The 1964 Peking Science Symposium and 1966 Summer Physics Colloquium were the two largest-scale international science congresses hosted by Mao’s China. Chapter 4 delves into the inner workings of these events, which brought hundreds of visitors to the People's Republic of China from throughout Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania. From planning through to post-conference tours organised for participants, it examines the network of organisations and individuals at national and local levels that collectively shaped these major initiatives to bring foreign scientists to China on the cusp of the Cultural Revolution. In doing so, it shows the extent of integration and coordination between science and foreign relations systems during the Mao era.

Chapter 1 focuses on the evolution of Chinese Communist Party support for Chinese scientists’ involvement in international scientific organisations during the Chinese Civil War and the early years of CCP rule after 1949. It analyses the meanings, motivations, and manifestations of such CCP-supported activities before and after taking power through organisations such as the Chinese Association of Scientific Workers, which had significant domestic and international dimensions. In doing so, it charts the rise of on Chinese involvement in the World Federation of Scientific Workers (WFSW) across the first decade of the international organisation’s existence, from its founding in 1946 through to Beijing hosting the federation’s tenth anniversary celebrations in 1956. This first decade of Chinese involvement in the WFSW showed the CCP’s united front work paying dividends in building relations with scientists at home and abroad, providing a platform from which the People's Republic of China would pursue a range of other efforts at international outreach.

China’s Mao-era science diplomacy involved strategies and structures that underpinned the hosting of foreign visitors such as scientists. Chapter 5 focuses on networks of individual relationships – professional, personal, and political – that ran through Chinese involvement in the organisations and events discussed in this book, focusing on some of those that developed between Chinese and left-wing British scientists from the 1940s through to the 1970s. Considering the experiences of J. D. Bernal, Howard E. Hinton, Dorothy Hodgkin, Kathleen Lonsdale, and Kurt Mendelssohn, it elucidates the range of motivations, responses, and outcomes on either side of scientists’ visits to China as part of everything from ‘friendship’ delegations made up of political sympathisers to lecture tours organised by scientific organisations. These British scientists had much in common with many other sympathetic visitors from the time, at least in broad strokes; nevertheless, this chapter identifies several key characteristics that set such scientists apart as a category of foreign visitor during the Mao era.

The Introduction maps out the book’s central arguments, contribution, and structure, in addition to contextualising key issues and providing essential background information. It considers the relevance of science diplomacy for understanding China’s international scientific relations under Mao and, in turn, the ways those activities deepen our understanding of the range of actors and approaches involved in science diplomacy. Important ideological concepts and foreign relations strategies underpinning these outreach activities, particularly ‘united front work’, were central to the CCP’s outreach practices involving scientists. The chapter further considers the importance of transnational science in modern China and international science in the post-Second World War period, as well as introducing the key scientists, organisations, and events that sit at the centre of this study.