Overview of Chinese underwater acoustics

French physicist Paul Langevin was the pioneer of active sonar [Ainslie, , p.10, Springer, 2010]. His graduate student and later collaborator, Dezhao Wang, founded the first Chinese underwater acoustics laboratory at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 1958. Shie Yang founded the first department of underwater acoustics engineering of China at Harbin Engineering University in 1959. In accordance with the development strategy of “from the near to the distant; from the shallow to the deep,” Chinese underwater acoustics research has been active in shallow-water acoustics, and has increased its efforts in deep sea acoustics in recent years. The Chinese underwater acoustics community has nurtured nine of CAS/CAE(Chinese Academy of Engineering) academicians and several world outstanding scholars in shallow-water acoustics. Under the support from the CAS and US ONR, two comprehensive China-US joint sea-going experiments were conducted; many international conferences in ocean acoustics were held in China. This paper briefly introduces the history of Chinese underwater acoustics research and overviews some underwater acoustics progresses that have publicly been released in China, including basic research in ocean acoustics, signal processing, and underwater acoustic transducers. [Work supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 61571436, 11434012, and 41561144006.]