31 million, with the enterprise responsible for product development, clinical verification and commercialization. In 2021, this immunohistochemical typing method was included in the "Guidelines and Norms for the Diagnosis and Treatment of Breast Cancer by the Chinese Anti-Cancer Association", and was applied in more than ten tertiary Class A hospitals in the LDT mode, serving more than 3,000 patients in total. This case is exactly the portrayal of the "path from basic research to clinical application" encouraged by the fund, and the fund's continuous support for the team's subsequent research is expected to extend the typing system to more cancer types and more refined population groups.

In 2021, Dou Qi's team began to cooperate with Converge Surgical, adopting the mode of patent licensing plus joint R&D, to carry out algorithm verification on the listed laparoscopic robot platform, and completed the world's first multi-task autonomous surgery verification on living animals. The results were published in *Science Robotics* and the SurRol framework was open sourced. The enterprise is responsible for device registration and hardware iteration, and the team continuously optimizes the algorithm, which is exactly the link that the fund's long-term grant can help, allowing the embodied intelligence algorithm to continue to evolve at a high level.

Jiao Feng's team has deployed more than 80 invention patents in the direction of C1 catalysis, and the complete set of catalytic process packages has been connected with leading enterprises such as Shaanxi Yanchang Petroleum. A thousand-ton pilot plant was built and passed appraisal in 2020. The transformation in the chemical industry does not take one-time patent sale as the mainstream, and more adopts the combination of patent pool licensing, process package delivery and long-term joint pilot test. This mode has higher requirements for continuous investment in research, which is exactly where the long-term grant of the fund can play its biggest role.

In addition, Chen Hao's team has refreshed the battery efficiency in the field of perovskite optoelectronic materials, and has carried out joint development with photovoltaic and equipment enterprises, prioritizing patent licensing to promote pilot test verification. The high-temperature superconducting coating and power thin film patents of Chen Zhuoyu's team have been connected with power grid enterprises to explore normal-pressure liquid nitrogen superconducting power transmission demonstration. Jia Ning's team has made patent reserves around bacterial anti-phage immunity and new antibacterial schemes, prioritizing transfer or exclusive licensing to avoid the long drug development cycle of new drugs. These three teams are currently in the stage of technical reserve and early docking, with clear transformation potential. As an external support for their source research, the fund grant not only guarantees the freedom of exploration, but also reserves space for future industrialization connection.

Significance of the initiative:

Complementing the patient capital for the "1 to 100" stage

The He Xiangjian Science Fund is not intended to replace national scientific research investment, but to fill a section of patient capital between government vertical projects and enterprise horizontal projects. It does not pursue rapid returns, does not bind equity, and does not rush to push scientists to start businesses. For most young scholars, RMB 2 million may not be enough to complete industrialization, but it is enough to support them to dig deeper into high-risk, long-cycle original problems at the stage when they have the strongest creativity.

From the perspective of venture capital, the real value of this batch of samples does not lie in whether star companies are born, but in clearly presenting a layered transformation spectrum from basic research, industry-university-research cooperation, patent licensing to corporate financing. At the same time, it also exposes the structural bottleneck for young source innovations to move towards commercialization: the closer to clinical, manufacturing and compliance links, the more heavy assets, long cycles and interdisciplinary collaboration are required, while the existing funding system and capital market still lack sufficient patience for these links.

The addition of the intelligent science track in the third session means that this initiative is still ongoing. Directions such as embodied intelligence, sensing hardware, brain-computer interfaces, and intelligent medical devices may receive more systematic long-term support. What is worth observing in the future is whether this kind of "unrestricted" funding can further open up the key links from laboratory discovery to industrial verification, so that more young scientists can promote original technologies to real scenarios without having to rush to start businesses.

The most special part of this initiative is that it starts in the way of public welfare, but takes the shape of patient capital. It does not rush to cash in, does not rush to take possession, and does not rush to push scientists onto the entrepreneurship arena. It first gives time, freedom and trial and error space, and then observes whether original technologies can grow vitality in the real industry.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Rongzhong Finance" (ID: thecapital), written by Dai Xianchao, and published with authorization from 36Kr.