Having first broken out in early 2020, by the time this issue is published the Covid pandemic will have entered its second fall. Living now with such a global plague, people all over the world have been riding successive pandemic waves, one after the other, struggling to survive each one while maintaining the essential functions of society. We have gradually reached an equilibrium, or what people are calling the “new normal,” in which the fear of disease recurrence is always there, though, ultimately, rescue seems to be on its way. Face masks are still much in demand, but the top priority in protection means and concerns has been silently replaced by vaccine supply—its production, distribution, and delivery.
Following my previous Editor’s Notes that brought attention to structural, historical analyses of the Covid pandemic (14.3 and 14.4), in this issue I hope readers will reconsider China as being both in a vulnerable state of cross-species epidemics and an active player in global health. China was considered the pandemic’s epicenter when Covid broke out in Wuhan in December 2019, but as the virus spread to the rest of the world and mutated to create new threats, China seems to have moved out of the spotlight. Its virus situation seems to be improving with a nation-wide vaccination program for its people; it can even spare substantial doses of its domestically made, WHO-listed Covid-19 vaccines Sinovac and Sinopharm, for other countries.
As observed, China, like its Cold War comrade Russia (then the largest component of the USSR), has employed vaccine diplomacy to boost its global standing. Even so, putting aside behind-the-scenes political maneuvers, in this issue we introduce three case studies that shed light on the socio-technical road China trod in the second half of the twentieth century. Bruce Seely and Zhihui Zhang’s paper, “China’s detonation-driven shock tube wind tunnels: A case study of transnational science in aeronautics during the Cold War,” provides an overview of how China, after a bumpy transition in 1949, developed and advanced technology on its own, tracing the research career of Hongru Yu (俞鸿儒), whose work coincided with the rise of the PRC. In addition to a conventional story of how Yu and his team successfully built the world’s first high-enthalpy detonation-driven shock tube tunnel, backed by the state, with technology they themselves had designed, this paper nicely captures how this locally made technology had to be considered in transnational contexts in terms of the science race and diplomacy—the Cold War and the PRC’s opening up to the world after the Cultural Revolution, and the flow, exchange, and collaboration of scientists and engineers under these circumstances.
Against the historical, transnational sketch of the development of PRC-made technology as seen in Yu’s personal career, Jue Hou’s paper, “The Cybernetic Writing Pad: Information Technology and the Retheorization of the Chinese Script, 1977–1986,” provides a close, domestic look at the complicated relationship between technology and society in the transitional period of the PRC from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. It is certain that, as a dominant political driver, the Cultural Revolution and its impact on science and technology cannot be ignored. Nonetheless, echoing the concerns we previously brought attention to about “Mao-era science” (Editor’s Note, 13.3), Hou brilliantly points out a double challenge in the PRC’s technological and social trajectory toward modernization when it came to integrating the Chinese script (as simplified characters), once created under an ideology of state phonocentrism, into data-storage formats for computers. Neither a political settlement nor a technical solution, what Hou discovers may surprise readers, especially those who are familiar with the evolutionary history of Chinese writing over the past century: a socio-technical transformation in which zi (character)-centered orthography paved the way for ci (word)-centered orthography. Alongside the author’s psychoanalytical interpretation of this transformation, this paper also makes for a good read in terms of multiple encounters in making writing “Chinese” in the post-Mao era—emerging writing apparatuses, refashioned writing agents, and the hermeneutic spaces between them.
Quickly moving on to the twenty-first century, in “Making Fast-Track Surgery Transportable: Sino-Danish Travel Work,” Signe Lindgaard Andersen presents us with the intriguing case of how, while it has become a competitive global player in advanced science and technology and an emerging market for biomedical products, there still exist in China old-fashioned technology collaborations with Western countries. Touching upon the PRC’s political economy in healthcare, yet departing from directly criticizing its hectic, superficial reforms, as seen in our special issue on biopolitics in China (5.3), Andersen shares Hou’s concerns on how technology should be thought of together with its users (in this case, healthcare professionals) and their interfaces, investigating how a set of “evidence-based, standardized protocols and guidelines” for perioperative recovery can be transferred from a local hospital in Denmark to Gansu, one of the poorest provinces in China. Starting with the notion of health-promoting infrastructures, the author’s ethnographic account not only reminds readers of the danger of simplifying the PRC down to a homogeneous state in terms of biotechnology development, it also nicely compliments the concept of “travelling comparisons,” the concept first introduced in our thematic issue 7.2 for doing transnational STS studies.
The three papers on technology in modern China certainly invite conversations between Chinese studies and STS, and we are grateful here to Carl Mitcham, a leading figure in technology studies who has strong connections with China, who has written for us a commentary essay. In “Sinology with Engineering Characteristics,” Mitcham not only offers the background knowledge of Chinese philology necessary to understand Jue Hou’s paper; he also demonstrates how such cases can spark productive interactions among the intellectual traditions that contribute to the making of East Asian STS.
Last, but not least, we have “A Site of Bounded Imaginaries: Local Narratives of Buan after Protests against a Nuclear Waste Repository,” by Seungmi Chung, Kun Hee Kim, Ye Seul Park, and Hyomin Kim. Echoing those Chinese cases in this issue, in which the state takes a definite lead in the making of science and technology infrastructures, the authors’ analysis powerfully shows readers how, by composing convenient sociotechnical imaginaries on state development, the Korean government, nuclear experts, and activists in environmental NGOs dominated and marginalized the voices of local residents in Buan, who were supposed to have been considered as primary stakeholders. These imaginaries may not be foreign to readers well-versed in PRC politics, for their storylines read very similarly to the “main melody” (主旋律 zhuxuanlü), that propaganda-like statement that overrides and represses other voices (like the “harmonious society” narrative, criticized in our thematic issue 5.3 on biopolitics in China). Even so, what is striking for STSers is perhaps that this case is happening in a post-authoritarian democracy like Korea, and in the name of public deliberation.
With concerns about imaginaries and the non-textual threads we aim to convey (Editor’s Note, 15.2), we are delighted to have the historian of medicine, Marta Hanson, sharing her reflections on two EASTS covers (8.3 and 11.4) that featured a portrait of a Korean female scientist at work and a propaganda map of the Japanese empire. By juxtaposing them, Professor Hanson is “struck by the different perspectives they depict from the expansionist imperialist vision of someone placed at the military center of the Japanese empire in Formosa to the more contemplative scientific life of an imagined Korean woman situated within colonial Korea.” This is just one of the many ways in which we hope covers will continue to move us long after publication. In addition to this beautiful essay, this current issue includes a brief yet meaningful exchange between Zo Lin, the artist behind its cover images, and our cover team member En-Chieh Chao.
As the Covid virus marches on toward its second-year cycle alongside the serried ranks of its variants, people across the world have been accustomed to harsh measures such as nation-wide lockdowns that could not have been imagined when we think back to the SARS pandemic. This seems to imply that, while treasuring the lessons learned from the past, we have to be equally aware of and responsive to emerging challenges. As Emily Martin suggests in her classic Flexible Bodies (Citation1995), the notion of flexibility is multi-dimensional on multiple scales: it is both biomedical and cultural, individual and institutional. How to navigate the “new normal” world between hope and risk, without sacrificing human values, will not only be a hard task for democracies but also an STS task for all of us.
