Science and Really Existing Socialism in Maoist China

Abstract

On January 31, 1979, Michel Foucault made an offhand remark during a lecture at the College of France: “I do not think that there is an autonomous socialist governmentality. There is no governmental rationality of socialism.…One can, moreover, reproach it…but it has lived, it has actually functioned, and we have examples of it within and connected up to liberal governmentalities.” In this rare reference to socialism in The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault framed it as “the internal logic of an administrative apparatus” in which the “governmentality of a police state” forms “a fusion, a continuity, the constitution of a sort of massive bloc between governmentality and administration.”1 One can read this remark as dismissive, slotting socialism as a pseudo-ideology subsidiary to an all-encompassing global history of capitalism. And in the three decades since the end of the Cold War, such readings of socialism have only multiplied—not least due to the extension of Foucauldian concepts such as governmentality and biopolitics into the analysis and even administration of former Socialist states.2Reading Foucault’s lines in the 2020s, however, leaves a different impression. If we examine his skepticism against a backdrop of battles over pandemic governance, his emphasis on the functional existence of a hyper-administrative police state “fused” with socialism brings a specific country to mind: the People’s Republic of China. As the second largest economy in the world and an avowedly Socialist state (at least in propaganda), the seemingly exceptional operation of science and medicine under government supervision in China begs new lines of inquiry into how states can and should wield technical expertise. The history of science and of scientism—that is to say, the power of knowledge and the politics engendered from it—must also do more to explore beyond Western experience, and consider the case of China with similar rigor and care.Literature on science in the People’s Republic of China, at least in the English-speaking academy, has since the first decade of the 2000s cast new light on this history not simply as a Manichean struggle between a hostile party-state and conscientious scientists, but in fact integral to a longer history of Modern China’s infatuation with Science. In her review essay published in this journal in 2012, Ruth Rogaski highlighted these works’ discussion of how Chinese elites in the twentieth century “swore their allegiance” to the ideal of Science “with an ardor bordering on obsession” (582). This collective addiction to Science as “self-appointed national savior” (586) could be seen throughout the twentieth century across Nationalist and Communist regimes, and it was this obsession that eventually brought about tragic consequences in the aftermath of the Great Leap Famine and One Child Policy. True to the critique of High Modernist reason, this line of scholarship tells a story of affect and passion, of how state-led invocations of science produced a politics that ran counter to its purported objectives. In other words, it was a story of failure.A decade later, the field has shifted yet again toward a different framework. In this essay, I seek to articulate an emergent intellectual agenda based on three recently published monographs, highlighting in particular a potential move toward a history of raison d’état in contemporary China on its own terms—how knowledge and power have operated and functioned in the People’s Republic of China, not just how they may have failed. Such an approach would take seriously Foucault’s musings, which—while deliberately vague—nudge us to consider exactly how governmentality and administration were “fused” and mutually constituted, as well as how socialism may or may not have functioned as an “internal logic” of that machinery.3It will become clear that all three books reviewed here, despite their differences, perform this conceptual move away from an affective reading of the socialist state and toward an epistemic reflection on how science functioned in the early People’s Republic of China as an example of “really existing socialism.”4 The so-called “Maoist” period, which extends from the 1950s well into the late 1970s, has usually been set up as a clear contrast to the “Reform and Opening Up” policies pursued in the late 1970s by CCP leadership under Deng Xiaoping. Using newly available archival sources and interviews, these books all help recover some of the concrete practices of science and medicine during the Maoist era and show how the “fusion” between different aspects of governance that Foucault imagined in his lecture was actually operationalized on the ground. In sum, they turn his musing on the (im-)possibility of socialist governmentality into a tangible, if at times unsettling, history that could be immensely useful to reflect upon the present.As an early modernist myself, I claim no research expertise in this period. But it should not be news for anyone that the shifting configurations of modernity bear on early modern studies, while the histories we tell of previous eras affect how we see the more recent past—and the present. Further, I hope these works will receive wider attention and be integrated into the growing literature on Cold War science, as their subject matter on three distinct but interrelated fields—medicine (and specifically preventive medicine by means of mass immunization), statistics, and agricultural science—all concern the governance of populations from the perspective of a major player in every plot twist of the Cold War era. In a nutshell, we could no longer afford to leave out socialist China (and East Asia in general) in a global history of what Lorraine Daston and others have called “Cold War Rationality.”5***Of the three books reviewed here, Mary Brazelton’s Mass Vaccination sticks closest to a Foucauldian framework. True to its title, the book examines how inoculating “citizens’ bodies” not only involved but also constituted state power—seeing the birth of biopolitics in China through the lens of state-initiated mass vaccination. The book traces a long history starting from the early twentieth century, covering major episodes of international aid and state-building during and after World War II, major vaccination campaigns under the PRC, and ends with the eradication of small pox in China and its entry into the World Health Organization in the early 1970s. Overall, Mass Vaccination presents more continuity than break in the build-up of state research and administrative capacity, seeing the Maoist era as a crucial phase of this history rather than an aberration from it.This sweeping account across multiple wars and regime changes is made possible by Brazelton’s meticulous reconstruction of a transnational history of bacteriology and immunology in modern China. Specifically, she highlights the role played by eminent Chinese scientists who returned from training abroad and gained academic and political prominence starting in the 1920s and 1930s. Brazelton’s creative use of documents from the League of Nations Archive fleshes out the importance of the interwar period in preparation for later international aid to China during World War II, including the work of the young embryologist Joseph Needham serving as the liaison overseeing British assistance of China’s public health campaigns. Her discussion of vaccination programs done by the National Epidemic Prevention Bureau also breaks new ground by centering on the southwestern province of Yunnan, where the regional influence of French imperial administration in Indochina first set up medical and public health infrastructure, a forgotten history that Brazelton reconstructed with both diplomatic archives in Nantes and local records in Yunnan. Brazelton convincingly argues that “Chinese doctors and biologists were an active part of a global research community in microbiology before the Second World War,” (16) and that this interconnection was only strengthened after the war and carried forward into the 1950s.There can also be no question that Brazelton’s path-breaking research should become the go-to guide for anyone researching in this area. Yet it was precisely this fascinatingly diverse range of topics and archival sources that attenuated the biopolitical framework. In other words, the sources themselves belie the claim that mass vaccination reflected the “growing power of the central state” (92) in modern China. Rather, we see various actors, transnational and subnational, investing in vaccination to fulfill their idiosyncratic goals during the exigencies of wartime. Most of her case studies in wartime China concern the actions of local government, or a central government in exile with limited control on the ground. Concrete actions of policing emphasized limiting mobility—through a system of checkpoints at train stations or bus routes and even through physical barriers around whole cities—over inoculation. As with the sources, so with the diseases: heterogeneity complicates a simple narrative of vaccination as a mechanism of biopower. While much of the book centers on small pox, whose inoculation bears a much longer history in late imperial times, key chapters address cholera outbreaks in wartime, the very real danger of bubonic plague as a biological weapon, and a postwar campaign against polio and tuberculosis. At times, it becomes difficult to see a clear agenda for national governance over citizenship emerging from the disparate efforts before the end of the Civil War in the late 1940s.Indeed, Brazelton’s research clearly shows that only in the 1950s did the party-state become capable of drastically increasing mass vaccination rates and thus eradicating many infectious diseases. And yet exactly how did the revolutionary agenda fit in with a biopolitical framework? Was the power of biomedical intervention and its links to the meaning and practice of “citizenship” necessarily the central piece that motivated the Socialist state to do what it did? Looking past Foucauldian concepts such as “biosovereignty” and “biocitizenship,” which were in fact derived later from the decolonizing world in the 1950s and 1960s, we see a decisive break in the very meaning of nationhood and citizenship in the early years under the PRC. More analysis building on Brazelton’s work could help show how socialism altered the premises of governance through preventive medicine—enabling specific modes of “seeing like a state” that had real consequences on millions of lives.***In many ways, Arunabh Ghosh’s Making it Count seeks to do exactly that, picking up conceptually where Brazelton leaves off to delve into a close look at the role of statistics in Socialist governance. While Mass Vaccination traversed the 1949 divide without dramatizing the transition to Socialist governance, Ghosh begins in the immediate aftermath of Communist victory and stays tightly focused on the first decade of the PRC, ending shortly after the conclusion of the first Five Year Plan in 1957. While Brazelton’s central characters were biomedical experts who may or may not have held a governmental position, Ghosh’s work sheds light on a different kind of technical expert: namely, government statisticians who buttressed socialism by churning out numbers for the smooth function of a planned economy being built from the ground up, via a violent and aggressive process of nationalization and collectivization.Brazelton’s attention to Western-centered international organizations rendered the 1950s as a short episode in her longer periodization, while Ghosh highlights a different set of transnational connections being formed during the early PRC precisely as a result of Communist China’s newfound geopolitical situation during the early Cold War. This approach brings forward the entangled relationship between ideological and epistemic positions mapped along shifting geopolitical fault lines. In concrete terms, Ghosh describes how Maoist China learned Soviet-style statistics that prioritized exhaustive enumeration over “bourgeois” sample method. Yet in merely a few years, the harbinger of the Sino-Soviet split following Stalin’s death paved the way for China’s active involvement in Third-World diplomacy at the Bandung Conference in 1957, opening up space for—among other transnational episodes in Ghosh’s book—a fascinating episode of Sino-Indian collaboration on stochastic statistical method.The most illuminating point that Ghosh makes here—one that helps flesh out the world of socialist science and link it up with more familiar narratives—is that it would be wrong to assume homogeneity and stability in what “Socialist statistics” may have been and meant for its practitioners. Rather, we see a tug-of-war between three distinct epistemic approaches—exhaustive enumeration, stochastic sampling, and a case-based ethnographical approach to social survey with earlier roots—with profound implications for the ethos of bureaucratic practices under the young state. Each approach also had its own transnational origins, which afforded different geopolitical opportunities and interpretations. The Maoist era, characterized by the dramatic end of close alignment with the USSR and the subsequent rapprochement with the United States in the early 1970s, makes a fascinating case study of the vicissitudes of global and regional geopolitics and technoscience in the global regime(s) of knowledge.Ultimately, Making It Count is motivated by the familiar question of rationality and governmentality. In Ghosh’s own words, statistics can shed light on what “seeing like a Socialist state” (title of Part II) might mean. Yet the other keyword of the book’s subtitle, namely “statecraft,” begs for more grounded investigation. For an early modernist, the term “statecraft” is usually rendered as the standard English translation for jingshi (literally “ordering the world”), a central idea in Confucian political theory that sought to effect positive change in society via direct participation in state administration. Invoking statecraft in the Maoist context thus has the potential of establishing a much longer line of inquiry, as Foucault did in his discussion of raison d’état and the rule of law in early modern Europe. Whereas the practice of jingshi was situated in Confucian discourses of subjectivity, Ghosh’s statisticians in this book could come across as mere cogs in the state machinery, commanded by forces beyond their control. Socialism, too, was shown to be a versatile glue that held together various statistical practices and thus governmental modes—perhaps a bit too versatile and shapeless.While I certainly do not wish to impose unreasonable demands on an already very rich study, it does seem to me the ending of the book in 1958 avoids answering the hard question presented by the Great Leap Forward as both the culmination of state building and a spectacular failure of the same. Following the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957, the more unruly technical experts were mostly purged from office, and the familiar story of widespread bureaucratic malfunction, massive famine and death, and an economic debacle ensued to even cost Mao his grip over Party leadership—until the violent onset of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. Ghosh suggests viewing the multifaceted history of statistics as ultimately incapacitating the PRC in its effort to capture and construct social facts. But to assess the real legacy of Socialist statistics, we will need a fuller examination of planning and governance into the 1960s and 1970s. Even during the frenzied excesses of the Cultural Revolution, the planned economy kept moving, sowing the seeds of a more developmentalist policy that took over in the 1980s. Here we see the limits of following official archives as the primary source for governmentality. If the devil is in the details, there are many different kinds of places to look, including the archival silences behind which the real-life stories of statisticians remain untold.***Among the three authors discussed here, Sigrid Schmalzer seems the least Foucauldian at first glance. Brazelton and Ghosh both focus on distinct technologies of governance (vaccination and statistics), with an eye toward demonstrating the excesses and incapacities of governmentality. Turning this familiar paradigm on its head, Schmalzer’s study of “scientific farming” emphasizes the concrete political act of farming over the dictates of science. Rather than arbitrating between the capacity and incapacity of the Maoist state, Red Revolution, Green Revolution invites us to embrace the seeming contradiction that the epistemic framework in Maoist China was always built upon both science (Green Revolution) and politics (Red Revolution). While neither Brazelton nor Ghosh took the Maoist slogan of “mass science” seriously, it is the key animating principle in Schmalzer’s book, a true united front between her historical actors and the scholarly voice as well.For Schmalzer, science in the PRC revolves around a productive tension between two seemingly opposite attributes: tu (“soil,” native, coming from the masses) and yang (“ocean,” foreign, coming from distant expertise). Adapting this tension for analytic purposes, the book shows that it would be facile to distinguish Maoist “radicals” who prosecuted science from “moderates” who endorsed science, or to see the Maoist massline as a simple-minded investment in “tu” science at the expense of “yang.” Rather, the lives and work of individual scientists almost always combined the two elements, as illustrated by Pu Zhelong’s remarkable efforts to help peasant communes in Guangdong inoculate moth caterpillars with wasp eggs, thereby reducing pesticide use and increasing crop yield. Politics did not just happen to science, nor was it simply a matter of keeping the two separate. In Maoist China, the Green and Red Revolutions were always mutually entangled with each other—just as science and society are always co-produced.Also departing from Brazelton and Ghosh’s books, scientists, or technical experts, did not form the sole focus of Schmalzer’s inquiry into scientific farming. Taking the Maoist model of “three-in-one” triage between technical experts, local cadres, and peasants (the mass in “mass science”) seriously, Schmalzer conducted extensive fieldwork and interviews to try to get diverse perspectives on Maoist scientific farming. “Seeing like a state agent” is neither reducible to state archives nor entirely coherent with the memory of a rural youth who came of age without formal schooling. Agricultural experimentation, conducted as an extension of governmental activity at the local Commune, provided “a rare opportunity to choose their own path” (187)—in other words, we see choice at the heart of a supposedly statist project. The promotion of agricultural techniques often met with resistance and failure, but at every step they involved “political maneuvering, social engineering, and rhetorical finessing” (133). Especially noteworthy is Schmalzer’s sensitivity to gender as a variable in the operation of science as a part of really existing socialism. For instance, newspapers report how young village girls, inspired by the ideals of scientific farming, experimented with the cross-breeding of cattle, in defiance of older and male villagers’ derision (195 and passim) for engaging in activities formerly designated for men. Here, Schmalzer’s interpretation enriches the moments of resistance that a flattened Foucauldian framework might miss or cloak with an aura of doomed inevitability.The commitment to “Science for the People” not only informed Schmalzer’s study of Maoist China but also motivated an unusual move by academic authors today—adapting her research into a children’s book on the subject of sustainable farming. Working with the Asian American artist Melanie Linden Chan, Schmalzer adapted the life story of the US-trained agricultural entomologist Pu Zhelong into a picture book for children, with the poetic title Moth and Wasp, Soil and Ocean. The fact that a book about science was told from the perspective of a rural youth who participated in agricultural experimentations also enhanced its appeal to a young audience. The favorable reception of this book (last time I looked, a rating of 4.7 of 5 by twenty-four readers at Amazon) speaks volumes about both Schmalzer’s commitment to the “massline” of historical knowledge production today, and the ways in which children—and perhaps lay readers in general—were not necessarily deterred by seemingly remote topics, or apparent contradictions between “soil” (tu) and “ocean” (yang).6***Where, then, do these recent works on PRC science leave us? First, the books make it clear that we should retire the habit of seeing Maoist China as a remote corner locked away from Cold War–era scientific modernity and rationality. They show how science in China before, during, and after the Cold War has always been an integral part of transnational networks, albeit a rapidly changing one depending on geopolitical alliances and regional differences. More archival research will certainly recast these transnational dynamics in the years to come. Second, the “Reform and Opening-Up” era since the late 1970s has done much to mask the more radical strains of science and politics in Maoist China, but this recently imposed archival bias against tu science could not hold fast forever, since it is now clear that the PRC will not blindly follow a neoliberal script as some in the United States may have wished. Yet it would also be misleading to look for a radical alternative to biomedicine and governmentality—a “successor science” (Schmalzer 128, drawing on Donna Haraway and Sandra Harding)—in the really existing socialism of the People’s Republic of China. Untangling the contradictions inherent in China’s trajectory in the twenty-first century requires us to engage with “postcolonial subjectivity, manifested particularly in the struggle to be simultaneously tu and yang” (Schmalzer 98). I hope this essay does its part to arouse more interest and engagement in this direction.Toward the end of Life: A Critical User’s Manual, Didier Fassin notes a tension between “two lines of critical thought.” The first one aims at freedom from being held “prisoners of an ideology that prevents us from seeing the world as it is,” while the other focuses on helping us “become aware of the arbitrary and contingent character of our values, norms, and representations,” thus generative of a genealogical/cognitive critique.7 The three books reviewed shed new light on science and power in Maoist China. While Brazelton and Ghosh adopt a more genealogical approach, thus remaining close to the Foucauldian question, Schmalzer’s sensitive—at times lyrical—celebration of subjectivity reminds us to be aware of our own post–Cold War bias. By laying out the similarities and differences among these books, my goal is not to pick sides but rather to highlight how these authors’ distinct achievements might orient future work.Finally, the purpose of such critical history is never trained on the contemplative space alone. Rather, perhaps we all could venture beyond academic prose and find better ways of telling complex stories to a broader audience, including children. To borrow the business historian Philip Scranton’s remark about “Communist Business” in his recent monograph on business enterprises in People’s Republic of China, “Socialist Science,” too, was a project in motion, not a contradiction in terms.8 Perhaps it was precisely the contradictions that set this project in motion in the first place—not just in China and other Socialist states, but everywhere.