Mr. Science and Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution

China is emerging as a new superpower in science and technology, reflected in the success of its spacecraft and high-velocity Maglev trains. While many seek to understand the rise of China as a technologically-based power, the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s may seem an unlikely era to explore for these insights. Despite the widespread verdict of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution as an unmitigated disaster for China, a number of recent scholars have called for re-examining Maoist science-both in China and in the West. At one time Western observers found much to admire in Chairman Mao's mass science, his egalitarian effort to take science out of the ivory tower and place it in the hands of the disenfranchised peasant, the loyal worker, and the patriot soldier. Chunjuan Nancy Wei and Darryl E. Brock have assembled a rich mix of talents and topics related to the fortunes and misfortunes of science, technology, and medicine in modern China, while tracing its roots to China's other great student revolution-the May Fourth Movement. Historians of science, political scientists, mathematicians, and others analyze how Maoist science served modern China in nationalism, socialism, and nation-building-and also where it failed the nation and the Chinese people. If the Cultural Revolution contributed to China's emerging space program and catalyzed modern malaria treatments based on Traditional Chinese Medicine, it also provided the origins of a science talent gap and the milieu from which a one-child policy would arise. Given the fundamental importance of China today, and of East Asia generally, it is imperative to have a better understanding of its most recent scientific history, but especially that history in a period of crisis and how that crisis was resolved. What is at issue here is not only the specific domain of the history of science, but the social and scientific policies of China generally as they developed and were applied prior to, during, and after the Cultural Revolution.

Despite the verdict of the Cultural Revolution as a disaster for China, a number of scholars have called for reexamining socialist science under Mao¿s aegis. This collection examines the viewpoints on social and scientific enterprises of that era, probing medicine, the space program and the one-child policy as outcomes of earlier Maoist science.

Foreword by Joseph W. DaubenAcknowledgmentsPART I. INTRODUCTIONChapter 1. Introduction: Reassessing the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, by Darryl E. Brock and Chunjuan Nancy WeiChapter 2. The People's Landscape: Mr. Science and the Mass Line, by Darryl E. BrockPART II. SCIENCE, SOCIETY AND THE CULTURAL REVOLUTIONChapter 3. Science Imperiled: Intellectuals and the Cultural Revolution, by Cong CaoChapter 4. Screening the Maoist Mr. Science: Breaking with Old Ideas and Constructing the Post-Capitalist University, by Michael A. MikitaPART III. SCIENTIFIC DISCIPLINES AND THE CULTURAL REVOLUTIONChapter 5. Dialectics of Numbers: Marxism, Maoism, and the Calculus of Infinitesimals, by Yibao XuChapter 6. Ideology and Cosmology: Maoist Discussion on Physics and the Cultural Revolution, by Yinghong ChengChapter 7. Space for the People: China's Aerospace Industry and the Cultural Revolution, by Stacey SolomoneChapter 8. Barefoot Doctors: The Legacy of Chairman Mao's Healthcare, by Chunjuan Nancy WeiChapter 9. Rural Agriculture: Scientific and Technological Development during the Cultural Revolution, by Dongping HanPART IV. THE POST-MAO SPRINGTIME FOR SCIENCEChapter 10. Missile Science, Population Science: The Origins of China's One-Child Policy, by Susan GreenhalghChapter 11. Worker Innovation: Did Maoist Promotion Contribute to China's Present Technological and Economic Success?, by Rudi VoltiChapter 12. On the Appropriate Use of Rose-Colored Glasses: Reflections on Science in Socialist China, by Sigrid SchmalzerSelected BibliographyIndexContributors