Aboard the repatriation flights that took US citizens out of China in February 2020 were many of the US social scientists then based in the country, conducting fieldwork or teaching and researching at universities. Since then, Covid-19–related restrictions on entry to China have prevented almost any US social scientists from traveling to the country, compounding the pre-existing challenges faced by US academics researching in China during the Xi Jinping era. But this is not the first time in the history of the People’s Republic that US social scientists have been almost wholly cut off from China. Indeed, for the first 30 years after the PRC’s establishment in 1949, it was all but impossible for US social scientists to travel to the country, and yet harder for them to conduct independent research there. If it took until 1979 for US social scientists to win official PRC government approval to research in China, half a decade earlier the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) found other means to successfully negotiate the entry of the first US social scientists into China—by smuggling them in.

The origins of social scientist scholar escorts

“In Beijing, Zhou told Sheldon that China was not yet prepared to admit social scientists from the United States, even as the PRC welcomed a growing number of US natural scientists and as Chinese scientists traveled to the United States in exchange.”

The SSRC’s initiative can be traced back to a 1973 conversation between one of the leading US social scientists of the last century, the sociologist and then-SSRC president Eleanor Sheldon, and Chinese premier Zhou Enlai. In Beijing, Zhou told Sheldon that China was not yet prepared to admit social scientists from the United States, even as the PRC welcomed a growing number of US natural scientists and as Chinese scientists traveled to the United States in exchange. In another meeting during Sheldon’s trip, a senior Chinese academic and official told her that Chinese social science was in a period of “struggle, criticism, and transformation”—and not at all ready for academic exchanges with the United States.1“Report on Exchange Discussions: Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China Visit to China,” May 15–June 15, 1973, “1973 – International Relations – Visits: Com Visit on Scholarly Exchanges” folder, Committee on Scholarly Communication with the PRC papers, National Academy of Sciences (NAS) archives, Washington, DC, United States; oral history interview with Eleanor Sheldon, New York, United States, January 17, 2020.

An impatient Sheldon and the SSRC that she led did not accept Zhou’s request that they wait for China to be ready to receive US social scientists. The SSRC had been working since 1966 to develop opportunities for US social scientists to again conduct research in China. The organization had persevered with these efforts even as China was overtaken by the tumult of Mao’s anti-intellectual Cultural Revolution that same year. Thus, less than two years after Sheldon’s conversation with Premier Zhou, the SSRC-sponsored Committee on Scholarly Communication with the PRC (CSCPRC) unilaterally devised its own means to send US social scientists into the PRC: China specialists would travel under the cover of escorts for the natural scientists that were welcomed by China, acting as ostensible translators and guides to delegations of physicists, biologists, and chemists.2Pete Millwood, “An ‘Exceedingly Delicate Undertaking’: Sino-American Science Diplomacy, 1966–78,” Journal of Contemporary History 56, no. 1 (2021): 166–90.

This would prove a controversial policy: The Chinese government would soon accuse US social scientists of perpetrating “extremely unfriendly act[s]” while in the PRC.3Anne Keatley to Eleanor Sheldon, June 15, 1976, Folder 6371, Box 527, Series 1, Accession 2, Social Science Research Council (SSRC) records, Rockefeller Archive Center. Moreover, the strictures placed on visiting academics, as well as the damage wrought by the Cultural Revolution on China’s own social scientists, severely limited what US social scientists could learn while in China. Why, then, did the CSCPRC persevere with a policy that seemed to threaten other forms of scientific exchange—for seemingly little benefit?

“The CSCPRC’s mission thus included a pedagogical aspect: to cajole the Chinese government into opening its country to scientific researchers from outside—in a manner not unlike how US educators had sought to transform the scientific values of China in the decades after the remission of the Boxer Indemnity in 1909.”

The Committee did so in part because they believed that the barriers raised to research in China by the country’s government were fundamentally invalid. The Committee had been founded in 1966 under the sponsorship of the SSRC, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Academy of Sciences. Its founding documents proclaimed that “American social and natural scientists and scholars have long supported the principle of direct communication of ideas in the traditions of open societies” and that “China may continue severely to restrict such communication, but it is hoped by taking steps to create an atmosphere conducive to intellectual exchange the Chinese will respond.”4National Academy of Sciences paper, “Committee on Scholarly Communication with Mainland China,” June 1966, “1966” folder, CSCPRC papers, NAS archives. The CSCPRC’s mission thus included a pedagogical aspect: to cajole the Chinese government into opening its country to scientific researchers from outside—in a manner not unlike how US educators had sought to transform the scientific values of China in the decades after the remission of the Boxer Indemnity in 1909.5→Michael H. Hunt, “The American Remission of the Boxer Indemnity: A Reappraisal,” Journal of Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1972): 539–59.
→Frank Ninkovich, “The Rockefeller Foundation, China, and Cultural Change,” Journal of American History 70, no. 4 (1984): 799–820.

The CSCPRC’s social scientist escort policy was transparently intended to benefit the social scientists more than the natural scientists they accompanied. Although the social scientists selected for this role were China experts, some were specialists not on contemporary China but on recondite, even arcane, aspects of the country’s pre-revolution past; they knew even less about the natural sciences that were the focus of the exchange delegations in which they traveled. Benjamin Schwartz, for example, was a historian of ideas. He had written on the rise of Mao Zedong in the 1920s and 1930s, but his most famous work was a close study of Yan Fu, a Chinese intellectual who was born in the mid-nineteenth century and introduced Darwin’s theories to China. The distinguished Harvard historian traveled to the PRC in an unlikely pairing: accompanying a 1975 delegation of US scientists studying China’s novel methods for controlling insect pests.6China Exchange Newsletter 3, no. 3, July 1975.
Insect Control in the People’s Republic of China: A Trip Report of the American Insect Control Delegation, Submitted to the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1977).
→Benjamin Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964).

Even those scholar escorts who were specialists on contemporary China were often out of practice speaking—let alone translating—Chinese and lacked any training in technical terminology. Some hired tutors in the weeks before their departure to try and polish rusty Chinese they hadn’t spoken regularly for years—deprived of opportunities to by the very barriers that the CSCPRC was seeking to circumvent. On a practical level, the language skillsets of these scholar escorts usually didn’t matter much: Chinese hosts provided their own translators to all scientific delegations. But the social scientists’ limited abilities as translators—their ostensible function on scientific exchanges—underscored that they were sent to China for their own benefit rather than as an integral part of cooperation in the natural sciences.

“Political provocation”: US social scientists “seriously hurt the feelings of the Chinese people”

“Beijing had welcomed many thousands of guests from Western countries—although very few from the United States—but had been wary of inviting social scientists who might wish to pry beneath the surface of the carefully presented façade.”

China’s objections to allowing US social scientists into the country were connected to a longstanding PRC suspicion of any foreign guests that had the skills and knowledge to see through the Communist government’s propagandistic representation of the country. Since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, Beijing had welcomed many thousands of guests from Western countries—although very few from the United States—but had been wary of inviting social scientists who might wish to pry beneath the surface of the carefully presented façade. Social scientists equipped with even stilted Chinese language abilities would be able to seek out their own sources of information beyond those presented as part of the guided tours received by all foreign guests.7Julia Lovell, “The Uses of Foreigners in Mao-Era China: ‘Techniques of Hospitality’ and International Image-Building in the People’s Republic, 1949–1976,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 25 (2015): 135–58.
→David Caute, The Fellow-Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (London: Yale University Press, 1988).

In response to the CSCPRC’s unusual tactics for sending US social scientists to China, the Beijing government adopted its own indirect, unconventional means to try to close the scholar escort route. First, in 1974, Chinese authorities dredged up claims that one proposed scholar escort, the Princeton historian of Ming-dynasty China, Frederick Mote, had illegally spied in China in the 1940s. Mote had worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency, while China and the United States were wartime allies. He denied ever having been involved in espionage, however. Holding firm during a week-long delay to the departure of the linguistics delegation that Mote was set to accompany, the CSCPRC finally convinced the delegation’s Chinese hosts to concede that, if “Dr. Mote has changed his hostile attitude to China,” he would be permitted to revisit the country.8Anne Keatley to The Files, “CSCPRC Linguistics Delegation, October 1974 – Frederick Mote, Rejection and Subsequent Acceptance by PRC,” October 8, 1974, “1974 – General” folder, CSCPRC papers, NAS archives.

Two years later, Beijing again accused US social scientists of inappropriate behavior, this time while already in China accompanying an exchange. The hosts of a delegation of wheat specialists claimed that, in the unlikely setting of the Chinese Academy of Science’s Institute of Genetics, Lloyd Eastman and Ramon Myers had engaged in a “political provocation.” Eastman was a historian and Myers an economist; a representative of the Chinese Society of Agronomy protested that neither man “had any direct interest in wheat.”9Paraphrase of cable from United States Liaison Office to Department of State, conveyed to CSCPRC by State, June 17, 1976, Folder 6371, Box 527, Series 1, Accession 2, SSRC records, Rockefeller Archive Center, Tarrytown, NY, United States. Their “provocation” had been to ask a Chinese geneticist how he was certain that Hua Guofeng, the then-Chinese premier and Mao’s hand-picked successor, would not end up facing the same fate as Liu Shaoqi, Lin Biao, and Deng Xiaoping, the men Mao had previously picked to succeed him: being purged. (Hua was indeed ultimately purged, just a few years later.) Eastman and Myers’s question “seriously hurt the feelings of the Chinese people,” a senior Chinese diplomat told the CSCPRC.10Anne Keatley to Eleanor Sheldon, June 15, 1976, Folder 6371, Box 527, Series 1, Accession 2, SSRC records, Rockefeller Archive Center.

As provocative as the question was, back in Washington, the Committee concluded that Chinese hosts were primarily latching onto Eastman and Myers’s comments in order to find a justification to end the practice of social scientist escorts. The Committee stood firm, calling the scholar escort program an “important policy issue” and arguing that it was critical that “scholars from a variety of disciplines” be included in scientific delegations “so that the [scientific] topic can be fully understood.” Underlying this response was a belief at the CSCPRC that probing questions about China’s political situation (even to geneticists) were not inappropriate—they were to be expected. This, the Committee believed, was what unfettered US scholarly inquiry entailed. With Sheldon’s backing, the CSCPRC won out again: Social scientists like Eastman and Myers continued to accompany scientific delegations to China, whether these groups were focused on vegetable farming, engineering, or pure and applied chemistry.11Ibid.

The value of social science access to China in the 1970s and beyond

For the CSCPRC and SSRC, the disruption to scientific exchanges caused by Chinese complaints about scholar escorts was more than offset by the value of the initiative in securing much-desired access to the PRC. Indeed, being able to send even a smattering of social scientists into China was seen by the CSCPRC as one of the few aspects of the Sino-American scientific exchange program that was of immediate significant scientific value to the US side. Social science specialists on China had, after 1949, been pushed to either shift their geographic specialization—to Taiwan or to other parts of the world altogether—or to conduct research through tealeaf reading of PRC publications and the Beijing government’s official economic statistics.

“Once in China, Vogel quickly realized that it would be difficult to conduct social science research in the country, even once admitted.”

Some of the most insightful social science research had been carried out by a young sociologist, Ezra Vogel, who had interviewed refugees that had fled the Communist mainland for Hong Kong. Vogel’s 1968 book, Canton Under Communism, was one of the first studies of life in the PRC by a US social scientist that could claim to be based primarily on first-hand accounts, even though the author had not entered Communist China during his research.12Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969More Info → US social scientists desperately wanted to return to mainland China and conduct interviews like Vogel’s—but with the Chinese people that continued to live under the Communist regime rather than those who had already fled. Vogel was himself an active member of the Committee and first traveled to the PRC in 1973, on the same CSCPRC-sponsored trip on which Sheldon had met Premier Zhou. Once in China, Vogel quickly realized that it would be difficult to conduct social science research in the country, even once admitted. Initially, Chinese hosts did not provide a social scientist to accompany Vogel and Sheldon on their visit; meanwhile, the US natural scientists on the delegation were accompanied by Chinese specialists from their own fields. After a query from Vogel prompted his Chinese hosts to belatedly provide him a counterpart, Vogel found that the terrified social scientist given the job responded to any scholarly question by changing the subject to the weather or local scenery.13Ezra Vogel, “China before the Deng Transformation,” in My First Trip to China: Scholars, Diplomats, and Journalists Reflect on Their First Encounters with China, ed. Kin-ming Liu (Hong Kong: East Slope Publishing Limited, 2012).

What insights were gained from hard-won access to the PRC? Scientific exchanges did advance the US understanding of some aspects of Chinese society. One of the few delegations of social scientists to be admitted to the country before 1979 was a group of educational specialists and child psychologists that spent three weeks studying early childhood education in 1973. Among those on that trip were Urie Bronfenbrenner, a cofounder of the Head Start program, and Jerome Kagan, who did much to establish the field of developmental psychology in the United States. William Kessen was the leader of the delegation and, based on the group’s collective research, produced the influential 1975 book, Childhood in China.14William Kessen, ed., Childhood in China (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975). The book offered an account of education and socialization in Cultural Revolution China and was hailed as “a landmark book that should be studied by everyone involved in child development” by the American Journal of Psychiatry.15Sidney Werkman, review of Childhood in China, William Kessen, Ed., American Journal of Psychiatry 133, no. 6 (1976): 727–28.

Influential as the book was, it is clear now, if not then, that it was not the product of independent research. Instead, as with many other accounts of Chinese society written by US visitors in the 1970s, it was primarily based on the voluminous information conveyed to the delegation in long speeches that “introduced” each site they visited in China, and on interactions with Chinese children and teachers that were heavily mediated by the delegation’s hosts. Chinese government reports written by the cadres that accompanied the delegation reveal the careful choreography of visits to model educational institutions accompanied by constant, politicized commentary—that was often later reproduced in Childhood in China, sometimes verbatim. The cadres that would receive the US psychologists were instructed to “put politics in command” during the visit and to “appear relaxed on the outside but [to] be tense on the inside.” Simultaneously, however, Chinese hosts saw the exchange as a means of gaining academic insights from US social scientists: Internal government reports show notable interest in the critical commentary of the visitors, such as that Chinese nurseries were too dull and should be more like the PRC’s kindergartens.16“关于接待美国幼儿教育代表团 – 工作安排的具体意见” [Receiving an American delegation on child development and education (specific comments on working arrangements)], [undated but in folder from November 1973], Folder 153.6.42, Beijing Municipal Archive, China.

Meanwhile, other social scientists wrote shorter accounts of the PRC for US newspapers and magazines. Many of these accounts admitted that the little that economists or sociologists could learn while visiting the PRC only made them more aware of US ignorance of the reality of Chinese society. Another insight was that Zhou Enlai was sincere when he said that the PRC needed more time to prepare before receiving US social scientists. As one US political scientist put it in 1973, “there is nothing resembling social science” at Chinese universities. “The most depressing aspect of our trip was exposure to elderly, foreign-trained intellectuals who have been reduced to self-abasing, anxious hollow shells of men.”17Richard Solomon to Henry Kissinger, July 18, 1973, “China Exchanges, July 10–October 31, 1973” folder, Director’s Files of Winston Lord, Record Group 59, United States National Archives II, College Park, MD, United States.

While US social scientists chafed against the restrictions placed on them in the PRC, China was gaining a great deal from natural science exchanges with the United States. The PRC sent nearly 40 delegations of scientists to be received by the CSCPRC in the United States between 1972 and 1978. All but two of these delegations were in the hard sciences: Humanities delegations on library science and language teaching were the only two exceptions. The delegations were, moreover, frequently focused on applied science that would have immediate, practical benefits for Chinese industrial development. These included delegations sent in 1975 to study US communications technology, industrial automation, and the petroleum industry, and delegations sent over the following two years that examined agricultural mechanization, geological drilling, tunnel boring, and hematite ore beneficiation. Meanwhile, the PRC government continued to proclaim that the scientific exchange program with the United States was intended to build friendship and to be a mutually beneficial exchange of scientific knowledge of equal worth. Chinese documents from 1973 offer just one example of PRC hosts stating that scientific exchanges would demonstrate the superiority of China’s socialist system.18“接待美国幼儿教育代表团计划” [Plan for receiving an American delegation on child development and education], November 1973, Folder 153.6.42, Beijing Municipal Archive. Many American visitors were indeed impressed by innovations in Chinese science, from organic substitutes for agricultural chemicals to acupuncture anesthesia.19For an early, positive account of both see Arthur Galston, Daily Life in People’s China (New York: Crowell, 1973). Nonetheless, both the social and natural scientists at the CSCPRC had concluded by the mid-1970s that China was doing rather better out of a bargain that gave them almost unfettered access to the most advanced US science while Beijing simultaneously attempted to disrupt even the trickle of social scientists that visited the PRC accompanying natural science delegations.

The Committee repeatedly drew Chinese attention to the disparity in the benefits of the Sino-American scientific exchange that had occurred since 1971. By 1976, the CSCPRC had grown so frustrated by Chinese intransigence that the Committee and its backers at the American Council of Learned Societies, the SSRC, and the National Academy considered pulling out of the scientific exchange program with China altogether. In that year, the CSCPRC “postponed” two of the seven delegations China had asked to send to the United States to put pressure on Beijing to agree to changes, including allowing social science-focused delegations.20Anne Keatley to Philip Handler, January 23, 1976, and Frank Press and Anne Keatley to Zhou Peiyuan, January 23, 1976, “1976 – Exchange Agreement – Negotiations” folder, CSCPRC papers, NAS archives.

Two years later, much had changed. The pressure applied by US scientists, as well as important shifts in China’s domestic political priorities, had brought a profound transformation in how the Chinese government saw scientific exchange. Deng Xiaoping was solidifying his control as paramount leader of the PRC and had made scientific cooperation with the outside world—in particular with the United States—a critical aspect of his platform for the development of post-Mao China. Deng’s attitude to reform was complex and, in 1979, he orchestrated a crackdown of the Democracy Wall movement that had criticized the Communist Party. But Deng had also encouraged the formation of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in May 1977, and he rehabilitated many social scientists who had, like him, been attacked during the Cultural Revolution. China had finished the preparation that the late Zhou Enlai had said was needed before US social scientists could conduct research in the PRC. The first US delegation to be hosted by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a delegation of specialists on the Han dynasty, arrived in China in October 1978. Months later, in April 1979, a delegation of CASS’s senior leadership arrived in the United States to discuss further officially sanctioned academic cooperation in the social sciences.21China Exchange Newsletter 7, no. 1, February 1979.

US social science research in China after 1979

Beginning in 1979, US social scientists were finally able to begin conducting deep research in China. Barriers to research lingered, as did suspicion from many in China of US motives. Nonetheless, much important research was completed in the 1980s. Tellingly, a decade after the 1979 Democracy Wall movement, when Deng again faced critical opposition, this time in Tiananmen Square, many US sociologists and political scientists were conducting fieldwork in the PRC and thus on hand to interview those involved in the student-led movement. One such researcher, Craig Calhoun, would later take up Sheldon’s old position as head of the SSRC.22Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1995More Info →

Today, levels of access to China seem closer to 1973 than to the period preceding 1989. The Chinese government has repeatedly stated that the restrictions imposed on entry to China in response to Covid-19 will be eased, but it remains unclear when significant numbers of US social scientists will again be able to conduct research in the PRC. Recent US government actions have also made such research harder: The Trump administration’s cancellation of the Fulbright China program, for example, ended one of the principal avenues for US social scientists to conduct fieldwork in the PRC. This loss of access matters: As China’s geopolitical importance grows to that of a peer competitor of the United States, social scientific understanding of the Chinese society that Xi rules is critical to making sense of the roots and extent of Chinese state power, at home and abroad. Smuggling social scientists into China may not be the answer to new barriers to research in the PRC, but the history of the SSRC’s efforts to gain access to China for social science research in the 1970s nonetheless offers reminders of another moment in which US social scientists encountered great challenges to conducting research in China—that they ultimately overcame.

References:

1
“Report on Exchange Discussions: Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China Visit to China,” May 15–June 15, 1973, “1973 – International Relations – Visits: Com Visit on Scholarly Exchanges” folder, Committee on Scholarly Communication with the PRC papers, National Academy of Sciences (NAS) archives, Washington, DC, United States; oral history interview with Eleanor Sheldon, New York, United States, January 17, 2020.
2
Pete Millwood, “An ‘Exceedingly Delicate Undertaking’: Sino-American Science Diplomacy, 1966–78,” Journal of Contemporary History 56, no. 1 (2021): 166–90.
3
Anne Keatley to Eleanor Sheldon, June 15, 1976, Folder 6371, Box 527, Series 1, Accession 2, Social Science Research Council (SSRC) records, Rockefeller Archive Center.
4
National Academy of Sciences paper, “Committee on Scholarly Communication with Mainland China,” June 1966, “1966” folder, CSCPRC papers, NAS archives.
5
→Michael H. Hunt, “The American Remission of the Boxer Indemnity: A Reappraisal,” Journal of Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1972): 539–59.
→Frank Ninkovich, “The Rockefeller Foundation, China, and Cultural Change,” Journal of American History 70, no. 4 (1984): 799–820.
6
China Exchange Newsletter 3, no. 3, July 1975.
Insect Control in the People’s Republic of China: A Trip Report of the American Insect Control Delegation, Submitted to the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1977).
→Benjamin Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964).
7
Julia Lovell, “The Uses of Foreigners in Mao-Era China: ‘Techniques of Hospitality’ and International Image-Building in the People’s Republic, 1949–1976,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 25 (2015): 135–58.
→David Caute, The Fellow-Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (London: Yale University Press, 1988).
8
Anne Keatley to The Files, “CSCPRC Linguistics Delegation, October 1974 – Frederick Mote, Rejection and Subsequent Acceptance by PRC,” October 8, 1974, “1974 – General” folder, CSCPRC papers, NAS archives.
9
Paraphrase of cable from United States Liaison Office to Department of State, conveyed to CSCPRC by State, June 17, 1976, Folder 6371, Box 527, Series 1, Accession 2, SSRC records, Rockefeller Archive Center, Tarrytown, NY, United States.
10
Anne Keatley to Eleanor Sheldon, June 15, 1976, Folder 6371, Box 527, Series 1, Accession 2, SSRC records, Rockefeller Archive Center.
11
Ibid.
12
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969More Info →
13
Ezra Vogel, “China before the Deng Transformation,” in My First Trip to China: Scholars, Diplomats, and Journalists Reflect on Their First Encounters with China, ed. Kin-ming Liu (Hong Kong: East Slope Publishing Limited, 2012).
14
William Kessen, ed., Childhood in China (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975).
15
Sidney Werkman, review of Childhood in China, William Kessen, Ed., American Journal of Psychiatry 133, no. 6 (1976): 727–28.
16
“关于接待美国幼儿教育代表团 – 工作安排的具体意见” [Receiving an American delegation on child development and education (specific comments on working arrangements)], [undated but in folder from November 1973], Folder 153.6.42, Beijing Municipal Archive, China.
17
Richard Solomon to Henry Kissinger, July 18, 1973, “China Exchanges, July 10–October 31, 1973” folder, Director’s Files of Winston Lord, Record Group 59, United States National Archives II, College Park, MD, United States.
18
“接待美国幼儿教育代表团计划” [Plan for receiving an American delegation on child development and education], November 1973, Folder 153.6.42, Beijing Municipal Archive.
19
For an early, positive account of both see Arthur Galston, Daily Life in People’s China (New York: Crowell, 1973).
20
Anne Keatley to Philip Handler, January 23, 1976, and Frank Press and Anne Keatley to Zhou Peiyuan, January 23, 1976, “1976 – Exchange Agreement – Negotiations” folder, CSCPRC papers, NAS archives.
21
China Exchange Newsletter 7, no. 1, February 1979.
22
Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1995More Info →