Projects

Project “Science, Modernity and Political Behavior in Contemporary China (1949-1978)” (concluded)

This project is supported by a generous research grant of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation (http://cckf.org), for a duration of two years (2013-15).

It has resulted in a monograph: Rui Kunze and Marc Andre Matten: Knowledge Production in Mao-Era China—Learning from the Masses (Lexington).

This book traces and analyzes the transformation of the public discourse of science and technology in Mao-era China. Based on extensive primary sources such as science dissemination materials and technical handbooks, as well as mass media products of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution periods, this book delineates the emergence of a pragmatic approach to knowledge in society. To achieve the goal of fast modernization with limited financial, human, and material resources, the party-state accommodated Western and local, “modern” and “traditional” knowledges in the fields of agricultural mechanization, steel production and Chinese veterinary medicine. The case studies demonstrate that scientific knowledge production in the Mao-era included various social groups and was entangled with political and cultural issues. This reveals and explains the continuity of scientific thinking across the historical divides of 1949 and 1978, which has hitherto been underestimated.

Project “Fixing Foreign Sciences” (concluded)

This project starts with the assumption that historical materialism equipped the People’s Republic of China with an ideology that saw progress and development no longer as a result of fateful coincidence (Newton’s apple) or a sudden revolution (Thomas Kuhn), but as the consequence of thoughtful planning ahead of time. Similar to Stalinist Russia (Pollock 2006) Maoist China focused on the removal of coincidence and contingency by envisioning five- and twelve-year plans of science development (such as the “Outline of Developing Science and Technology between 1956 and 1967”). Science and technology became an integral part of planned economy and were subjected institutionally, organizationally and financially to political leadership (Du 1959, Xu and Fan 1957). The central epistemological principle in science was inductive reasoning because according to Mao Zedong’s 1937 text On Practice(Shijianlun) any scientific reasoning should rely on social practice and empirical observation. Scientists who were contrary to that following Karl Popper were considered violating the holy principles of materialism and suffered political persecution for their assumed idealist and/or bourgeois epistemologies (see here the ideological struggles related to Einstein’s theory of relativity [Hu Danian 2005] or the fate of the mathematician Shu Xingbei during the Cultural Revolution [Huang Yong 2008]).