The combination of changing international circumstances alongside significant developments in China’s domestic politics made 1960 a turning point in Chinese international scientific outreach. Chapter 3 examines the impacts of these on Chinese engagement with the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs and the World Federation of Scientific Workers, considering the reasons for the significant divergence in how each was viewed and, consequently, those relationships evolved into the early years of the new decade. As had been the case in the 1950s, elite Chinese scientists and scientific organisations worked with foreign affairs officials, but in the context of the early 1960s this meant significantly adjusting and adapting their approaches to such external events and organisations. In all, Chinese science diplomacy via united front work was less well suited to the combative context of the Sino-Soviet split than when the two powers were not so overtly locked in competition for influence.

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.

Scientists had a distinctive part to play in the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign relations prior to it coming to power as well as during the early decades of the People’s Republic. The Conclusion considers the significance of this sustained party and party-state interest in scientists’ international activities for subsequent developments from the 1970s through China’s rise as a science and technology power by the early twenty-first century. These relations did not just spring out of nowhere, fully formed, and ready to go with the onset of rapprochement. Nor were they simply a product of long-term Americanisation. Consequently, the Conclusion explores notable areas of continuity and others of revived relevance when it comes to the party-state and the spectrum of international activities undertaken by scientists.

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.

Chapter Four looks at how Hong Kong’s local business elite and foreign businesses were gradually squeezed out from center stage of the financial market in Hong Kong by Chinese companies and the business elite. While local tycoons worked closely with the CCP to defend the city’s undemocratic status quo and advance their business interests on the mainland, they valued the legal and institutional autonomy of Hong Kong as safeguards of their wealth. Chinese tycoons with Hong Kong residency, some of whom are publicly known as CCP members, also value such autonomy and legal protection of their private wealth, though many see themselves as caretakers of Beijing’s interests in Hong Kong. The business elites’ contradictory character manifests itself amidst the fight over the extradition bill, when many local and mainland Chinese tycoons explicitly or implicitly acted against the bill. The US-China trade war that began in 2017 superimposed on the elite conflict in Hong Kong and cast a shadow on the offshore financial role of Hong Kong.

Chapter 1 focuses on the key role played by Dutch communist and founding member of the Soviet Comintern Henricus Sneevliet (alias Maring) in the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Shanghai in 1921. Background is provided on the challenging political and economic circumstances of Republican-era China, and two concepts promoted by Sneevliet with lasting significance for the CCP: the need for a disciplined, Leninist party, and the necessity of allying with the broader Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) movement, known as the “United Front.” Chinese resistance to Sneevliet’s second concept, led by student activist Zhang Guotao, who advocated the immediate establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat, was a factor in Sneevliet’s low opinion of the CCP as a viable political party. This contrasts with his favorable impression of Sun Yat-sen and the KMT in the south, which led to a debate in the Comintern over the viability of mass party strategy. Eventually, Chen Duxiu, the Party’s current leader, ordered CCP members to join the KMT, but Sneevliet was replaced by Russian Comintern agent Mikhail Borodin.

Communist efforts to recruit students and often unsuccessful attempts to tap into the student movement were contingent on GMD education in overseas Chinese schools. The Guomindang promoted Asianist ideas aiming to increase Chinese influence in Southeast Asia, including the idea of a regional International of Nationalities. On one hand, the GMD’s education policies were responsible for the rise of Chinese identification among the locally born Chinese. The rise of Chinese identity among locally born Chinese contributed to increasing the MCP’s popularity among students on the eve of the war and after the start of the Japanese occupation in 1942. On the other hand, the younger generation of Malayan-born Chinese rebelled against GMD indoctrination, which, however, successfully instilled in them identification with China. Both the MCP and the Communist Youth League had similar shortcomings due to the lack of cadres, finances, and knowledge of language. Teachers in Chinese schools, who often had communist views, instilled in their students the “modern” cosmopolitan outlook, which included Western music, arts, and communism.

Due to its Chinese membership and its national status as the communist party of Malaya, the MCP embraced two national identities, Chinese and Malayan, and represented two nations. Bolshevik language both empowered and hindered the MCP as a Chinese association and as a communist party. By 1934, dictated by the MCP’s logic of survival as an overseas Chinese organization, the MCP started to practice United Front tactics. Over the course of the 1930s, the MCP was supported by some affluent members of the Chinese community, as the overseas bourgeoisie were concerned about a better government in China. Yet the radical antibourgeois and anti-British language of the MCP resulted in a loss of support among affluent members of the Chinese community on the eve of the war. The majority of the Chinese community was neither anti-British nor anticapitalistic. The Bolshevik concept of a proletarian nation and anti-British rhetoric hindered the MCP in its ability to attract a following and excluded the Chinese bourgeoisie as potential members of its communist party. At the same time, the Bolshevik language of the revolution helped to strengthen the MCP’s ambitions.

Chapter 1 situates the wenshi ziliao within the context of post-Mao cultural production and ideology in the 1980s. The party-state integrated professionalization and expertise-based specialization with political mobilization, and adopted a flexible experimental approach to reform in the economic and cultural arenas. Whether in the form of special economic zones, news and entertainment media structures, sites of official commemoration, or oral history projects, local elites and officials were given officially sanctioned space to undertake economic and cultural initiatives. This moment of innovation and experimentation involved the historical rehabilitation of entrepreneurs, intellectuals, Guomindang (GMD) affiliates, and other former “counterrevolutionaries.” Historical production by the People’s Political Consultative Conference and wenshi ziliao committees adhered to central guidance and local initiative. Through the PPCC’s mandate of “inspect, consult, and reeducate,” the state applied to the realm of historical investigation a combination of strategies for gauging local conditions, seeking popular legitimacy, and asserting political control. Wenshi ziliao organizers called for “united front” materials and interwove the stories of a wide spectrum of historical actors ranging from Party revolutionaries to former shop owners, gold miners, bandits, and GMD officials.

Differentiating wenshi ziliao from other kinds of history production such as gazetteers and Party histories, organizers emphasized the integration of oral history with political mobilization. Internal circulation embodied the diversity/unity strategy of the Party by creating a “safe zone” for celebrating inclusivity and plurality of expression in which Party officials, informants, writers, and editors could experiment locally with different variations of reform discourse in the realm of history. It contained heterogeneity within a framework of controlled distribution to a select group of government, Party, and academic institutions along with work units in targeted industries. Yet they remained ambivalent. The inclusiveness and diversity of the wenshi ziliao, while essential to the tasks of building a united front and bringing about political healing and reconciliation, made it difficult for the Party to control the political message that they conveyed. Unlike the previous Maoist campaigns of mass mobilization, the wenshi ziliao were a restricted approach to mobilization that involved a selective network of local elites and a semi-internal framework for publication and dissemination. They integrated the Maoist methods of mass line and investigative research with a more controlled, selective mobilization process.