Biology and Revolution in Twentieth-Century China

In this first comprehensive analysis of biological science in modern China, Laurence Schneider traces its troubled development from the 1920s, across the 1949 boundary, and into contemporary post-socialist China. Schneider uses his detailed portrayals of influential scientists and key education and research institutions to explore both internal and external forces at work in scientific development. The author examines the largely U.S. sources of its technical development and the subsequent quality of its research and educational accomplishments. At the same time, he firmly grounds these in the context of China's national, economic, and social revolutions. These upheavals have been the source of periodic obsessions to use science to regulate nature, to manage foreign influence on science, and to control scientists. The author argues that populist 'mass science' was Mao's solution to problems of control, especially in the 1950s, when Soviet Lysenkoism was granted the power in China to monopolize biology and ban genetics. This book provides the only detailed study of Lysenkoism in China, linking its ascendance to the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. It concludes with an analysis of the phoenix-like rise of genetics in recent decades and the assignment of biotechnology to a leading role in plans for economic development. Based on a broad range of archival materials and interviews with major actors in the story, this book will be a rich resource for all those interested in contemporary China.

Biology and Revolution is both an erudite labor of love and an absorbing examination of the struggle for control of scientific endeavor, and deserves a wide readership., Excellent., This book contains a rare but detailed analysis of how institutional, social, and political factors influenced not only Chinese professional lives, but also their institutions, universities, and laboratories. A concluding chapter offers a thoughtful, critical survey of events. Carefully researched writing; chapter bibliographical notes; glossary of Chinese names; list of 24 scientists interviewed by Schneider; bibliography in English and Chinese. Highly recommended., The intellectual content of this book is intriguing., In this comprehensive history of biological science in modern China, Laurence Schneider undertakes to explain the origins, developments, deviations, and triumphs—including China's role in sequencing the human genome—of Chinese genetics and evolutionary theory across the twentieth century. Tracing this history from the 1920s through the 1990s, Professor Schneider's volume adds to the small but growing number of monographs that cross the 1949 divide as well as to the handful of studies about twentieth-century Chinese science.

Laurence Schneider is professor emeritus of Chinese history at Washington University in St. Louis.