How might one tell the histories of China and India – two countries that have come to be seen as twenty-first-century giants? How might one tell of how they look to the world and to each other? In this issue we juxtapose, connect and compare the two. Ours is an attempt at a historiography of twentieth-century modernity in China and India beyond the encouragement of Euro-American historiography. We seize this opportunity provided by the contemporary engagement and concern with the two countries to reinterpret the narratives of their twentieth-century transformation, which are far from settled at the moment. We bring historical knowledge to speak usefully to the excitement, anxiety and aspiration around science and technology in China and India. We bring the same to speak meaningfully to the cynicism, admonition and expectations that the world has of them. We use China and India as a method of exploring new historiographical questions of science. We are invested in extending the relevance of studying China and India to the world at large through connections, references and juxtaposition, and by raising questions that, on the one hand, expose the limits of the Euro-American experience and, on the other, open up the intellectual and historiographical space for narratives and theoretical frameworks that are not tied to geopolitical significance. This paper sets out these issues and introduces the papers of the collection.

In 2015 Dhruv Raina published Needham's Indian Network: The Search for a Home for the History of Science in India (1950–1970), bringing to light the long-range networks that institutionalized the disciplinary history of science in post-colonial India, and demonstrating the intellectual and infrastructural contributions of Joseph Needham (1900–1995) in this endeavour. This paper takes a different approach and turns to the way that Needham perceived Indian vis-à-vis Chinese civilization, and the role India played in Needham's historiography of science. It turns out that Needham's most sustained engagement with India could be found in his histories of medicine, bodily practices and alchemical traditions. In the first section of the paper, I outline the key concepts of ‘Grand Titration’ and ‘oecumenical science’ that animated Needham's historiography, which clarifies why Chinese medicine, especially acupuncture, occupies a privileged status. The second section elaborates on Needham's scholarship and vision of acupuncture, involving the verification of acupuncture's reality and efficacy via Western biomedicine. He thought acupuncture would be China's unique contribution to a new ‘universal medicine’ in the modern age, but by contrast Needham saw little worth refurbishing in Indian medicine, arguing via an investigation in yoga that Indian practices were generally less ‘materialist’ and less ‘proto-scientific’. In the third section, I turn my attention to Needham's preoccupation with the history of alchemy around the world, and discuss his theorization on transmission and circulation of scientific knowledge. I comment on Needham's commitment to the thesis that European alchemy was a melting pot of Chinese, Indian, Persian, Arabic, Greek, Egyptian and Roman ideas and practices. While Needham reserved his ‘deepest love’ and ‘profoundest desire’ for Chinese civilization, India on the other hand often occupied a secondary status in his historical accounts, and in the conclusion I move from a critique of Needham's preconceptions to reflect on the writing of the history of non-Western science.

This article examines scientific developments in China and India by comparing and contrasting the enterprises of natural history during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From this perspective, the cases of China and India shared some similarities, but also exhibited important differences with respect to the conditions, ideologies, personnel, processes and strategies in scientific development. Two very large countries, with much left unexplored, attracted broad scientific interest in their flora and fauna from the early modern period; the interest intensified in the nineteenth century because of increasing accessibility to their interiors. However, the different historical situations that involved empire, nation, professionalization, geography and domestic and international politics helped shape the respective trajectories of scientific development in the two countries. Yet, despite their differences, China and India shared important similarities in the co-production of science and state, the global hierarchy of knowledge production, and the coloniality of power relations. This historical complexity also represented an important aspect of the global history of science, one that still bears poignancy and resonance in the contemporary world.

Starting as early as 1951, and with increasing urgency after 1956, Chinese and Indian statisticians traded visits as they sought to learn from each other's experiences. At the heart of these exchanges was the desire to learn more about a cutting-edge statistical method, random sampling, which, while technically complex, held great practical salience for large and diverse countries such as China and India. This paper draws upon unpublished documents, letters, institutional archives, memoirs, oral history and newspaper reports to reconstruct the sequence of these exchanges, their outcomes and the concerns of the participants. The exchanges demonstrate not only the crucial role played by Indian statisticians in the rise of random sampling, but also the amount of resistance these methods generated in places like China (and the Soviet Union). As a clear instance of South–South scientific exchange, they also compel a broadening of our understanding of early Cold War scientific networks, which should no longer be dominated by centre–periphery models that take either the USSR or the US as the centre. Finally, the exchanges hint at the varied nature of post-1949 Sino-Indian history, a subfield still dominated by geopolitics and a focus on the causes, course and legacy of the Sino-Indian War of 1962.

Planning for science and technology was a global phenomenon in the mid-twentieth century. A few countries drew up comprehensive five-year plans adapting from the Soviet model: China and India were two new developing countries to do so. In this paper we examine the early efforts at national planning for science and technology as seen in the Chinese twelve-year science and technology plan (1956–1967) and the five-year (1974–1979) science and technology plan of India. These are two historically distinct moments globally and two separate attempts specifically. What tie them together are the goals both sought to accomplish: of science- and technology-led industrialization and development, many times in comparison and sometimes in competition with each other. We show that these two incomplete exercises show us the complex histories of institutions and processes that confirm state-led faith in and engagement with science and technology.

Drawing from recent theoretical insights on the circulation of knowledge, this article, grounded in real-world examples, illustrates the importance of ‘the site’ as an analytical heuristic for revealing processes, movements and connections illegible within either nation-centred histories or comparative national studies. By investigating place instead of project, the study reframes the birth of modern rocket developments in both China and India as fundamentally intertwined within common global networks of science. I investigate four seemingly disconnected sites in the US, India, China and Ukraine, each separated by politics but connected and embedded in conduits that enabled the flow of expertise during (and in some cases despite) the Cold War. By doing so, it is possible to reconstruct an exemplar of a kind of global history of science, some of which takes place in China, some in India, and some elsewhere, but all of it connected. There are no discrete beginnings or endings here, merely points of intervention to take stock of processes in action. Each site produces objects and knowledge that contribute to our understanding of the other sites, furthering the overall narrative on Chinese and Indian efforts to formalize a ‘national’ space programme. The focus on these four sites reveals a global network of science in motion, linked by the common goals of building powerful rockets to explore space.

This paper juxtaposes the epistemological challenges raised by new agricultural technologies in India and China during the mid- to late twentieth century. In both places, the state actively sought to adopt the ‘improved’ seeds and chemical inputs of what USAID triumphantly called the ‘green revolution’; however, in neither country did this imply an unproblematic acceptance of the technocratic assumptions that undergirded the US programme. India and China's distinct ideological contexts produced divergent epistemological alternatives to the US vision, with particularly important differences in the perceived relationship between the sociopolitical and technoscientific realms and also in the understanding of what constituted a ‘modern’ farmer. In India, critics persistently challenged the technocratic state to consider social, political and economic aspects of agrarian modernization, but radical leaders in Mao-era China went considerably further in attacking the very notion that technological change could be divorced from social and political revolution. Leaders in both India and China sought to overcome ‘backwardness’ and ‘superstition’; however, the Indian state held up examples of farmers who exemplified capitalist ideals of modernity through their willingness to take risks in pursuit of profit, while Chinese leaders valorized peasant technicians who combined experience in labour, new technical knowledge and faith in socialist revolution.

The snow leopard is a highly charismatic megafauna that elicits admiration, concern and donations from individuals and NGOs in the West. In its home territories, however, it is a threat to local communities' livestock and a potential source of income for its pelt and parts. Conservation and study are further challenged by its range; snow leopards traverse the borders separating China, India and ten other countries with long histories of tension with each other as well as internal political and economic struggles. This transnational animal provides an ideal case study for the consideration of transnational conservation science in the recent past.

Given that purely scientific accounts of ‘environmental performance’ and ‘development’ cannot fully explain the environment and its interactions with people, this paper investigates how nature has been historically and sociopolitically defined in different societies. The analyses and observations presented in this paper are based on a critical literature review and on case studies of two ‘coal capitals’, one in Guizhou in China and the other in Jharkhand in India. The study examines the historical representations of environmental campaigns (particularly from the 1950s to the 1990s) in the two countries, and discusses how historical, sociopolitical and ideological factors have affected conceptualizations of nature and how they are reflected nowadays in people's narratives concerning the environment. The paper concludes that the Chinese pattern of development, as well as of knowledge construction, reflects a greater intention of homogenizing the public with the language of development deployed by the centralized power; meanwhile, the Indian pattern allows a greater space for the representation of conflicts, including people's struggles against the state. The comparative analysis enriches our understanding of people's responses to official perceptions of the environment endorsed by modern science and governance.

Science park developments have become ubiquitous in China and India in recent decades as both countries integrate further into the global economy. These exclusive high-tech spaces prioritize the partnership between industry, research and the government as a desirable mode of urbanization, economic growth and knowledge production. Contrary to the older form of industrial zone associated with big science and big industry for national mobilization during the Cold War, contemporary science parks constitute a network of global spaces that are designed to facilitate the circulation of technology, personnel and capital in the neo-liberal world. Similarly, science parks are closely linked to innovation, entrepreneurship and social exclusion rather than the collective social betterment. As utopian machines for the privileged, these exclusive spaces are about consumption, desire, hedging and speculation as much as about science, research and production.

History and Speculation, Past and Future, are not as separate as they once were in our disciplinary imaginations. Science fiction has emerged as one of many new speculative frequencies in today's scholarly spectrum. Visual representation is an older mode that brings thought and feeling, analytics and prediction together. It pre-dates both historical and fictional narrative forms. Shaped by long histories of artistic and critical conversations, images today are being used in ways that extend and complicate our interdisciplinary scholarly methods. Here, they are put to work in order to pose different questions and suggest alternative analyses of the histories and futures of Asia's changing landscapes.

A conversation between philosopher of digital cultures Anna Greenspan and historian of China Jeffrey Wasserstrom, speculative-fiction writer Anil Menon, and historian of science Kavita Philip, exploring the emerging work from scholars who have grown up with the global influence of science fiction in popular culture while being trained in the disciplinary spaces between science, engineering, social science, law and the humanities. The following questions are addressed: what are the prehistories of science fiction and the futures of such interdisciplinary work? How do India and China, as places where important new science fiction is being written, and as nations exploding now into emerging markets characterized by technological dynamism, fit into older historiographic frames that saw the European Enlightenment as the source of modern science, and the ‘developing world’ as destined only to ever play catch-up? How should the politics of digital futures and non-European pasts figure in historical research and in fiction writing, keeping in mind the historian's fear of presentism and anachronism, and the fiction writer's dislike of political moralism?