New Publications from Prof. Lin
The two new publications out this year look into China's scientific policies domestically and internationally.
The chapter "From Political to Technological Leader of the Third World" illustrates how the country’s engagement with UN specialized agencies shifted from using them as diplomatic, politically led battlegrounds to pursuing scientific and technological collaboration. The first change came with the New International Economic Order, when UN agencies explored “appropriate technology” ideas. It disseminated Mao-era science and technology as models for countries with limited resources. Some UN specialized agencies redefined the term “technology” to accommodate the fact that Mao-era technology was primarily based on its political contexts and could not be extracted purely from other countries. The second followed the opening-up policy in 1978, when the Chinese government worked with the UN to acquire science and technology while offering training, especially to low-income Asian countries, on its agricultural and public health policies.
The article "Parallel Publications and Selective Interactions" shows how the regime’s stance toward Soviet paradigms like Pavlovianism and Lysenkoism was shaped by their respective political histories in the USSR. Under varying political pressures, scientists negotiated ideological conformity in different venues. In generalist journals, they had to align with Soviet theories and publicly confess prior shortcomings. In specialized publications, they followed Maoist principles, particularly the valorization of farmers’ knowledge, to question or reframe Soviet authority. In popular science publications, by contrast, Soviet science was largely absent, displaced by productivism and technological self-reliance narratives.
Full references:
“Parallel Publications and Selective Interactions: Food and Agricultural Sciences and the Soviet Scientific Paradigms under the Early People’s Republic of China.” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 55, no. 2 (2025): 152–79. (Institutional version: https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/277811/)
“From Political to Technological Leader of the Third World: Chinese Exchanges with the United Nations Specialized Agencies in the 1970s and 1980s.” In International Organizations and the Cold War: Competition, Cooperation, and Convergence, edited by Sandrine Kott, Eva-Maria Muschik, and Elisabeth Roehrlich, 213–30. Bloomsbury Academic, 2025.