Maoist "mass science," the mass-oriented policy of knowledge production and its dissemination, has been a central question in recent scholarship on the history of science, technology, and medicine in the People's Republic of China (PRC). By analyzing approximately 100,000 Mao-era state publications in the fields of agriculture, manufacturing, science, and health, to name a few, literary scholar Rui Kunze and historian Mare Andre Matten join the contributors to the 2012 edited volume, Mr.
Science and Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution: Science and Technology in Modern China, Fa-ti Fan, Sigrid Schmalzer, and Miriam Gross, among others, in critically situating the changing discourse on mass science in the political, economic, and epistemological contexts of the Maoist era. Kunze and Matten argue that mass science, whose core characteristics were experience, experiment, and productivity, was a historical product of the entanglement of a Maoist philosophy of science based on practice, the ideal of emancipating the laboring masses of workers and pea-sants, and an obsession with self-reliant production that resulted from chronic material constraints and geopolitical isolation.
In the Introduction and Chapter One, Kunze and Matten situate this book in histor-iographical conversations on the place of Mao-era China in global and postcolonial histories of science. Following scholars such as Bruno Latour, Sandra Harding, and Warwick Anderson have "[called] into question the image of science associated with rationality, objectivity, and universal truth, which is based on the assumption of a unified modem "science**" (xvi), historians of science in China have reconceptualized indigenous knowledges in the country not as anti-scientific or anti-modern, but as the foundation of a "necessary postcolonial self-assertation that questions the universal character of Western modernity" (10). According to the authors, this affirmation of ordinary peoples' knowledge in Maoist China was predicated on the notion of
