20190724T090020190724T1145Europe/AmsterdamBeyond Technical Aid: Cold War Scientific Cooperation in East Asia
How international scientific cooperation played out in Cold War politics and knowledge production has been a central concern for historians of science. The connection between U.S. or Soviet technical assistance and the rapid development of science in East Asia has been noted in this context. This panel sheds lights on unexplored but central questions connected to this issue: What did "cooperation" mean to actors in the Cold War context? What socio-political conditions and material infrastructure made cooperation available or led to failure? Wasn't regional cooperation within East Asia important as much as aid from superpowers? Hyun examines how the notion of cooperation was contested, negotiated, and redefined between South Korean and the U.S. scientists conducting ecosystem ecology research in the Korean demilitarized zone during the 1960s. DiMoia illuminates how Japanese and South Korean parasitologists revitalized their colonial medical network in the name of development aid projects after the normalization of diplomatic relations in 1965. Luk looks at an international oceanographic project known as "Cooperative Study of the Kuroshio and Adjacent Regions" (1965–1978) and reveals the politics of international cooperation and competition between Chinese and Japanese scientists. Barrett explores the rhetoric and reality of regional cooperation in the planning and execution of the 1964 Peking Science Symposium, discussing China's efforts to establish itself as the central scientific power in the developing world. Bringing together diverse cooperative projects, this panel provides opportunities to rethink the nature of scientific cooperation in Cold War East Asia beyond the history of technical aid.
Organized by Jaehwan Hyun and John DiM ...
Drift 25, Rm. 201History of Science Society 2019meeting@hssonline.orgAdd to Calendar
How international scientific cooperation played out in Cold War politics and knowledge production has been a central concern for historians of science. The connection between U.S. or Soviet technical assistance and the rapid development of science in East Asia has been noted in this context. This panel sheds lights on unexplored but central questions connected to this issue: What did "cooperation" mean to actors in the Cold War context? What socio-political conditions and material infrastructure made cooperation available or led to failure? Wasn't regional cooperation within East Asia important as much as aid from superpowers? Hyun examines how the notion of cooperation was contested, negotiated, and redefined between South Korean and the U.S. scientists conducting ecosystem ecology research in the Korean demilitarized zone during the 1960s. DiMoia illuminates how Japanese and South Korean parasitologists revitalized their colonial medical network in the name of development aid projects after the normalization of diplomatic relations in 1965. Luk looks at an international oceanographic project known as "Cooperative Study of the Kuroshio and Adjacent Regions" (1965–1978) and reveals the politics of international cooperation and competition between Chinese and Japanese scientists. Barrett explores the rhetoric and reality of regional cooperation in the planning and execution of the 1964 Peking Science Symposium, discussing China's efforts to establish itself as the central scientific power in the developing world. Bringing together diverse cooperative projects, this panel provides opportunities to rethink the nature of scientific cooperation in Cold War East Asia beyond the history of technical aid.
Organized by Jaehwan Hyun and John DiMoia
Contested Cooperation: The US-South Korea Ecological Survey in the Demilitarized Zone, 1963-1968View Abstract Organized SessionThematic Approaches to the Study of Science09:00 AM - 09:30 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/24 07:00:00 UTC - 2019/07/24 07:30:00 UTC
This paper explores the planning, execution, and failure of the US-Korea Cooperative Ecological Survey project in the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in the 1960s. In this period, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) newly initiated bilateral scientific cooperation between the NAS and similar organizations in developing countries along the line of the developmental turn of the U.S. foreign assistance. The U.S. conservationists closely working with the NAS used this scheme to introduce nature conservation practices and the discipline of ecology to developing countries. In this context, by way of the NAS’s Pacific Science Board, Helmut K. Buechner (1918–1975), director of the Office of Ecology at the Smithsonian Institution, together with Yung Sun Kang (1917–1999) of Seoul National University, initiated the preliminary cooperative project at the DMZ in 1965. Korean and U.S. scientists soon began to realize that their collaboration was marked by dissonance. The different understandings between them over the nature of their cooperative relationship provoked a nationalist backlash from the Korean side, strengthened financial controls from the Smithsonian side, and finally led to the failure of the project. The paper will reveal that the conflict between two sides revolving around the notion of cooperation was deeply linked to the broader political debate on the role of leading Korean scientists as “knowledge brokers” among the U.S. aid authorities, American scientists, and Koreans themselves in this period. In doing so, it illuminates the contested nature of Cold War US-Korea scientific collaboration which hid behind consensual American hegemony.
Jaehwan Hyun Max-Planck-Institute For The History Of Science
Parasites and the Postcolonial: Renewed Japan-Korea Medical Collaboration and South Korean Developmentalism, 1964-Early 1970sView Abstract Organized SessionThematic Approaches to the Study of Science09:30 AM - 10:00 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/24 07:30:00 UTC - 2019/07/24 08:00:00 UTC
This paper (undertaken with Aya Homei of Manchester University) depicts how anti-parasite and family planning campaigns developed in Japan and Korea independently after the Second World War, as specifically domestic public health initiatives that directly contributed to the post-war reconstruction (Japan) and nation-building (South Korea) exercises, and examines how they were later incorporated into development aid projects from the 1960s. In the South Korean case, leading parasitologists, including Dr. Seo Byung Seol (1921-1991) of Seoul National University, re-engaged with their Japanese colleagues, while also reaching out to Southeast Asia as a mentor, and potential model. By juxtaposing domestic histories of Japan as a former coloniser, and South Korea as its former colony, the paper explores colonial legacies in post-war medical cooperation in East Asia. Furthermore, by clarifying how Japanese and South Korean development aid projects both grew from the links that existed in their respective domestic histories, the paper aims to highlight complexities engrained in the history and to shed new light into a historiography that often locates the origins of development aid in colonial history. If South Korean developmentalism dates its origins to this intense period of networking (late 1960s, early 1970s), the outreach remains distinct from the colonial period, even while containing uncomfortable resonances with it.
The Pacific’s Black Current: China, Japan, and the “Cooperative Study of the Kuroshio and Adjacent Regions” (CSK), 1965-1978 View Abstract Organized SessionThematic Approaches to the Study of Science10:15 AM - 10:45 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/24 08:15:00 UTC - 2019/07/24 08:45:00 UTC
The Kuroshio–––literally known as the “black current”––is the Pacific counterpart of the Gulf Stream in the North Atlantic. It is a west-to-east flowing warm current in the Northeast Pacific region. During the Cold War, a 13-year international program known as the “Cooperative Study of the Kuroshio and Adjacent Regions” (CSK) was launched between 1965-1978, incorporating participation from British Hong Kong, (Republic of) China, Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Korea, the US, and the USSR. This paper explores the complexity of scientific cooperation manifested in the divergent interests held by Chinese and Japanese scientists in the CSK. Just as Japanese oceanographers held different sets of concerns and expectation over the CSK than their Soviet counterparts, the Chinese delegates of the CSK also expressed different interests than their Japanese colleagues. Through studying the national differences in the international survey of the Pacific current, this paper aims to shed light on the politics of oceanographic internationalism as intertwined along the Pacific coasts. I argue that the participation of China and Japan in the mid-twentieth century study of the Kuroshio seem to highlight their divergent commitments and motivation in approaching the Pacific’s black current.
Presenters Christine Luk Department Of The History Of Science, Tsinghua University
Scientific Cooperation and Asian Socialism: Chinese Ambitions and Regional Cooperation in the 1964 Peking Science SymposiumView Abstract Organized SessionThematic Approaches to the Study of Science10:45 AM - 11:15 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/24 08:45:00 UTC - 2019/07/24 09:15:00 UTC
The 1964 Peking Science Symposium was the largest international scientific congress held in the People’s Republic of China during the Mao Era. This event was the centrepiece of China’s strategic pivot in terms of its approach to international scientific outreach during the 1960s, away from existing structures and organisations like the World Federation of Scientific Workers and toward the creation of a new scientific order in which China would be a scientific superpower within the developing world. Accordingly, the event was open only to scientists from countries in Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Latin America, pointedly excluding those from other parts of the world. Yet for all that the Peking Science Symposium was a vehicle for Chinese ambitions toward increased influence in international science, the event was also ostensibly organised in close collaboration along with communist parties from North Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Japan. Attendance at the event itself reflected the centrality of these regional collaborators, with over 60% of the delegates came from these countries, while the influence of Japanese scientists and science, in particular, looming large in the proceedings. This paper examines the nature and significance of the involvement of regional collaborators – both scientific and political – in the Peking Science Symposium. In doing so, it elucidates both crucial vectors of influence from within Asia on Chinese science as well as the significance of regional collaboration in China’s drive to establish itself as a centre within the scientific world during one of the hottest periods of the Cold War.
Commentary: Beyond Technical Aid: Cold War Scientific Cooperation in East AsiaView Abstract Organized Session11:15 AM - 11:45 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/24 09:15:00 UTC - 2019/07/24 09:45:00 UTC
Christine Luk
Gordon Barrett