The Chinese Society of Rheology (CSR) was found in the period of‘the Spring of Science’, when China began to implement the reform and opening up policy in the late 1970s. The interdisciplinary nature of rheology has inspired and gathered scientists from the Chinese Chemical Society (CCS) and the Chinese Society of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (CSTAM) to study many scientific and engineering problems from petroleum recovery, mineral mining to polymer processing and various material manufacturing in a unified manner. After several years of preparation, CSR was formally established in China jointly by CCS and CSTAM during the First National Congress on Rheology (NCR-1) in November 1985, with 178 attendee and 125 research papers. Prof. Chan Man Fong at Peking university was elected as the first president of CSR. Since then, we have NCR every 2-3 years, up to 15th NCR in December 2020, with attendee 380 and 222 lecture/posters.

From very beginning, CSR actively facilitates international exchange and cooperations, especially since we formally have become a member of ICR in March 1988. We held many international, regional, bilateral meetings, e.g. Pacific Rim Conference on Rheology (Shanghai, 2005), China-Japan Bilateral Conference on Rheology (Beijing, 1991), IUTAM Symposium on Rheology of Bodies with Defects (Beijing, 1997), International Symposium on Complex Fluids (Shanghai, 2005), International Symposium on Multiple Scale Modelling of Complex Fluids– Fundamental Challenge and Industrial Applications (Guangzhou, 2018), International Workshop of East Asian Young Rheologists (Changchun, January 2020), etc. Many global well-known rheologists visited China, e.g. Sir Sam F. Edwards, Masao Doi, Ken Walters, Gerry Fuller, Ronald G. Larson, Hiroshi Watanabe, Gareth H. McKinley, Henning Winter, David Cheng, etc. They and many other friends helped us in various ways for the development of rheology in China.

Over the last decades, enormous advances in ICT, AI, HPC have rapidly transformed traditional industrial sectors in foods, personal care products, pharmaceuticals, paints, lubricants, ceramics, polymers, liquid crystals, high performance fibers, oil exploration and production into a digital era of formulation design and precision control over processing conditions from molecular viewpoint, and fertilizing a new industrial revolution. It presents a tremendous opportunity for further development of rheology in China. CSR aims at working with the international rheology community closely to solve the grand challenging problems in energy, advanced materials, life science and medicine, climate change and beyond.