Marc Andre Matten - Böcker

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.

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.

This anthology with annotated translations of 34 texts of Chinese and Taiwanese historians introduces contemporary debates on transnational and global history in both countries. The book covers ten fields of historical research: conceptual history, environmental history, the history of translation, women’s history, maritime history, history of overseas students, historical nihilism, New Qing history, new revolutionary history, and the history of spatial conceptualizations in Sino-foreign interactions.Each section—complemented with a detailed introduction to the research of the past two decades—assembles texts of a variety of authors, allowing insights into their interactions with Western scholarship and showing the impact of political interventions into academic research. Detailed annotations make the texts accessible to a non-sinological readership (including undergraduate students). Together with the annex of multilingual digital archives of Chinese and Taiwanese history the book is suited for both research and teaching.