The combination of changing international circumstances alongside significant developments in China’s domestic politics made 1960 a turning point in Chinese international scientific outreach. Chapter 3 examines the impacts of these on Chinese engagement with the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs and the World Federation of Scientific Workers, considering the reasons for the significant divergence in how each was viewed and, consequently, those relationships evolved into the early years of the new decade. As had been the case in the 1950s, elite Chinese scientists and scientific organisations worked with foreign affairs officials, but in the context of the early 1960s this meant significantly adjusting and adapting their approaches to such external events and organisations. In all, Chinese science diplomacy via united front work was less well suited to the combative context of the Sino-Soviet split than when the two powers were not so overtly locked in competition for influence.

The 1964 Peking Science Symposium and 1966 Summer Physics Colloquium were the two largest-scale international science congresses hosted by Mao’s China. Chapter 4 delves into the inner workings of these events, which brought hundreds of visitors to the People's Republic of China from throughout Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania. From planning through to post-conference tours organised for participants, it examines the network of organisations and individuals at national and local levels that collectively shaped these major initiatives to bring foreign scientists to China on the cusp of the Cultural Revolution. In doing so, it shows the extent of integration and coordination between science and foreign relations systems during the Mao era.

Chapter 1 focuses on the evolution of Chinese Communist Party support for Chinese scientists’ involvement in international scientific organisations during the Chinese Civil War and the early years of CCP rule after 1949. It analyses the meanings, motivations, and manifestations of such CCP-supported activities before and after taking power through organisations such as the Chinese Association of Scientific Workers, which had significant domestic and international dimensions. In doing so, it charts the rise of on Chinese involvement in the World Federation of Scientific Workers (WFSW) across the first decade of the international organisation’s existence, from its founding in 1946 through to Beijing hosting the federation’s tenth anniversary celebrations in 1956. This first decade of Chinese involvement in the WFSW showed the CCP’s united front work paying dividends in building relations with scientists at home and abroad, providing a platform from which the People's Republic of China would pursue a range of other efforts at international outreach.

China’s Mao-era science diplomacy involved strategies and structures that underpinned the hosting of foreign visitors such as scientists. Chapter 5 focuses on networks of individual relationships – professional, personal, and political – that ran through Chinese involvement in the organisations and events discussed in this book, focusing on some of those that developed between Chinese and left-wing British scientists from the 1940s through to the 1970s. Considering the experiences of J. D. Bernal, Howard E. Hinton, Dorothy Hodgkin, Kathleen Lonsdale, and Kurt Mendelssohn, it elucidates the range of motivations, responses, and outcomes on either side of scientists’ visits to China as part of everything from ‘friendship’ delegations made up of political sympathisers to lecture tours organised by scientific organisations. These British scientists had much in common with many other sympathetic visitors from the time, at least in broad strokes; nevertheless, this chapter identifies several key characteristics that set such scientists apart as a category of foreign visitor during the Mao era.

Scientists had a distinctive part to play in the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign relations prior to it coming to power as well as during the early decades of the People’s Republic. The Conclusion considers the significance of this sustained party and party-state interest in scientists’ international activities for subsequent developments from the 1970s through China’s rise as a science and technology power by the early twenty-first century. These relations did not just spring out of nowhere, fully formed, and ready to go with the onset of rapprochement. Nor were they simply a product of long-term Americanisation. Consequently, the Conclusion explores notable areas of continuity and others of revived relevance when it comes to the party-state and the spectrum of international activities undertaken by scientists.

Elite Chinese scientists’ prominence within the World Federation of Scientific Workers during the 1950s opened many new opportunities for those scientists and the Chinese party-state alike. Examining the origins and evolution of the on-again off-again relationship between China and the early Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, Chapter 2 discusses the decision-making processes and key episodes that shaped this relationship. From Chinese policymakers and officials’ internal debates over the Russell-Einstein Manifesto in 1955 through to the end of Mao-era engagement with Pugwash at the fateful Moscow Conference in 1960, Chinese involvement in Pugwash during this period shows the shifting dynamic tension created by a system in which foreign policymakers expected scientists to act as state agents in their international activities. Much of the time, this saw senior Chinese Communist Party leaders or foreign relations officials able to actively shape the Chinese side of these international encounters; however, particularly in the case of those taking place in person and overseas, scientists were the ones who were carrying out the interactions, creating the potential for them to exercise some agency in how they were conducted and reported back.

The Introduction maps out the book’s central arguments, contribution, and structure, in addition to contextualising key issues and providing essential background information. It considers the relevance of science diplomacy for understanding China’s international scientific relations under Mao and, in turn, the ways those activities deepen our understanding of the range of actors and approaches involved in science diplomacy. Important ideological concepts and foreign relations strategies underpinning these outreach activities, particularly ‘united front work’, were central to the CCP’s outreach practices involving scientists. The chapter further considers the importance of transnational science in modern China and international science in the post-Second World War period, as well as introducing the key scientists, organisations, and events that sit at the centre of this study.