Jing-Wei Gu

Jing-Wei Gu was born on July 1, 1900, in Jiading County, Jiangsu Province (now part of Shanghai). Her parents died early; with the support of her stepmother she attended primary school in Jiading and the Jiangsu Provincial Normal School in Suzhou before the age of 20.⁠[1]

In 1920 she entered Datong University in Shanghai, where she became a student of the physics professor Hu Gangfu.⁠[1][2]

Hu Gangfu (1892–1966) was professor of physics at Nanjing Higher Normal School (renamed Southeast University in 1921) from 1918 to 1925 and at the same time taught physics at Datong University, spending three days a week in Nanjing and three in Shanghai; her years as a student at Datong fell in this period.⁠[1]

In 1923, while still a student at Datong, she won a government scholarship for study in the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry.⁠[1][2]

The Rackham Graduate School profile states that she went to Cornell UniversityCornell UniversityCornell University is a private research university in Ithaca, New York, and a member of the Ivy League. It is New York State's federal land-grant university, a distinction unique within the Ivy League. Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White founded the university in 1865, and it opened in 1868. In addition to its Ithaca campus, Cornell operates Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell Tech in New York City and a medical college in Qatar. It enrolled 26,793 students in fall 2024. Its president is Michael I. Kotlikoff.Open the full entry as an exchange scholar in a government-funded program.⁠[2]

She enrolled in the College of Arts and Sciences of Cornell University and received the A.B. in 1926; in 1928 she received the M.S. from Yale UniversityYale UniversityYale University is a research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Its predecessor, the Collegiate School, received a charter in 1701. Trustees chose New Haven in 1716; the institution became Yale College in 1718 and Yale University in 1887. Yale provides undergraduate, graduate and professional education and has 14 undergraduate residential colleges. As of October 2026, its president was Maurie McInnis, who took office in July 2024. In 2026, Yale expanded aid for incoming undergraduates and celebrated its 325th anniversary.Open the full entry.⁠[1][2]

In 1928 she entered the graduate school of the University of Michigan, where she studied under the theoretical physicist D. M. Dennison; in the same year she won a Barbour Scholarship. The scholarship was endowed by Levi Barbour in 1917 to support women graduate students from Asia and the Middle East.⁠[1][3][2]

D. M. Dennison (1900–1976) was her exact contemporary. In 1929 she became a member of the American Physical Society.⁠[1][1]

The article by retired staff of the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences calls the award the Barbour scholarship for Oriental women, states that she won it on the strength of her record and that such an opportunity and such funding were hard for a Chinese woman to obtain in the 1920s, and prints a group photograph of the Barbour scholars of 1928–1929 in which she is second from the right in the middle row. The Rackham Graduate School page prints “1928” after her name.⁠[3][2]

She received the Ph.D. in physics in 1931 with a dissertation entitled “Intensity Distribution in Band Systems of Symmetrical Triatomic Molecules and the Absorption Spectrum of Chlorine-Dioxide.”⁠[2][1]

The article by Dai Nianzu and Liu Na sets out the background: around 1931 five groups were studying the spectrum of ClO₂. Goodeve and Stein and Finkelnburg and Schumacher had worked earlier in the visible and ultraviolet; Urey and Johnston measured the visible and infrared absorption spectra and concluded that the lower electronic state had three normal frequencies and the upper state only two; Dennison first analyzed a linear structure for the ClO₂ molecule and then guided her experimental measurements in the infrared and ultraviolet and her analysis on a triangular model; and Bailey and Cassie made measurements in the infrared.⁠[1]

The dissertation had two parts: an experimental measurement of the intensities of the visible and ultraviolet absorption bands of chlorine dioxide (ClO₂), and a study, by wave-mechanical calculation, of the intensity distribution in the band systems of symmetrical triatomic molecules.⁠[1]

She measured the vacuum wave numbers of 179 bands and concluded from them that the ClO₂ molecule has only three normal frequencies in both the lower and the upper state, 529, 954 and 1105 cm⁻¹, a result that differed fundamentally from the inference of Urey and Johnston. The last two could be confirmed directly by experiment; the first was not observed in the infrared, which she attributed to the limits of the spectroscopic technique. On a triangular model she calculated an apex angle of 65° and an O–Cl distance of 1.22×10⁻⁸ cm.⁠[1]

The experimental results that Bailey and Cassie published in 1932 confirmed her three normal frequencies and molecular constants; they inferred two further frequencies, 1884 and 2034, which she interpreted as combinations of her three. She also compared her constants with the shifts of the two chlorine isotopes (35 and 37); Dai Nianzu and Liu Na write that, theory and experimental technique being still immature, the comparison gave no meaningful result.⁠[1]

The second paper extended the Franck–Condon theory to the intensity distribution in the band systems of triatomic molecules of the general XY₂ type and derived, by wave-mechanical calculation, expressions for the vibrational quantum numbers of the states in the most probable transitions. From her data she also calculated three frequencies and the molecular constants of ClO₂ in an excited electronic state; Dai Nianzu and Liu Na consider that, because the excited state depends closely on the initial conditions, these values may lack general validity.⁠[1]

The two parts were published in September 1933 as two papers under her sole name in the same issue of the Physical Review (volume 44), beginning on pages 376 and 383.⁠[1][3]

The dissertation was finished in 1931 but appeared a year after the paper of Bailey and Cassie. Dai Nianzu and Liu Na write that Dennison and she, teacher and student of the same age and both young, did not send it out promptly; only after Bailey and Cassie’s paper of 1932 had confirmed her work did Dennison decide to submit it at once, and it was mailed to the Physical Review in May 1933, and in it she endorsed the results of Bailey and Cassie. The two authors add that Wu Dayou and others who later cited these papers, unaware of this history, often cited her paper together with that of Bailey and Cassie and sometimes even reversed their order.⁠[1]

The article by retired staff of the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, for its part, describes her work under Dennison as a study, by quantum mechanics, of the intensity distribution and structure of the spectra of diatomic molecules.⁠[3]

On August 16, 1931, she and three companions, among them Wu Mi, boarded in Berlin a train bound for China by way of Siberia, traveling third class on hard seats.⁠[3]

After her return she was first professor and chair of the Department of Physics at Nankai University (1931–1933), the second head of that department after Rao Yutai.⁠[1][3]

The list of past heads on the website of the Nankai University School of Physics, however, gives Rao Yutai’s term as 1922–1929 and hers as 1930–1936. The Rackham Graduate School profile states that after her return she served as a professor of physics between 1932 and 1983. The article by Dai Nianzu and Liu Na gives Rao Yutai’s dates as 1891–1968.⁠[4][2][1]

In 1932, in the preparations for the founding and first annual meeting of the Chinese Physical Society, she was a member of the preparatory committee and a referee of its papers group; the article by Dai Nianzu and Liu Na counts her among the society’s organizers.⁠[1]

After leaving Nankai she was professor of physics at Datong University in Shanghai and, from 1933 to 1937, concurrently a research fellow of the Institute of Physics of the Academia Sinica, where she continued her work in spectroscopy; she was the institute’s only woman research fellow.⁠[1][3]

The article by retired staff of the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences describes her as modest and kind and as outstanding in her career.⁠[3]

In 1934 volume 7 of the English-language weekly China Critic carried a profile of her. The magazine’s column of portraits, called “Unedited Biographies” or “Intimate Portraits,” was written by Wen Yuanning (1899–1984); others portrayed in it included Chen Jiageng, Ding Wenjiang, Feng Youlan, Gu Weijun, Hu Shi, Liu Fu, Liu Haisu, Wu Mi, Wu Zhihui, Xu Zhimo, Ye Gongchao and Zhao Yuanren.⁠[1]

Dai Nianzu and Liu Na write that Wen Yuanning came to know her in 1933 or 1934, when they lodged in the same apartment house in Shanghai, and that he wrote the profile to attack society’s disdain for women and the view that women should not receive higher education.⁠[1]

The profile says that at the Jiangsu Provincial Normal School in Suzhou her Chinese was outstanding and that she was the youngest in her class and one of its best students; that to prepare for study abroad she entered a “Utopia” college (Datong University, as Dai Nianzu and Liu Na note); and that she then graduated from Cornell University, took a master’s degree at Yale University and became a doctor of physics at the University of Michigan, with a flawless academic record.⁠[1]

The profile also says that she was small in stature but great in spirit, quiet and unaffected, ready to help and comfort her friends and always patient in listening to their troubles; that her greatest characteristic was her concern for others; and that she disliked talk for its own sake but had a sense of humor that most people lack.⁠[1]

Some of the portraits were later collected by Wen Yuanning in a book, which Qian Zhongshu reviewed, likening the pieces to a few blossoms of ink thrown off by a casual brush, saying that they could not serve as a who’s who of modern China, and calling them short lives of contemporary Chinese notables written in the manner of the Spring and Autumn Annals; a bilingual edition, with a Chinese translation by Jiang Feng, was published by Yuelu Press in Changsha in 2004.⁠[1][1]

Chien-Shiung Wu was born in the town of Liuhe in Taicang County, Jiangsu, next to Jiading County; she graduated from National Central University in 1934 and then spent a year as a teaching assistant at Zhejiang University.⁠[1]

In 1935–1936 Chien-Shiung Wu worked under her as a research assistant at the Institute of Physics of the Academia Sinica. The National Academy of Sciences memoir and the New Dictionary of Scientific Biography state that Chien-Shiung Wu did research in X-ray crystallography under her; the article by Dai Nianzu and Liu Na states instead that the two planned to measure the spectrum of a gas at low temperature.⁠[5][6][1]

Drawing on Jiang Caijian’s biography of Chien-Shiung Wu (Taipei, 1996), Dai Nianzu and Liu Na write that she was the first person to guide Chien-Shiung Wu into physics research and was glad that the institute had found a woman of high ability, careful in her work and gentle in temper. Their laboratory was divided into two rooms, the larger a darkroom and the smaller a discussion room; they spent much effort on setting up apparatus, purifying gases and obtaining a high vacuum, and worked in the darkroom from morning to night, almost forgetting food and sleep. Because she was teaching at Datong University she could come to the institute only one day a week, so Chien-Shiung Wu did most of the research alone; the article likens her guidance to that of a doctoral or postdoctoral supervisor today.⁠[1][1]

The planned low-temperature spectroscopy of a gas was never carried out, because both of them went abroad for research. Dai Nianzu and Liu Na write that she had a special fondness for low-temperature physics.⁠[1]

The article by retired staff of the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences calls her the supervisor and colleague with whom Chien-Shiung Wu spent her days, under whose guidance Chien-Shiung Wu did experiments and studied English in preparation for going abroad. The article by Dai Nianzu and Liu Na and the article in the overseas edition of People’s Daily both call Chien-Shiung Wu her student, and the chronicle of the University of Science and Technology Beijing says that she trained outstanding physicists, of whom Chien-Shiung Wu is the foremost.⁠[3][1][7][8]

The National Academy of Sciences memoir calls her “a female professor, Jing-Wei Gu, who had just returned from the United States”; in the article by Dai Nianzu and Liu Na her return is dated 1931.⁠[5][1]

She encouraged Chien-Shiung Wu to study abroad and also taught her English. With her encouragement and an uncle’s financial help, Chien-Shiung Wu left for the United States in 1936, intending to pursue graduate studies at the University of Michigan.⁠[1][5][9]

Dai Nianzu and Liu Na write that Chien-Shiung Wu decided to go abroad in the late spring or early summer of 1936 and that the plan to study at the University of Michigan came from her suggestion and recommendation. The New Dictionary of Scientific Biography states that the uncle who paid was a businessman, that Chien-Shiung Wu sailed in August 1936 on the ship President Hoover, intending to study at the University of Michigan, her mentor’s alma mater, and that shortly after landing in San Francisco she changed her mind and entered the University of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry; the reasons it gives are the stories she heard of discrimination against women students at Michigan, the attraction of the physics department at Berkeley, and the efforts of Luke Chia-Liu YuanLuke Chia-Liu YuanLuke Chia-Liu Yuan (1912–2003) was a Chinese-born American experimental physicist and the husband of the physicist Chien-Shiung Wu; he worked mainly at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he was a senior physicist. He was elected an academician of Academia Sinica in 1959 and chaired the steering committee of Taiwan’s Synchrotron Radiation Research Center from 1983 to 2002.Open the full entry to persuade her to stay. In Dai Nianzu and Liu Na’s account, Chien-Shiung Wu chose the University of California after arriving in San Francisco, influenced by fellow students and by word of discrimination against women at the University of Michigan.⁠[1][6]

Dai Nianzu and Liu Na write that when Chien-Shiung Wu later explained to American audiences that women were treated more fairly in China, she drew on her own upbringing and cited her, Yang Huiyu, the principal of the Suzhou Women’s Normal School, and her own classmates as examples.⁠[1]

In May and June 1937 the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, winner of the 1922 Nobel PrizeNobel PrizeThe Nobel Prize is an international award established under the will of Alfred Nobel, comprising five prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace, awarded since 1901; its funds are managed by the Nobel Foundation, whose Board is based in Stockholm. The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, established in 1968, is not a Nobel Prize.Open the full entry in Physics, spent 19 days in China lecturing and visiting. On the afternoon of May 20 he arrived in Shanghai with his wife, Margrethe, and his son Hans Bohr; at 10 a.m. on May 21 Ding Xielin, the director of the Institute of Physics, showed Bohr and his son around the institute, and at 7 that evening he gave a dinner for the Bohr family, which she attended as a research fellow of the institute. The article by retired staff of the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences reproduces an image of a handwritten letter from her to Mrs. Bohr.⁠[3]

In 1938–1939 she was a guest scientist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics (Kaiser Wilhelm-Institut für Physik, today’s Planck Institute for Physics, as Dai Nianzu and Liu Na note) in Berlin, where she worked on her own on the Stark effect in chrome alum (Chromalaun) at low temperatures and its relation to thermal and magnetic properties, under the title “Der Starkeffekt und Beziehung zum thermodynamischen und magnetischen Verhalten in Chromalaun bei tiefen Temperaturen.”⁠[1][1]

The work was to have appeared in the Physik. Z. in 1939–1940; on the evidence of the Veröffentlichungen aus den Kaiser Wilhelm-Instituten (April 1939 to March 1940, pp. 483 and 484), Dai Nianzu and Liu Na suggest that this did not happen perhaps because of the growing intensity of the Second World War.⁠[1][1]

In 1940 she returned to China as professor of physics at Tangshan Jiaotong University, which was then located in Pingyue County (now Fuquan), Guizhou.⁠[1]

In August 1940 she married Shi Ruwei (1901–1983); they had one son, Shi Yanyang, who later became an electronics scientist. Shi Ruwei, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was a research fellow of the Institute of Physics of the Academia Sinica from 1934 to 1949 and later served for 25 years as director of the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.⁠[1][3]

Shi Ruwei came from Chongming County, Jiangsu (now part of Shanghai), and so from the same district as she did; both had been students of Hu Gangfu, though at different schools: he studied in the mathematics, physics and chemistry division of Nanjing Higher Normal School from 1920 to 1925 while she was at Datong University. Later they were colleagues at the Institute of Physics of the Academia Sinica.⁠[1]

Dai Nianzu and Liu Na write that Shi Ruwei had earlier married in his home district and that contact with his first wife, née Zhang, was cut off by the Japanese invasion; in the hardship of the war years he and she looked after each other and in the end married. In their acknowledgments the two authors mention Shi Ruwei’s daughter, Shi Xieqin.⁠[1][1]

The article by retired staff of the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences states that Shi Ruwei went abroad in 1930 with support from the China Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Culture, took a master’s degree at the University of Illinois in 1931, entered Yale University the same year to work on magnetism under L. W. McKeehan at the Sloane Physics Laboratory, and received his doctorate in 1934 with a dissertation on the magnetic properties of iron–cobalt single crystals. During the war he moved the research equipment successively to Kunming, Guilin and Chongqing; in 1948 he became acting director of the Institute of Physics of the Academia Sinica and made great efforts to keep its equipment from being shipped to Taiwan. The article calls him one of the pioneers and founders of modern magnetism research in China.⁠[3]

The article by retired staff of the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences prints a photograph taken in Kunming in 1940 whose caption identifies her and Shi Ruwei with the family of Zhao Zhongyao; a China Youth Daily article carried on the website of the Chinese Academy of Sciences also has a photograph of 1940, captioned as showing Shi Ruwei with his wife, named as her, and Zhao Zhongyao and his wife in Kunming.⁠[3][10]

Guangxi University was founded at Wuzhou in 1928 by the industrialist Ma Junwu (1882–1939), moved to Guilin in 1936 and became a provincial university; after the outbreak of the war, as colleges from the north and east moved west, many professors came to the southwest and taught there, and in 1939 it became a national university. From 1941 to 1945 she was a professor there.⁠[1][11]

In 1943 Shi Ruwei became concurrently a professor at Guangxi University.⁠[10]

Dai Nianzu and Liu Na write that the students of Guangxi University came from all parts of China and from very unequal circumstances and that she treated them all alike; when a student came with a problem she would put everything else aside to discuss it; she helped poor students with money from her own pocket; and on weekends and holidays she invited students to her home. The China Youth Daily article carried on the website of the Chinese Academy of Sciences says that in that difficult period the couple’s patience and care in teaching and their sincerity and kindness left a deep impression on the students.⁠[1][10]

The same article says that the family’s circumstances were then very hard; Zhang Xiaozheng, a student in the mechanical engineering department of Guangxi University, is quoted as having written that he bought a suit of clothes at a street stall kept by the couple.⁠[10]

After the victory over Japan the colleges in the southwest moved back to their original sites. In 1946 she returned to teach at Datong University; in 1947 she worked at the National Institute for Compilation and Translation in Shanghai; and from 1949 to September 1952 she again taught at Datong University.⁠[1]

In 1948 she and Shi Ruwei were photographed in Nanjing with the family of Qian Linzhao; the photograph is printed in the article by retired staff of the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.⁠[3]

From 1952 she was a professor at the Beijing Steel and Iron Institute (now the University of Science and Technology Beijing), where she built up the physics teaching and research section and served as its first head, a post she held until 1983.⁠[1][11]

The chronicle of the University of Science and Technology Beijing records that in the first semester of the 1952 academic year the physics teaching group had one professor, its head, who had come from Datong University in Shanghai; her name is in the list of the institute’s first staff. A 2024 report on the university’s news site states that from 1952 she headed the physics teaching and research section of the Basic Courses Department of the Beijing Steel and Iron Institute, the forerunner of the university’s School of Mathematics and Physics, and calls her one of the founders of physics at the university.⁠[8][12]

Reports of 2026 by China Youth Daily and the Beijing Daily app say that, with laboratory equipment scarce and teaching conditions hard, she kept up the teaching of basic physics and research in spectroscopy and taught for decades.⁠[11][13]

Dai Nianzu and Liu Na write that, as a southerner, she spoke a Mandarin hard to tell from her native dialect, and that the dialect of the Shanghai suburbs is harder to follow than Shanghainese; when she arrived in 1952 she was required to lecture in Mandarin, students from northern China found her accent hard to follow, and she needed an assistant with strong language skills to help her.⁠[1]

In the 1950s and 1960s she proposed several times to do research in low-temperature physics there, and the institute agreed that she could set up a low-temperature physics laboratory; Dai Nianzu and Liu Na write that her plan could hardly be carried out, perhaps because of the unbroken succession of political campaigns.⁠[1]

The chronicle records that she was one of the institute’s third-grade professors in the grading approved by the Ministry of Education and that she sat on the first department council of the Department of Physical Chemistry and on the institute’s first and second councils; it says that she worked for many years on low-temperature physics and spectroscopy.⁠[8]

The chronicle also records that at a meeting held to mark an anniversary of the institute, certificates of honor were presented to teachers of long service or to their families, and it singles out five by name: Liu Zhixiang, Jin Yan, Wei Shoukun, her and Ren Dianyuan.⁠[8]

She served as vice president of the first council of the Beijing branch of the Chinese Physical Society. In 1956 she and Shi Ruwei both joined the Chinese Communist Party; the chronicle of the University of Science and Technology Beijing records that the Party branch of the common teaching and research sections discussed and approved the admission of the then head of the physics teaching group, the first time since the institute’s founding that a senior intellectual was admitted to the Party.⁠[1][3][8]

The article by retired staff of the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences states that Shi Ruwei never drew the allowance due to him as a member of the Academic Divisions and for a time paid more than half of his monthly salary (the article gives the figure of 200 yuan) as Party dues; it gives a memorial volume for Shi Ruwei as its source and holds that she, as his partner in life, must have agreed and supported him.⁠[3]

When Chien-Shiung Wu returned to China to visit relatives in 1973 and again in 1977, she called on her in Beijing each time and treated her with great respect.⁠[1]

Shi Ruwei died of illness early in 1983; she died in Beijing on October 30 of the same year.⁠[1]

The chronicle of the University of Science and Technology Beijing, recording her death, calls her vice president of the Beijing Physical Society, a noted physicist, former head of the physics teaching and research section of the Beijing Steel and Iron Institute, one of the institute’s founding veterans and a former third-grade professor.⁠[8]

Dai Nianzu and Liu Na write at the end of their article that under extremely hard conditions she gave her whole life to physics research and teaching in China and that her story will be part of the history of Chinese physics. The article by retired staff of the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences speaks of a life that was brilliant yet modest.⁠[1][3]

Dai Nianzu and Liu Na write that she lectured gently and without hurry, tracing a theory from its origins, stressing its key points and going through even the effect of a change in a single factor and the checking of dimensions and the mistakes commonly made there. Before 1949 she taught in fluent American English and used European and American textbooks.⁠[1]

The two authors write that her patience and care in teaching and her sincerity and kindness left a deep impression on her students, and that over her long years of teaching and research she trained one group of able students after another. The article in the overseas edition of People’s Daily says that she devoted her whole life to education and trained a great many physicists.⁠[1][7]

Gerhard HerzbergGerhard HerzbergGerhard Herzberg (1904–1999) was a German-born physicist and molecular spectroscopist who moved to Canada in 1935 and worked for many years at the National Research Council of Canada. He received the 1971 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the electronic structure and geometry of molecules, particularly free radicals.Open the full entry, winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, cited her paper in volume 2 (1945, p. 287) of his three-volume Molecular Spectra and Molecular Structure, noting that it was then the only paper on the ultraviolet absorption spectrum of the triatomic molecule ClO₂.⁠[1][1][3]

In Wu Dayou’s Vibrational Spectra and Structure of Polyatomic Molecules, published in 1939, most of the data on normal frequencies and molecular constants in the section on ClO₂ come from her doctoral dissertation. Drawing on the later growth of knowledge of molecular vibration spectra and on the electron-diffraction measurements of ClO₂, Wu Dayou rearranged her observed and calculated results, renumbered the normal frequencies and reassigned the band types, gave a more accurate account than hers of the combination that yields 1884, and calculated an apex angle of 122° from the electron-diffraction data; the data were left unchanged in the supplemented edition of 1945. Dai Nianzu and Liu Na write that the book was the only scholarly reference work in its field, so that her results were preserved in it.⁠[1][1]

In 1936 electron-diffraction measurements gave an apex angle of 137° ± 15° for ClO₂, which showed that the molecular constants she had calculated were too small; Dai Nianzu and Liu Na write that her values for the three normal frequencies are still valued today.⁠[1]

The article by Dai Nianzu and Liu Na calls her the first woman doctor of physics in modern Chinese history; a 2025 article in the overseas edition of People’s Daily and a 2026 article in China Youth Daily describe her in the same way. The chronicle of the University of Science and Technology Beijing, a 2024 report on that university’s news site, a 2021 report in the Beijing Evening News and a 2026 report by the Beijing Daily app likewise call her China’s first woman doctor of physics.⁠[1][7][11][8][12][14][13]

Yin Xiaodong and Zhou Jinrui count seven Chinese women who earned doctorates in physics abroad before the founding of the People’s Republic of China, in the United States, Germany and Britain. The article by retired staff of the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences places her first in order of degree date, followed by He Yizhen, Zhou Rusong, He Zehui, Chien-Shiung Wu, Wang Mingzhen and Wang Chengshu.⁠[15][3]

The abstract of the College Physics paper says that during their studies abroad and after their return the seven made outstanding contributions in spectroscopy, metal physics, statistical physics and nuclear physics; its English keywords give their names, in order, as KU Zing-whai, HO I-djen, Chow Y S, HO Zah-wui, WU Chien-shiung, WANG Ming-zhen and WANG Cheng-shu.⁠[15]

The article by Dai Nianzu and Liu Na was published to mark International Women’s Day; the article by the Party branch of retired staff of the Institute of Physics and the institute’s branch of the association of senior scientists was written for the centenary of the Chinese Communist Party and International Women’s Day.⁠[1][3]

The play Chun Shi, staged in 2020, has three protagonists: her, her assistant Chien-Shiung Wu and the director Ding Xielin; its character Gu Jingwei is modeled on her.⁠[3][7]

Chun Shi is one of a series of plays about intellectuals of the Republican period by the troupe Huaju Jiuren, which grew out of Peking University, and was performed at the National Centre for the Performing Arts on May 28–30, 2021; that year was the troupe’s tenth anniversary, and the Beijing Evening News wrote that Zhu Hongxuan, who began as its playwright and came to direct as well, is regarded by its members as the soul of the troupe. The Beijing Evening News wrote that the play draws on two real women intellectuals, Chien-Shiung Wu and the colleague and supervisor with whom she spent her days; it names the director of the Institute of Physics at the time as Ding Xilin and calls him a patriotic physicist and playwright.⁠[14]

The article in the overseas edition of People’s Daily says that the play is set in the late spring and early summer of 1935: Gu Jingwei, the only woman research fellow of the Institute of Physics of the Academia Sinica, and her woman assistant, Qu Jianxiong, work together for only a year, yet each shapes the other’s life. Around International Women’s Day in 2025 a charity performance for women in science was given at the Erqi Theatre in Beijing before 778 women students and women working in science, engineering, agriculture and medicine.⁠[7]

On March 24, 2024, Party members among the staff and students of the School of Mathematics and Physics of the University of Science and Technology Beijing went to the Erqi Theatre to see Chun Shi; the report on the university’s news site gives the three characters’ names as Gu Jingwei, Qu Jianxiong and Ding Xilin.⁠[12]

On September 18, 2026, Gu Jinghui, an original play by the School of Mathematics and Physics of the University of Science and Technology Beijing, was given a special performance at the university’s staff activity center; its story runs from the 1930s to the 1980s.⁠[11]

The performance took place during National Science Popularization Month as part of a series of grassroots events on the spirit of scientists. The play is the first original play of the School of Mathematics and Physics; Gao Shuang, deputy secretary of the school’s Party committee, said that staff and students had rehearsed it for two years. It shows her in the early years of the Beijing Steel and Iron Institute, has been selected for the 2026 program of the Beijing Association for Science and Technology for publicity among science workers, and is to be given regular special performances.⁠[11][13]

Her name appears in several forms in English-language sources: Zing-whai Ku at the Rackham Graduate School of the University of Michigan, Ku Z W in citations of her Physical Review papers, Gu Jinghui (Zing Whai Ku) in the New Dictionary of Scientific Biography, and Jing-Wei Gu in the National Academy of Sciences memoir and at the National Park Service. The article by Dai Nianzu and Liu Na notes that the last character of her Chinese given name is also written with a different character, pronounced wei.⁠[2][1][6][5][9]

Rackham Graduate School, University of Michigan: Official website: https://rackham.umich.edu/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2]

Nankai University: Official website: https://www.nankai.edu.cn/ (opens in a new window).⁠[16]

University of Science and Technology Beijing: Official website: https://www.ustb.edu.cn/ (opens in a new window).⁠[17]