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U.S.-China Scientific Exchange: a Case Study of State-Sponsored Scientific Internationalism During the Cold War and Beyond

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U.S.-China Scientific Exchange: a Case Study of State-Sponsored Scientific Internationalism During the Cold War and Beyond ZUOYUE WANG* U.S.-China scientific exchange: A case study of state-sponsored scientific internationalism during the Cold War and beyond IN FEBRUARY 1972 President Richard Nixon of theUnited States embarked on his historic journey to Beijing. The dramatic tripnot only opened a new era in U.S.-China relations, but also began an exciting process ofmutual discovery be tween the two peoples. If it is true that, as the China scholar A, Doak Barnett wrote, "never in themodern period have twomajor societies been so isolated from each other for so long in peacetime," the end of the schism also brought forth unprecedented exchanges inmany walks of life, especially in academia.1 The geopolitical move by the two countries to counter Soviet aggression paved the way for interactions in science and other fields. The contacts flourished through the 1970s and expanded even furtherafter the establishment of diplomatic rela tions and the launching of China's economic reformsby the end of the 1970s. This intellectual open door proved to have profound social and political, as well as scientific, impact, especially in China, which had just begun to emerge from the devastating Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976. Despite itsconsiderable significance, scientificexchange has often been treated as a sideline inU.S.-China relations. Several excellent studies examine U.S.-China academic and educational exchanges, but theybarely touch on the scientific com *Department of History, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, CA 91768. I thank Richard Suttmeier, Lawrence Badash, H. Lyman Miller, Gene Rochlin, Wolfgang Panofsky, Xiaojian Zhao, Fan Dainian, JimWilliams, Peter Westwick, Jessica Wang, and Benjamin Zulueta for reading drafts of the paper and for stimulating discussions and com ments. Translations from Chinese documents are my own. Generally, names of Chinese in mainland China are rendered in piny in with family names first and given names last. For Chinese Americans and Chinese in Taiwan, names are usually spelled in theWade-Giles style, with given names first and family names last: e.g., Chen Ning Yang, with the excep tion of Tu Wei-Ming, who uses Wade-Giles but places his family name first and given name second. 1. A. Doak Barnett, China and the major powers in East Asia (Washington, D.C., 1977), 178, as quoted in Harry Harding, A fragile relationship: The United States and China since 1972 (Washington, D.C., 1992), 33; Leo A. Orleans, Science in China and U.S.-China scientific exchanges: Assessment and prospects (Washington, D.C., 1976), 11, estimated in 1976 thatabout 10,000Americans visitedChina between 1971 and 1976. HSPS, 30:1 (1999) 250 Z. WANG ponents, thus obscuring the part that science and technology played in the devel oping relationship. Most of these studies focus on the impact of academic ex changes in theU.S. and leave the political, social, and cultural impact of such exchanges on Chinese society unexamined.2 This paper examines theU.S.-China scientific reopening as a case study of scientific nationalism and internationalism. Here we are concerned not somuch with specific exchange projects as with the political context and implications of the exchange as a whole. What, for example, did the exchange mean toChinese science and Chinese scientists,many of whom had suffered, along with other in tellectuals, horrible persecution at thehands ofMao Zedong's radical Red Guards during theCultural Revolution? How did American scientists respond to the new opportunities? Above all, what does this storyof scientific exchange tell us about scientific nationalism and internationalism during theCold War? In considering these questions, we will look not only at the two national scien tific communities involved but at also the special subnational group of Chinese American scientistswho were crucial in the forging of this new international sci entific network. They, along with Chinese scientistswho were trained in theU.S. in the 1930s and 1940s, helped to stimulate and sustain the exchange program. In turn,the U.S.-China reopening did much to give them a political voice and helped them form a distinct scientific community. The narrative covers mainly theperiod from 1971, when the firstmoves in the reopening took place, up to 1989, when the Chinese government's crackdown on the pro-democracy demonstration at Tiananmen Square produced a hiatus in the exchange and introduced new dynam ics inU.S.-China relations. But we will also take a brief look at the 1990s, when this community of Chinese American scientists evolved into a transnational scien tificnetwork of theChinese diaspora and when some of these scientistswere ac cused by theU.S. government of spying for China in the areas of nuclear and defense technologies. The present study thus examines interactions of scientific communities at three levels, the subnational, the national, and the international, during theCold War and beyond. 2. David M. Lampton, A relationship restored: Trends in U.S.-China educational exchanges, 1978-1984 (Washington, D.C., 1986); Leo A. Orleans, Chinese students inAmerica: Poli cies, issues, and numbers (Washington, D.C., 1988). See also Kathlin Smith, "The role of scientists in normalizing U.S.-China relations, 1965-1979," and Richard R Suttmeier, "Sci entific cooperation and conflict management in U.S.-China relations, 1978 to the present," unpublished papers, 1998, courtesy of the authors; Denis Fred Simon, "The role of science and technology in Chinese foreign relations," in Samuel S. Kim, ed., China and the world: Chinese foreign policy in the post-Mao era (Boulder and London, 1984), 293-318. There is also little written about U.S.-Taiwan scientific exchange, which should make a fascinating comparison with the U.S.-China case. Although it is beyond the scope of the present paper, I intend to address aspects of that story in the future. U.S.-CHINA SCIENTIFIC EXCHANGE 251 State-sponsored scientific internationalism The U.S.-China scientific exchange provides a case of what might be termed state-sponsored scientific internationalismduring theCold War, when nation-states, often for geopolitical reasons, established the framework for communication and collaboration among scientists across national boundaries. This was in contrast to themore traditional, private form of scientific internationalism that relied on per sonal scientific communication beforeWorld War II. Prominent examples of the latter included the travel of scientists to enemy territories in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to conduct scientific research.3 The statewas mostly absent or passive. Nationalism did surge during and immediately followingWorld War I, as Entente scientists launched a boycott against theirGerman colleagues. Max Planck lamented the division as an "unnatural mixture of science and politics."4 Yet, itwas often the national scientific communities, inGermany and elsewhere, rather than the governments, thatmost actively promoted or manipulated the ide ology of scientific nationalism.5 In the interwaryears, "private" internationalism soon revived as physicists fromaround theworld, often financed by theRockefeller Foundation, traveled toGermany, Denmark, and England to study the new quan tummechanics and nuclear physics. Chinese scientists also benefited from and joined in thismovement of people and ideas. Most pioneering Chinese physicists in themodern era, for example, received their graduate training in theU.S. or Europe in the early twentieth century. Chinese biologists exchanged specimens with colleagues in theWest.6 World War II, especially theManhattan Project, started state internationalism in science in earnest, although traditional,personal networks among scientists con tinued to play an importantrole. To make the atomic bomb, theU.S., Britain, and Canada pooled resources and scientists under formal governmental agreements. During the ensuing Cold War, state internationalism flourished when theworld was divided into two hostile camps in the late 1940s and 1950s, and persisted even when realignment and detente in the 1960s and 1970s changed the early pattern of bipolar conflict. Both theNATO andWarsaw-pact alliances sponsored fraternal scientific cooperation. The U.S. and Britain exchanged information, albeit lim ited, on nuclear weapons. Scientists from theEastern bloc worked with each other 3. Lawrence Badash, "British and American views of the German menace inWorld War I," Royal Society of London, Notes and records, 34 (1979), 91-121. 4. J.L. Heilbron, The dilemmas of an upright man: Max Planck as spokesman for German science (Berkeley, 1986), 104. 5. Ibid., 109; Paul Forman, "Scientific internationalism and theWeimar physicists: The ideology and itsmanipulation inGermany afterWorld War I," Isis, 64 (1973), 151-180; Daniel Kevles, "'Into hostile political camps': The reorganization of international science inWorld War I," Isis, 62 (1971), 47-60. 6. Peter Neushul and Zuoyue Wang, "Between the devil and the deep sea: C.K. Tseng, ocean farming, and the politics of science inmodern China," unpublished paper. 252 Z. WANG at theDubna nuclear research center in the Soviet Union.7 Using Dubna's 10-GeV accelerator, Chinese physicists led byWang Ganchang discovered an elementary particle, the anti-sigma negative hyperon, in the late 1950s, widely regarded as the onlymajor achievement in thehistory of thatmachine.8 Until the Sino-Soviet split became public in the early 1960s, thousands of Soviet scientists and engineers also went towork inChina as advisors. China sent students,
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