China-Africa Stories | The silkworm expert assisting Madagascar's sericulture industry

【Editor's note: 2026 marks the China-Africa Year of People-to-People Exchanges. This is the second in a series of China-Africa stories from Zhejiang University, featuring the students, researchers and alumni working to bring the two sides closer. This installment turns to a silkworm expert.】

In late 1982, Feng Jiaxin, a professor in the Department of Sericulture and Apiculture at the former Zhejiang Agricultural University (now Zhejiang University), was invited by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) to serve as chief technical adviser on sericulture for Madagascar. His outstanding work substantially raised the country’s sericulture output; two years later, on January 18, 1985, the Government of Madagascar conferred upon him the title of Knight of the National Order of Madagascar, together with an honorary certificate signed by the president.

Madagascar’s central highlands had long sustained a sericulture sector, yet by the early 1980s it had fallen into steep decline. In 1981, the government signed an agreement with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to launch the Highland Sericulture Project (MAG/80/010). Under the terms of that agreement, FAO was to recruit one international chief technical adviser and four sericulture specialists to serve in Madagascar. Following FAO’s review process, Professor Feng was named General Technical Consultant for Sericulture in Madagascar; concurrently, China’s Ministry of Agriculture designated him head ofthe Chinese expert team assigned to the project.

Arriving in Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital, in December 1982, Professor Feng began working with the country’s National Sericulture Experimental Institute. He carried out field surveys, gathered production data, and drafted practical, locally grounded work plans after gaining a full picture of the sector. What he found on the ground proved worse than anticipated. Pebrine, a devastating silkworm disease, was running unchecked: mother moths were never microscopically screened before breeding. The local gene pool was dangerously narrow, and most silkworm eggs were farmer-retained stock of consistently low quality.

Conventional crossbreeding normally requires four to ten years, so Feng needed a faster route. “Madagascar must breed its own silkworms,”he reasoned. Rather than building from zero, he chose to upgrade existing local varieties, capitalizing on their single natural strength: multivoltine, non-diapausing strains that complete short life cycles and produce multiple generations each year. Beginning in January 1983, he instituted a rigorous single-moth rearing protocol; within twelve months he had bred six generations and established six improved lines. Eighteen months on, his MC line achieved a whole-cocoon maximum weight of three grams—a world record at the time. The ternary hybrid he subsequently developed boosted cocoon yields by over 50 percent, and more than 1,200 improved egg sheets were multiplied and disseminated nationwide within a single year.

Technical breakthroughs were only half the story. Professor Feng instructed farmers in twice-yearly mulberry pruning, which lifted leaf output by more than 30 percent. He also trained local technicians in microscopic mother-moth examination, cutting pebrine off at its source. A state-run silk farm that had bled losses for years posted its first profit; and the training programs he delivered left behind an enduring cadre of Malagasy sericulture specialists.

On 18 January 1985, at a farewell reception attended by more than 50 guests — among them representatives of the Madagascar government, United Nations agencies and the Chinese ambassador — a government minister conferred the honour on him on behalf of the president of Madagascar. This honour is not mine alone, Feng said. It recognises Chinese technology and China's aid work, and it stands as a modelof international cooperation.

Madagascar was but one chapter in a lifetime devoted to sericulture. Feng graduated in 1954 from the Department of Sericulture at Zhejiang Agricultural College, which was later incorporated into Zhejiang University. He stayed on to teach, eventually chairing the department, and helped develop silkworm varieties that saw cumulative use across Zhejiang exceeding ten million egg sheets. He remained vigorously engaged in scholarship well beyond retirement. In late 2025, he donated both his Knight insignia of the National Order of Madagascar and the presidential honorary certificate to the Zhejiang University Archives.