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Dialectical Materialism Serves Voluntarist Productivism: The Epistemic Foundation of Lysenkoism in Socialist China and North Vietnam

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Abstract

This essay asks why Chinese and North Vietnamese agricultural scientists in the 1950s and 1960s willingly adopted the Soviet agricultural sciences represented not only by agronomists Ivan Michurin and Trofim Lysenko but soil scientist Vasili Williams. The answer, I argue, is that they were fascinated by the promise of Soviet agrobiology that I conceptualize as a combination of dialectical materialism and voluntarist productivism: if one masters the interconnectivity between plants, microbes, organic and inorganic materials, and soil, one can overcome the given biological and environmental limits, manipulate and optimize the material flow, and ceaselessly maximize agricultural production. Engaging the historiographical debate about Lysenkoism—which has mostly paid attention to the Euro-American cases (the Soviet, Eastern European and even “capitalist” Western), genetic controversies, and geopolitical specificities of each locale—as a global phenomenon, I shed fresh light on the understudied Chinese and North Vietnamese cases, the intersection between Lysenko’s theories and Williamsian soil science, and epistemic commonality across national differences.

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Notes

  1. On the historiographical discourse about the “diffusion” of modern science, see Basalla (1967), Anderson (2018a).

  2. Lysenkoism influenced not only Communist countries but also several Western countries. See Wolfe (2010), Cassata (2012), deJong-Lambert (2013), Iida (2015), deJong-Lambert and Krementsov (2017).

  3. For works that more directly frame Lysenkoism as agricultural science or a set of practical agricultural management principles, see Smith (2014, Chap. 3) and Elina (2017).

  4. For Chinese scholarship on Chinese Lysenkoism, see Cui (2000), Lü (2011), Wang (2015), Feng et al. (2016); Luo (2018). These authors approach Lysenkoism in China based on their criticism of political ideology intervening in science.

  5. Nguyễn Thụy Phương’s work on the postcolonial history of a French school in Hà Nội, the Lycée Albert-Sarraut, briefly touches upon the school’s Michurinist biology curriculum with a focus on its ideological significance (Nguyễn 2015). To the best of my knowledge, no Vietnamese research on Lysenkoism in North Vietnam has been published.

  6. Some few works by Bùi Huy Đáp were translated into English by the US government in the late 1950s as part of their military and intelligence activities in Indochina; for example, see Bui (1958), Bui (1959a).

  7. This is mainly because Lysenko himself called his theories “Michurinist biology” or “agrobiology.” For more detailed discussions on the terminology, see Gordin (2018, pp. 57–58).

  8. The historian of Chinese agricultural sciences Sigrid Schmalzer suggests a similar binary of “tu” (soil) and “yang” (ocean) sciences. The former came to mean the local, rural, humble, and traditional Chinese ways of doing science, while the latter referred to the foreign, modern, elite, and Western approaches. For more detailed analysis on the binary between yang and tu science, see Schmalzer (2016, pp. 34–38).

  9. That is, in the years before 1953, when geneticists had not yet discovered the double helix and the notion of the gene remained largely presumptive.

  10. In their chapter on “The Problem of Lysenkoism” (Chap. 7), Levins and Lewontin (1985) analyze Lysenkoism as a theory of heredity. Although they articulate the agricultural conditions in the Soviet Union in detail and even mention Vasili Williams in passing, agriculture is treated as a broader context or consequence of Lysenkoist hereditary theory. They do, however, offer some critical analytical tools that can be applied to farming and agriculture. Another chapter, “The Political Economy of Agricultural Research” (Chap. 9), includes their critiques of “capitalist” agriculture that are only implicitly related to their examination of Lysenkoism in Chapter 7 (see below Footnote 33). If so, one of my contributions is to complement what Levins and Lewontin already hint at by reconceptualizing “Lysenkoism” into “Soviet agrobiology” and expanding its geographical focus to China and North Vietnam.

  11. Recently, scholarly efforts have been launched to reconceptualize the history of science, technology, and medicine in Asia in non-diffusionist ways. Such projects, albeit diverse in their approaches and disciplinary backgrounds, are often categorized under the banner of “Asia as Method” (Chen 2010; Anderson 2012). Those who are involved in discussions about Asia as Method tend to see Asia as a heterogenous patchwork rather than a fixed geographic entity, containing different localities and historicities, and they try to answer critically questions of “what they [Asianists] have to offer to practitioners in other locations, and how they might innovate as part of a process of an intellectual division of international labour” (Law and Lin 2017, p. 8). If so, Asia as Method is neither about the utter denial of or rupture from European modernity, nor the attempt to lay the foundation of the radical uniqueness of Asia. Rather, more feasibly, it is supposed to critically engage with the longstanding scholarly norm that we might call “Europe as Method.” Putting Europe as Method and Asia as Method into conversation will soften the former’s epistemic hegemony. For a literature review on the history of science, technology, and medicine in Southeast Asia based on the Asia as Method discourse, see Anderson (2018b).

  12. On the prehistory of modern Chinese biology and genetics from the 1870s to 1930s, see Jin (2020).

  13. On Le Tianyu (1900–1984) and the Chinese scientific community in Yan’an, see Schneider (2003, pp. 104–108). See also Reardon-Anderson (1991, pt. IV).

  14. On the generations of Chinese scientists in diverse fields trained in the West and Japan before 1949, see Buck (1980); Reardon‐Anderson (1991); Wang (2002); Hu (2005); Tsu and Elman (2014); Shen (2014).

  15. For example, when Zhang Zongbing, a Cornell-trained entomologist and professor at Peking University, translated the English edition of Principles and Methodologies: The Summary of Michurin’s Fifty-year Work into Chinese in 1950, Ye (1950) criticized Zhang’s translation for not properly distinguishing “acclimatization” and “change,” and “breeding” and “cultivating.”.

  16. Bùi Huy Đáp’s background was not as sparkling as his career. Coming from a poor peasant household, he went to the University of French Indochina to study agriculture. Đáp had no master’s or doctoral degree. Nevertheless, Đáp is celebrated as the “father of Spring Rice,” the first hybrid rice in modern Vietnamese history, although other foreign-trained scientists also contributed to the project.

  17. On the comprehensive inquiries on Vietnamese agriculture during and after the French colonial rule, see Kleinen (2005). See also Aso (2018).

  18. Bùi Huy Đáp officially visited Beijing as a member of the Vietnamese delegation to China in 1953. The trip might have let him know how Chinese agriculturalists tried to adopt the Soviet agricultural sciences. See People’s Daily (29 November 1953).

  19. On Michurin and his theories, see Michurin (1949); Weiner (1985). On the recent Russian reappraisal of Michurin, see Goncharov and Savel’ev (2016).

  20. On Lysenko’s appropriation of Michurinist “graft hybridization,” see Graham (2016, pp. 95–96).

  21. It was called by Lysenko the “theory of phasic development of plants” and by Western biologists “phenology.” On Lysenko’s work on this theory, Loren Graham points out that “Lysenko’s major errors were not in his subject of study but in his methods and conclusions.” See Graham (2016, pp. 83–87).

  22. However, we do not need to equate Lysenko’s theories with the doctrine of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Recently, the emerging field of epigenetics seems to produce evidence that supports the Lamarckian idea. Based on these new findings, some Russian scientists and journalists argue that “Lysenko was right.” Loren Graham counters this argument: “[W]here he was right, he was not original; where he was original, he was not right. He was right in his belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, but so were many of his predecessors and contemporaries. He was original in his claims to change one species into another, but his claims have not been replicated, and we must conclude that he was wrong.… Lysenko was actually a very poor representative of the concept of the inheritance of acquired characteristics.” See Graham (2016, pp. 141–142).

  23. This point hints at the doctrine of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. I delve into this idea and the genetic theories of Soviet agrobiology in the following section.

  24. The dichotomy between the reductionist, capitalist, and the Western, on one hand, and the holistic, socialist, and the Eastern, on the other, was a framework that was widely adopted by the historical actors in this paper. Yet non-reductionist views on life and its relation to the environment were present in the West too. For example, see Worster (1977), Peterson (2016).

  25. The resilience and creativity of Vietnamese peasants have been well studied. See Popkin (1979), Kerkvliet (2005).

  26. Here I want to emphasize that this anthropocentric dream of transgenerationally exploiting nature is by no means limited to Soviet agricultural sciences and actors in the socialist bloc. Breeding programs and GMOs in Euro-American contexts represent to some extent the same desire.

  27. For detailed information about Qiu Weifan’s career, see his autobiography and his memoir (Qiu 1993, 1996).

  28. Kovda was deeply involved in organizing scientific institutions and policies in the early PRC period. In 1955, he submitted “A Number of Suggestions Regarding Planning and Organizing the Nation-wide Scientist Research in the People’s Republic of China” to the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Yao and Baichun 2004). He also wrote a monograph on Chinese soil and landscape (Kovda 1960).

  29. Here, I find Kovda’s treatment of Liebig unfair. Far from simply representing “capitalist” soil scientists as opposed to Soviet ones, Liebig was one of the earliest critics of the rupture between the countryside and cities under capitalism, which he thought would lead to the dual problems of urban pollution and the depletion of soil fertility. Marx’s theory of soil fertility, or the concept of “metabolic rift” more specifically, was influenced by Liebig (Foster and Magdoff 2000; Schneider and McMichael 2010). What is unclear is how Kovda came to accept the contrast between Liebig’s theory of soil and Soviet soil science; both could have been situated in the same genealogy of Liebig, Marx, Dokuchaev, and Williams.

  30. Dokuchaev is remembered for his groundbreaking work on drought and harvest failure in the Russian steppes in the late nineteenth century. He emphasized the devastating impact of human immigration and farming on the “virgin nature” of the steppes and aimed to undo human-induced changes. He also argued that the question of maintaining moisture within soil should be at the core of coping with massive harvest failures in the dry steppes. Dokuchaev suggested that it is possible to optimize soil moisture conditions by regulating land use, rather than passively taking it as a matter of the climate. On Dokuchaev’s life and work, see Moon (2005); Oldfield and Shaw (2015); see also Brain (2010, pp. 674–675).

  31. English-language secondary materials on Williams are sparse. For bits of information on him and his relationship with Lysenko, see Becker (1996, pp. 66–67) and Stanchevici (2017, p. 144).

  32. Sigrid Schmalzer has found almost the same concept of “using the land while caring for the land (yong di yang di) in Maoist agricultural discourses (Schmalzer 2019, p. 424).

  33. Levins and Lewontin show another way of criticizing capitalist agriculture from the perspective of socialist or “dialectical” agriculture. They argue that the genuine focus of capitalist discourses on agricultural productivity is not increasing crop yield per se but maximizing the use of and farmers’ dependence on purchased inputs such as hybrid seeds and agrochemicals (Levins and Lewontin 1985, Chap. 9). Examining agricultural technologies, Jack Kloppenburg makes a similar argument (2004).

  34. On Zhu Kezhen, see Wang (2002).

  35. As we have seen, the previous scholarship on Lysenkoism has focused too much on genetic controversies and overlooked the importance of soil science in the transnational circulation of Soviet agrobiology. One of few exceptions is Christiana Oghina-Pavie’s work on Lysenkoism in Romania. Oghiana-Pavie points out, albeit briefly, that “the Dokuchaev-Kostachev-Williams system on soil science and the Michurinist conception of biology” arrived in Romania in tandem (Oghina-Pavie 2017, pp. 78–79).

  36. On this point, I appreciate the clarification and suggestion of an anonymous reviewer.

  37. Here, as always, I am indebted to critical scholars of earlier generations, especially Graham (1998) and Marks (2017).

  38. On the Anthropocene, see Ellis (2018). On critiques of the concept of the Anthropocene, see Haraway (2015), Van den Berg (2016), and also Foster (2020).

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Acknowledgements

I want to thank Nguyễn Bá Cường, Sang Ho Kim, Trần Tùng Ngọc, and Nguyệt Minh for their help during my field research in Hà Nội in 2018. I also send my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers for this journal, Sigrid Schmalzer, Christine Luk, Warwick Anderson, Janet Browne, Victor Seow, Hyeok Hweon Kang, Youjung Shin, Dong-kyu Yeom, Sara Press, Ann Choi, and Ashley Kim for their valuable comments and suggestions on early drafts of this essay. Last but not least, I would thank my Vietnamese language teachers, Ngô Như Bình, Trần Quang Minh, and Hoàng Văn Đốc, for their care and patience in guiding me towards its proficiency.

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This work was partly supported by the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University.

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    Jongsik Christian Yi

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Yi, J.C. Dialectical Materialism Serves Voluntarist Productivism: The Epistemic Foundation of Lysenkoism in Socialist China and North Vietnam. J Hist Biol 54, 513–539 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-021-09652-7

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