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 Marc 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 peasants, and an obsession with self-reliant production that resulted from chronic material constraints and geopolitical isolation.
