Knowledge Production in Mao-Era China

Learning from the Masses

AvRui Kunze,Marc Andre Matten

Häftad, Engelska, 2023

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Beskrivning

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.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2023-08-15
Mått:153 x 230 x 12 mm
Vikt:295 g
Format:Häftad
Språk:Engelska
Antal sidor:196
Förlag:Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
ISBN:9781498584630

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Mer om författaren

Rui Kunze is a research fellow at Friedrich–Alexander University Erlangen–Nüremberg.Marc Andre Matten is professor of contemporary Chinese history at Friedrich–Alexander University Erlangen–Nüremberg.

Recensioner i media

The cover illustration featuring the diagram of a pig’s acupuncture points is an apt illustration for a book devoted to the "people’s" science and how science, technology, and politics were intermixed in China under Mao Zedong, especially during the period spanning the start of Mao's Great Leap Forward campaign (1958) until a decade or so after the Cultural Revolution ended, around 1986. Drawing on technical and popular publications of the period devoted to science, medicine, agriculture, economics, industry, technology, and related subjects, Kunze and Matten investigate how "science" was conveyed to the masses in China as part of a conscious state-building and socialist construction effort…. For anyone interested in how science and politics interacted in China during the Mao Zedong era, this book provides especially enlightening reading. Highly recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students and faculty. General readers.

Innehållsförteckning

List of FiguresAcknowledgmentsIntroductionChapter 1 Defining Correct Science—Transformations of Knowledge EpistemologiesChapter 2 Creating the People’s Science: Science Dissemination as a Social ProcessChapter 3 Promising a Bright Future: The (Half-)Mechanization of Agricultural ProductionChapter 4 Producing Knowledge on the Shopfloor: Technological Innovation in Socialist IndustrializationChapter 5 Creating a Bifurcated Knowledge System—the Case of Chinese Veterinary MedicineChapter 6 Re-shuffling Science in the Reform EraBibliographyIndexAbout the Author