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China "Reds" Versus "Experts" in the 1950s and 1960s
Tensions between scientists and China's communist rulers
existed from the earliest days of the People's Republic and reached
their height during the Cultural Revolution
(see The Cultural Revolution Decade, 1966-76
, ch. 1). In the early 1950s, Chinese
scientists, like other intellectuals, were subjected to regular
indoctrination intended to replace bourgeois attitudes with those
more suitable to the new society. Many attributes of the
professional organization of science, such as its assumption of
autonomy in choice of research topics, its internationalism, and
its orientation toward professional peer groups rather than
administrative authorities, were condemned as bourgeois. Those
scientists who used the brief period of free expression in the
Hundred Flowers Campaign
of 1956-57 (see Glossary)--to air
complaints of excessive time taken from scientific work by
political meetings and rallies or of the harmful effects of
attempts by poorly educated party cadres to direct scientific
work--were criticized for their "antiparty" stance, labeled as
"rightists," and sometimes dismissed from administrative or
academic positions
(see The Transition to Socialism, 1953-57
, ch.
1).
The terminology of the period distinguished between
"red" and
"expert" (see Glossary).
Although party leaders spoke of the need
to combine "redness" with expertise, they more often acted as if
political rectitude and professional skill were mutually exclusive
qualities. The period of the Great Leap Forward saw efforts to
reassign scientists to immediately useful projects, to involve the
uneducated masses in such research work as plant breeding or pest
control, and to expand rapidly the ranks of scientific and
technical personnel by lowering professional standards. The
economic depression and famine following the Great Leap Forward,
and the need to compensate for the sudden withdrawal of Soviet
advisers and technical personnel in 1960, brought a renewed but
short-lived emphasis on expertise and professional standards in the
early 1960s.
The scientific establishment was attacked during the Cultural
Revolution, causing major damage to China's science and technology.
Most scientific research ceased. In extreme cases, individual
scientists were singled out as "counterrevolutionaries" and made
the objects of public criticism and persecution, and the research
work of whole institutes was brought to a halt for years on end.
The entire staffs of research institutes commonly were dispatched
to the countryside for months or years to learn political virtue by
laboring with the poor and lower-middle peasants. Work in the
military research units devoted to nuclear weapons and missiles
presumably continued, although the secrecy surrounding strategic
weapons research makes it difficult to assess the impact of the
Cultural Revolution in that sector.
In the most general sense, the Cultural Revolution represented
the triumph of anti-intellectualism and the consistent, decade-long
deprecation of scholarship, formal education, and all the qualities
associated with professionalism in science. Intellectuals were
assumed to be inherently counterrevolutionary, and it was asserted
that their characteristic attitudes and practices were necessarily
opposed to the interests of the masses. Universities were closed
from the summer of 1966 through 1970, when they reopened for
undergraduate training with very reduced enrollments and a heavy
emphasis on political training and manual labor. Students were
selected for political rectitude rather than academic talent.
Primary and secondary schools were closed in 1966 and 1967, and
when reopened were repeatedly disrupted by political struggle. All
scientific journals ceased publication in 1966, and subscriptions
to foreign journals lapsed or were canceled. For most of a decade
China trained no new scientists or engineers and was cut off from
foreign scientific developments.
During the decade between 1966 and 1976, China's leaders
attempted to create a new structure for science and technology
characterized by mass participation, concentration on immediate
practical problems in agriculture and industry, and eradication of
distinctions between scientists and workers. Ideologues saw
research as an inherently political activity and interpreted all
aspects of scientific work, from choice of topic to methods of
investigation, as evidence of an underlying political line.
According to this view, research served the interests of one social
class or another and required the guidance of the party to ensure
that it served the interest of the masses.
The early 1970s were characterized by mass experimentation, in
which large numbers of peasants were mobilized to collect data and
encouraged to view themselves as doing scientific research. Typical
projects included collecting information on new crop varieties,
studying the effectiveness of locally produced insecticides, and
making extensive geological surveys aimed at finding useful
minerals or fossil fuels. Mao Zedong took a personal interest in
earthquake prediction, which became a showcase of Cultural
Revolution-style science. Geologists went to the countryside to
collect folk wisdom on precursors of earthquakes, and networks of
thousands of observers were established to monitor such signs as
the level of water in wells or the unusual behavior of domestic
animals. The emphasis in this activity, as in acupuncture
anesthesia, was on immediate practical benefits, and little effort
was made to integrate the phenomena observed into larger
theoretical frameworks.
The effects of the extreme emphasis on short-term problems and
the deprecation of theory were noted by Western scientists who
visited China in the mid- and late 1970s. For example, work in
research institutes affiliated with the petrochemical industry was
described as excessively characterized by trial and error. In one
case, large numbers of substances were tried as catalysts or
modifiers of the wax crystals in crude oil, and little attention
was given to the underlying chemical properties of the catalytic or
modifying agents.
Data as of July 1987
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