Reviewed by: Can Science and Technology Save China? ed. by Susan Greenhalgh and Li Zhang Robert Peckham (bio) Susan Greenhalgh and Li Zhang, editors. Can Science and Technology Save China? Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020. 226 pp. Paperback $26.95, isbn 978-1501747038. "We live in a dizzying world of continuously unfolding dreams and nightmares," the anthropologist Mei Zhan observes in her afterword to the edited collection Can Science and Technology Save China? In her chapter, Zhan tells us, "a new event would inevitably blow my attempted conclusion wide open" (p. 213). Today, these words sound premonitory. Shortly after the book went to press, the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China, went global, precipitating draconian quarantine and lockdown measures the world over. Xi Jinping would use the crisis and the imposition of a "Zero-Covid" policy to tighten his grip on power and bolster China's tech capacities in the name of national security. Rather than blow the book's conclusion wide open, however, Covid-19 has underscored the importance of the themes it tackles. Now, more than ever, we need a better understanding of the ways in which science and technology (S&T) are transforming contemporary Chinese society, and a better grasp of the issues at stake in the politics of Chinese science-making. This is a prescient and impressively coherent collection of essays based on a workshop held at Harvard University in 2016. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the contributors—all but one of whom are anthropologists—address crucial questions about the relationship between science and the party-state, broader issues of governmentality, as well as China's status as a (bio)tech superpower. These are issues that have come to the fore during the pandemic. On the one hand, China's containment of the virus has been viewed—both within China and without—as a success story in contrast to bungled responses in many Western democracies. On the other hand, Chinese authorities have been accused of covering up evidence, fabricating data, and using the pandemic [End Page 190] to expand surveillance and social control. Although unsubstantiated, rumors that the virus leaked from a Chinese lab continue to circulate. Meanwhile, there is widespread frustration, resentment, and anger in China at the coercive public health methods employed by the party-state. In her lucid and insightful introduction, "Governing through Science," Susan Greenhalgh provides a succinct overview of the book's central concerns. She begins by tracing the intertwinement of S&T with the party-state, elucidates the rise of an anthropology of Chinese S&T, and new understandings of the 2000s and the 2010s that focus on S&T as instruments of governance, while also discussing the contextual nature of science and its imbrication in politics and economics. This should be required reading for anyone interested in S&T in China and—as Zhan suggests in her coda—anyone serious about the task of overhauling a tired Euro-American analytical apparatus that has for too long hindered the development of new tools for elucidating translocal "power-laden entanglements" (p. 216) of the kind examined in the book. It's a pity, given this radical agenda, that all the contributors, save one, are based at U.S. universities. Perspectives from outside American academia, I'd argue, are vital to the project and would have greatly added to the discussion. There are also a few puzzling moments in the introduction when the book's theoretical focus blurs. For example, Greenhalgh remarks at one point that "science is the ultimate arbiter of truth in modern societies" and that by "speaking in the name of nature, it depoliticizes objects" thereby extracting them "from the field of contestation" (p. 9). Yes, but what is the "science" that is being invoked here? Isn't the contestatory nature of "science" one of the key themes of the book? After all, a few pages earlier we've been invited to ponder "what counts as 'modern science' to Chinese people? What hopes are being invested in it? Who is making 'science' and how?" (p. 5). There is something vaguely wistful, too, about pointing out the ideological role of science and its naturalizing effects in an age of climate change...