Special Collection 2021
Rereading China: Science Walks on Two Legs
Editorial Collective
Publisher Calvin Wu
Managing Editor Alexandra Adams
Lead Editor Sigrid Schmalzer
Editors Camille Rullán, Clifford D. Conner, Erik Hetzner, Manu Raghavan, Mark Colasurdo, Leanne Loo, Trude Bennett
Contributors
Sigrid Schmalzer is professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she teaches Chinese history and the history of science. Her recent books include Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China (2016), Science for the People: Documents from America’s Movement of Radical Scientists (2018), and a book for children, Moth and Wasp, Soil and Ocean: Remembering Chinese Scientist Pu Zhelong’s Work for Sustainable Farming. She is a founding member of the Critical China Scholars and of the new Science for the People, and is a vice-president in her faculty union.
JS Tan is a former tech worker at Microsoft and a graduate student at MIT. He works on novel applications of computer vision technology. He is also a founding member of Collective Action in Tech, a research and media project to advance the tech labor movement, and writes about China, labor, tech and internationalism. His work can be found in Jacobin, Logic, Foreign Policy, Made in China, the Guardian Opinion, and Spectre. You can follow his writing on Twitter at @organizejs.
Vinton Thompson received his PhD in evolutionary biology from the University of Chicago in 1974. He was an active member of the Chicago chapter of the original Science for the People and the affiliated Science for Vietnam. After returning from the SftP delegation to China in 1973, he participated in the US-China People’s Friendship Association while serving as an OSHA inspector, a worker in a bicycle factory, and a manager of a bookstore focusing on African-American culture. In 1979 he returned to academia, teaching biology and holding administrative posts, culminating in ten years as president of Metropolitan College of New York. Presently, he is a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History and a mentor in the MSI Aspiring Leaders Program of the Rutgers University Center for the Study of Minority Institutions.
Zuoyue Wang is professor of history at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, specializing in science, technology, and politics in modern United States, China, and transnational contexts. Born in China and originally trained in physics, he received his PhD from UC Santa Barbara and published In Sputnik’s Shadow: The President’s Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Rutgers University Press, 2008; Chinese translation by Peking University Press in 2011). He is currently studying the history of Chinese American scientists and US-China scientific relations, for which he received a grant from the National Science Foundation in 2010–2014. He was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2019.
