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Crafting socialist embryology: dialectics, aquaculture and the diverging discipline in Maoist China, 1950–1965

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Abstract

In the 1950s, embryology in socialist China underwent a series of changes that adjusted the disciplinary apparatus to suit socialism and the national goal of self-reliance. As the Communist state called on scientists to learn from the Soviets, embryologists’ comprehensive view on heredity, which did not contradict Trofim Lysenko (1898–1976)’s doctrines, provided a space for them to advance their discipline. Leading scientists, often trained abroad in the tradition of experimental embryology, rode on the tides of Maoist ideology and repositioned their research. Some of their creative realignment of previous research questions, materials, and traditions to Marxist philosophy and agricultural objectives generated productive programs. In particular, Tong Dizhou (1902–1979) translated Engels’s dialectics of nature into a research question about cytoplasmic inheritance. His continuing investigation on it led to the first goldfish “clone” through a nuclear transplantation experiment; Zhu Xi and his associates transferred a goldfish model in embryology into studies on improving carp aquaculture, leading to a rare success in the Great Leap Forward of 1958. These directions for embryology continued well into the 1960s. At a time when global embryology was diversifying and began to be molecularized, eventually forming “developmental biology,” socialist embryology took shape in China with a different set of epistemic and practical commitments. The history of its development challenges and enriches our understanding of the concrete process of change in one discipline under Mao, showing ways in which scientists creatively adapted state-sanctioned ideologies and visions to do productive work outside the framework of molecular biology during the Cold War.

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Notes

  1. Tong’s “lumping” of historical camps in biology certainly had its problems. As Jane Maienschein points out, in the late nineteenth century, preformationism was no longer so much about preexistence of forms than about predetermination or predelineation (Maienschein 2005).

  2. Mao (1966, 277). The author’s translation. This adage originally came from Mao’s On Contradiction published in 1937.

  3. Tong articulated these ideas with great clarity in a posthumously published manuscript titled “A brief discussion of theories in biology and the history of their development,” dated 1978–1979, a final synthesis of Tong’s views in history of biology and dialectics. Although the manuscript was finished rather late, reading against Tong’s research activities and writings about nucleus/cytoplasmic relation earlier, it seems Tong at least had some inklings of these ideas in the early 1960s (Tong 1980, 7–41). Also see Tong (1964).

  4. Schneider (1986, 21–24, 71–74). Previous scholarship has emphasized the criticism of Lysenkoism and promotion of academic and agricultural genetics voiced at the Qingdao symposium. Such an emphasis seems to be somewhat anachronistic and to have overstretched one side of the argument, probably by the retrospective assessment of Chinese socialism and its detrimental effects on genetics. As much as the symposium was for open discussion, adherents of Michurin biology had spoken extensively and they certainly did not think the symposium was only about promoting genetics. See Li (1988).

  5. Because of the interruption of the Cultural Revolution starting in 1966, which halted almost all scientific research within the Chinese Academy of Science, the major publication reporting these nuclear transplantation experiments only came about in 1973; see Tung et al. (1965), Tong et al. (1973).

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Lisa Onaga, Hallam Stevens, Zuoyue Wang, Howard Chiang, Christine Luk, two anonymous reviewers, the chief editor of this journal Staffan Müller-Wille, as well as organizers and participants at the 2015 workshop “Crafting Life and Locating Gender in East Asia” in Nanyang Technological University and those at the 2016 workshop “Decolonizing Science in Asia” at the Pennsylvania State University, for helpful suggestions in improving the manuscript.

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  1. Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry, Chemical Heritage Foundation, 315 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19106, USA

    Lijing Jiang

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Jiang, L. Crafting socialist embryology: dialectics, aquaculture and the diverging discipline in Maoist China, 1950–1965. HPLS 40, 3 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-017-0166-x

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