The Socialist Origins of Artificial Carp Reproduction in Maoist China

Abstract

The Maoist era has often been portrayed as a hindrance to China’s biotechnological development due to Lysenko doctrine and the communist government’s animosity to basic academic research. Yet some of China’s most developed sectors in biotechnology have been made possible by socialist enterprises in agriculture and science under Mao. One such example is China’s world-leading aquaculture biotechnology and genetic research on Asian carp. Although some associated China’s success in the area with the booming Asian market and a globalised biotech industry, the field’s advancement has been deeply rooted in earlier socialist history in reforming aquaculture and science. This article takes one essential technology used by biotech and aquaculture industries–the hormone-aided method in artificial carp reproduction–as a major case. By tracing the political, scientific and sociocultural lineages that made its invention and dissemination possible, this article unpacks the complex local and historical underpinning that defies prevalent understanding about the method as simply a variation of biotechnology’s global form. Particularly, the initial invention of the method was catalysed not only by state economic concerns but also by a socialist understanding of fishery and Maoist attempts to remold scientists. The two successful breakthroughs described in the article demonstrate two ways that scientists and technicians of different social and professional standings have appropriated available scientific and political resources to achieve personal and institutional goals. The dissemination of the method was further cemented through mass involvement during the Cultural Revolution. By delineating the concrete processes that have ‘assembled’ and maintained the artificial carp propagation method, the article contrasts its entanglement with the socialist regime then with the way the method has become decontextualised in its current use.

For millennia, fish farmers in Asia relied on fry and fingerlings of a few carp species captured in natural waterways for raising edible fish in ponds and small lakes (Marks, 1998, pp. 119–120). During the second half of the twentieth century, as the number of fry and fingerlings significantly declined while demand kept rising, artificial reproduction of these carp became desirable. The hormone-aided induction of fish reproduction was eventually developed in the late 1950s and helped China’s aquaculture biotech evolve into a world-leading field, when many other areas in the life sciences straggled amid waves of political movements (Schneider, 2003). The method, commonly known as ‘artificial propagation’ (rengong fanzhi), was not only adopted by other Asian countries, but also lent an edge to China’s molecular biotechnology in transgenic fish. The capital-intensive path of bioengineering and its representation as ‘cutting edge’ in recent years, however, belied the deeper roots of artificial fish propagation that were connected to socialist concerns about fishery, science, and intellectuals in the early communist state. This article aims to unmask these links through the entangled histories of biotechnology, fishery and the country’s political conditions.

In capitalist neoliberal worldview, scientific aquaculture has been seen as a means of obtaining a variety of food fish with technological aids that promote mass production, rationalise consumption, and benefit corporations (Greenberg, 2011). However, China’s development of scientific aquaculture contradicts the way we understand aquaculture’s global form at present. Chinese development of scientific aquaculture prior to the late 1970s saw little corporate incentive and was linked instead to the aim of socialist self-reliance in food production along with ambitions to modernise the nation in ways that engage local practice and mass contribution (Schmalzer, 2016). Governmental and scientific pursuits in aquaculture thus became hybrid products inspired by heterogeneous motives: to ensure food security, to develop science while containing scientists, and to mobilise the masses for agricultural self-reliance. The two successful breakthroughs in artificial carp propagation achieved in the late 1950s particularly encapsulate such an admixture of motives. The subsequent dissemination of the artificial propagation method, carried out with mass enthusiasm during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, encouraged further invention and cemented continued research, although the process also distorted various technical components at times.

Aihwa Ong has aptly pointed out that static analysis of globalisation or neoliberalism with broad categories could never fully uncover the extreme dynamism and responsiveness to contingencies and politics that captured globalisation’s very condition (Ong, 2007). Regarding China, various scholars have pointed out that fitting the country into a ‘neoliberal template’ was difficult not only because of state authoritarianism but also due to the great variety of ways in which actors were entangled with the nation-state (Harvey, 2005, pp. 9–14; Ong, 2007). China’s political environment surrounding scientists and technologists had gone through a host of movements from the outset of the communist regime and between the 1950s and 1970s. While the authoritarian state always favoured higher production of fish, its prioritised areas for fishery development changed along with the economic, ecological, and political conditions and attentions. Actors in various professions involved in carp aquaculture thus adapted themselves to the changing political climate and policy emphasis. They applied transnational, local, and communist experience to engage with the state policy orientation. Among these varied ideological and practical demands of different periods, officials, scientists, technologists, and fish farmers selected those that could advance their own work while complying with the political priorities of the day. Over two decades, the development of artificial carp propagation technology thus became a mishmash of changing strategies, practices and narratives. Those political remnants being piled onto carp reproductive technology during the groping years of the communist state became largely forgotten in later years, when technicians and scientists during the economic reform appropriated the hormone-aided carp reproduction method as a basic link in the fish supply system or one necessary step for conducting advanced research in fish genetics. At present, when the method has been reassembled into industry and science aimed at bootstrapping China onto the global stage, often with governmental investment or substantial capital from Asian markets, what can we learn from its initial assemblage in Maoist times?

There is nothing new in stating that biotechnological forms usually require local processes of assemblage. Scholars have shown, for example, that the contraceptive pills that give billions of women reproductive control are linked to networks of rural yam pickers, international pharmaceutical companies, and the Mexican state in the harvesting and extracting of steroid hormones from barbasco, a wild yam in Mexico. Likewise, every new drug for cancer or AIDS approved by the FDA requires delicate dances between patient rights, commercial interest, and public intervention in the long process of clinical trails, whose nature is highly dependent upon the geographical locations where the trials are conducted (Epstein, 1996; Rajan, 2010; Soto Laveaga, 2009). Yet, the serving of a bowl of grass carp soup in Shanghai or Nanjing was taken to be so commonplace that few would associate it with high-stakes technological innovation and intense labour. As this article shows, to ensure the steady and sufficient supply of carp fish to cities, the early communist state tried to take control of the reproductive cycles of carp, in a social context in which the working modes and directions of scientists, technicians and farmers were also controlled and orchestrated under a strong state. Although unlike hybrid rice or transgenic soybeans, a grass carp raised in a pond does not differ much in genetic makeup from its wild counterparts, its biological existence has been fundamentally altered. Lives of both scientists and fish became hybrid forms between science and Chinese socialism. In this article, I aim to unpack the entanglement of the heterogeneous elements involved in artificial carp propagation and show these elements’ ‘knottedness’. This history puts the current stage of China’s fish biotechnology in a longer historical perspective, showing the connection of China’s most advanced area in biotechnology to the working modes of the socialist state, rather than to its neoliberal appropriation.

The development of fish reproductive technology in China was linked to three major state enterprises—developing fishery for food security, organising science for socialist production, and mobilising the masses for modernisation. While this article embeds the discussion of the second enterprise in the description of two major scientists’ research programmes, a few words about the first and the third enterprise are warranted here. Throughout the twentieth century, directions in developing fishery for ensuring food security in China had been highly fluid and malleable. This is quite understandable because the vast country needed to balance contending economic, environmental and social costs against the demand for aquatic products, whose calculation in turn depended on the relative yields in other agricultural sectors. As such, fishery policy in Maoist China vacillated a great deal between stressing capture- and culture-based fishery, between reviving long-practiced local techniques and initiating new methods to boost production. The changing direction of fishery thus provided a canvas for diverging values and visions to paint their hues. The invention of the carp artificial propagation notably took place at a time when freshwater aquaculture was highlighted as particularly appropriate for the socialist state.

Regarding the third enterprise, mass participation has been crucial in the making of modern industry and agriculture in socialist China. As Sigrid Schmalzer has shown, this aspect was widely commented upon and recommended by foreign visitors when China slightly opened up in the 1970s (Schmalzer, 2009). In 1976, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations formed an international group of four experts to observe aquaculture development in Guangdong, Hubei, and Jiangsu. They similarly lauded the integrative structure in Chinese aquaculture in combining the efforts of the government, fish farmers and scientists, particularly praising the advancement of hormone-aided fish propagation and its operation that involved mass participation (Tapiador, Henderson, Delmendo & Tsutsui, 1977, Chapter 9). Sources obtained internally within China also stress the importance of the experience of the masses and their efforts in developing aquaculture, although the linkage between scientific aquaculture and mass participation became largely effaced from recent discussion.

This article first delineates the changing fishery policy in the 1950s and the significance of controlled carp reproduction in culture-based fishery. Then it describes the entangled scientific, social and geopolitical elements in two influential technological breakthroughs in artificial carp propagation achieved in Guangzhou and Shanghai. Before concluding, the article also provides an overview of the dissemination and further development of the technology during the Cultural Revolution, when mass participation improved or hampered the implementation of the technology in various instances.

Socialist Fishery between Capture and Culture

In China, fish offers an important source of protein in the daily diet. Its production through aquaculture has a long history that can be traced earliest to records on oracle bones more than 3,000 years ago (Cai, 1991, p. 1). Thus from the time the Qing government (1644–1911) began to modernise fishery, aquaculture’s potential for developing industry and in preserving fish-raising traditions have been discussed. Yet the state needed to make decisions in distributing available resources between aquaculture and capture-based fishery. The particular areas chosen for focused development varied a great deal with the changing regimes.

When the prominent official and entrepreneur of the New Policies movement Zhang Jian (张謇, 1853–1926) raised the importance of developing fishery to the Qing court, he emphasised the linkage between fishing territories and maritime power. The pronounced connection between fishery and sovereignty meant that the focus was put on capture-based fishery that reached into territorial waters. As a call for modernising fisheries was launched, a number of students were sent to Japan to study scientific fishery, many at the Tokyo Fishery Institute. Upon their return, many of them became founding members of regional fishery schools and Jiangsu–Zhejiang Fishing Company (Muscolino, 2009, pp. 74–83). Before the breakout of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, the fishery experts of these schools had conducted research for the improvement of fishing gears, the refinement of pro-cessing and storage, and surveys of natural fishery resources. Although surveys of local aquaculture techniques and research on freshwater aquaculture were conducted, they were done in piecemeal fashion compared to the more systematic work in capture-based fishery.¹ Concentrated efforts in developing scientific aquaculture only started after the end of the War of Resistance in 1945.²

Apart from the connection to territorial control, focused development of capture-based fishery also made sense initially because it tapped into the ready natural resource that provided relatively quick return, while aquaculture required a longer period to develop. When the communists took over China in 1949, the country had gone through the War of Resistance and the Civil War, which devastated industries and fishery apparatus. Years of relapses during the war had nevertheless given marine and freshwater species some time for recovery from earlier exploitation during the late Qing and Republican periods. Given the relative abundance of wild fish sources, the early communist state also decided to focus on capture-based fishery first and make aquaculture a second priority. By 1953, because of the lack of interest in freshwater aquaculture, some earlier sources of freshwater fish in ponds were lost due to lack of maintenance and the presence of natural predators (Chinese Bureau of Agriculture [CBA], 1983, p. 43, hence CBA).

The year of 1953 marked a change in nationwide fishery policy from ‘centering on recovery’ to ‘combining aquaculture with capture-based fishery’ and ‘gradually improving aquaculture’ (CBA, 1983, p. 19). This redirection had much to do with the increasing domestic and international demand for aquatic products. At the time, many Chinese cities still suffered serious deficiency in providing residents with sufficient protein. In 1957, the total freshwater surface area used for fish cultures was about 20 per cent of the total surface area, which was considered quite low. It was suggested aquaculture industry in urban and suburban areas should be developed, since these areas would not compete with land use for crops, and would produce fresh fish for cities with low transportation costs (CBA, 1983, pp. 153–154).

Meanwhile, the drive to join the international economy with exports highlighted the economic and diplomatic potential of developing aquaculture. Between 1954 and 1957, after signing new international treaties on fishery as well as a series of advancements in fish processing, transport and finance, China’s fishery moved to an unprecedented large scale. Officials recognised that fishery products could provide additional raw materials for industry, agriculture, medicine, such as being processed as sources for stock feed and fertiliser. All these products could be exported to other countries in the communist bloc such as the Soviet Union and East Germany (CBA, 1983, pp. 162–166).

In the ‘National Program for Agricultural Development’ issued in 1956, it was proposed that China should ‘utilize all waters suitable to develop aquaculture’ (PRC Ministry of Aquatic Products, 1959, pp. 1–4). In weighing the capture- and culture-based approaches, both practical and ideological dimensions were considered. As stated by one director of the PRC State Council, Cheng Zihua (程子华), pelagic fishery required advanced engines and substantial amount of diesel, while coastal and inland fishery required significantly less. Soon in 1958, a socialistic interpretation of culture-based fishery was offered by the new Assistant Minister of the Ministry of Aquatic Products, Gao Wenhua (高文华). In his speech, ‘The struggle between cultivation and capture’, Gao pointed out that pelagic fishery relied on the expanding ocean fishing territories and often involved encroaching on other countries’ sea areas. As such, pelagic fishery was unmistakably colonial and imperialistic in nature. On the other hand, aquaculture was non-invasive and could maximise contributions from common fishermen instead of relying solely on experts. Thus, aquaculture was a socialist mode of fishery (Gao, 1958). At the same time, the higher demand in fishery production made captures from the finite yields of the ocean seem confining, while scientific aquaculture offered an alternative that could boost production in a seemingly infinite way.

Although the increasing national and international demand for aquatic products was the major motivation behind the state policy reorientation, the cultural factors that drew officials and fish farmers alike to aquaculture could not be neglected. Apart from aquaculture’s affinity with socialist ethos, raising fish in ponds and rice paddies had long been practiced in southern rural areas in the country for additional protein, which was especially important when crop production was devastated by drought or flood. Mao himself had grown up near the lakes and rivers of Hunan Province and had led the communist base in Yan’an, an inland town, for more than a decade. He personally favoured dishes made of fish and had highly praised Wuchang fish in poetry. The nation’s freshwater aquaculture in the 1950s could not be promoted without Mao’s blessing.

The Gravity of Artificial Reproduction

Despite the country’s long history of raising fish, the unprecedented scale of aquaculture raised new challenges. One of them was how to obtain enough fingerlings for the increasing demand. In China, four common species of fish for pond aquaculture– black carp, grass carp, silver carp, and bighead carp– have been conventionally called ‘four domesticated fishes’ (sida jiayu). In English-language scientific literature, they constitute a major portion of the species included in the umbrella term ‘Asian carp’ (Hinterthuer, 2012). Although these fish are able to grow and gain weight in artificial ponds without any problems, they cannot spawn in ponds or other still waters. This natural constraint forced fish farmers in southeastern provinces to toil yearly since they needed to obtain fry and fingerlings from certain sections of the Yangtze River during the spawning season of spring, which involved intensive labour and substantial risk. The spawning time window was short, and fingerlings were prone to die in precarious conditions while being transported. Cars, ships, trains and even airplanes were mobilised for transporting them, while purchasers gathered around the spawning areas in flocks in hopes of getting favourable bids. In 1957, one bighead carp fingerling was valued at 40 cents, which was more expensive than pure gold at the time (Zhong, 2007). The high price of fingerlings made them difficult to be distributed in an equitable way among different regions.

For the endeavouring state, a more aggravating issue was that the limited natural supply of fingerlings did not seem able to meet the national production goal. Making the situation worse, in the late 1950s, fishery surveys indicated that fingerling resources were in drastic decline due to overfishing. The threatened pool of fingerlings had not been unknown. As early as the 1930s, alarms of the dwindling fingerling supply in the lower Yangtze River had led to a state-regulated schedule for harvesting fingerlings in order to recover a sustainable level. Some researchers in the 1920s had started experimenting whether spawning could be induced in the pond in order to alleviate the complete reliance on natural spawns. In the late 1940s, after the Guomindang government reclaimed coastal cities from Japanese occupation and started to consider developing freshwater aquaculture, projects in artificial fish reproduction through the injection of hormones were among the early research initiatives.³

Adding to the problem of declining supplies, the demand for carp fingerlings kept rising as the net area for freshwater aquaculture rose steadily, which in 1956 alone increased about 40 percent. And the long-distance transportation of fingerlings with low survival rates (16 percent in 1956) exacerbated the issue. To address these problems, fishery experts suggested that peasants enlarge the number of species being cultivated and obtain fingerlings locally (CBA, 1983, p. 128). Yet, these were not long-term solutions. Research on artificial carp reproduction was then proposed for solving the pressing issue (Chen, Xiang & Liu, 2009, pp. 181–183).

A few biologists soon took up this call for research. Apart from their willingness to contribute, entry to aquaculture also offered a way to follow Mao’s vision for socialist science. Since the Yan’an Rectification Movement between 1942 and 1944, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had emphasised the utilitarian value of science and technology. After the CCP’s ascendance to power, as Korean War intensified the issue of self-reliance, Mao called on scientists to harness scientific knowledge for developing agriculture and industry (Schmalzer, 2014). As Mao harboured an ambiguous attitude regarding scientific experts’ revolutionary status, he employed class struggle as a recurring strategy to reform scientists and criticised the ivory tower style of academic research that did not offer solutions to socialist practice and production as bourgeois and imperialistic (Dikötter, 2013, pp. 174–206). In the late 1950s, aquaculture’s importance had been made known among scientists through the 12-year plan for science and technology, which included programmes in ‘improving methods for fish cultivation’ (Wang, 2005). Artificial propagation of food fish species thus became a hotspot for research, providing one area for scientists to make contributions and avoid criticism. Among such efforts, two research programmes eventually became successful in 1958 at the cusp of the Great Leap Forward.

Variegated Sources for Invention

In 1958, two breakthroughs in the artificial propagation of carp were achieved at the China South Sea Institute for Aquaculture (SSIA), Guangzhou, and at the Institute of Experimental Biology (IEB), Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai. Both breakthroughs were affected by pressures to make science relevant to production issues. They took place shortly after the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957, in which hundreds of thousands of scholars and scientists were criticised and humiliated for their views. To make matters worse, Mao’s Great Leap Forward campaign launched in 1958 put forward urgent and often absurdly impractical expectations to industrial and agricultural productions. As scientists were being transformed into, in Judith Shapiro words, ‘foot-soldiers in Mao’s war against nature’, an expanding team of fishery experts began to explore shortcuts to solving the issue of artificial carp reproduction (Shapiro, 2001, p. 197). Yet, as the two institutions’ names suggest, the leadership of two projects arrived at their breakthroughs with quite different kinds of expertise. Zhong Lin (钟麟, 1915–1996), the director of SSIA in Guangzhou, had been studying fish cultures since his years as a student at a technical fishery college in the 1930s. Resolving practical issues and consulting a network of fishery workers had been a built-in element in his daily work. Zhu Xi (朱洗, 1900–1962), on the other hand, had been trained in a tradition of experimental embryology in France and worked as an embryologist attuned to solve questions about biological development and reproduction. Zhu’s inroad into the applied problem of artificial carp propagation was a direct response to the state policy change regarding science, especially the request ‘to combine theory with practice’.

Local Experience and Political Correctness at SSIA

Born in Nanhai County, a county in Guangdong with widespread pond aquaculture, Zhong was said to have been interested in raising fish since a very young age. He eventually started to study the subject at Guangdong Advanced Professional College of Aquaculture in 1934. After graduating in 1937, Zhong taught and conducted graduate studies in Hong Kong with the eminent ichthyologist Lin Shuyan (林书颜, 1903–1974). In 1941, Zhong went to work at the Guangxi Aquatic Farm under Guomindang’s Bureau of Agriculture and Forestry, and had done some primary testing in stimulating carp spawning in ponds (Xu, 1983).

After the Communist Revolution, Zhong returned to Guangdong and became the director of the Institute of Aquaculture of Guangdong Provincial Bureau of Agriculture and Forestry (a predecessor of the SSIA) in 1953. Zhong had maintained a network of fishermen, officials and researchers as associates and friends. Partly because of his access to different kinds of resources through the network, he could build an experimental pond measuring 3 mu (about 2,000 square metres) and start experimenting on carp spawning right after joining the SSIA. The experimental pond was constructed in such a way that it connected with a nearby river and its level of water flows could be adjusted. Yet, the experiment required a long period to yield result, positive or negative, because bighead carp and silver carp, two species that Zhong had chosen to work on, required 3–4 years to reach sexual maturity. Zhong did not simply wait but busied himself with other projects including surveying local production methods in preserving salty fish, analysing local methods in cultivating oysters, surveying methods of cultivating fish in rice paddies, studying various parasites that sickened fingerlings, and examining an ulcer disease in grass carp. Even with so much attention to local methods and knowledge, Zhong was not spared from criticism. Some of his projects, such as local surveys in preservative methods for fish, were criticised because they were not directly related to production and were considered distracting misuse of valuable resources (South Sea Institute of Aquaculture, 2003, pp. 23–31).

In 1956, when the original fingerlings of bighead and silver carp reached their sexual maturity, the team tried to inject extracts made from urine of pregnant women and those from the hypothalamus of common carp. These extracts were believed to be effective in inducing spawning behaviour, yet SSIA researchers did not obtain the desirable results. While visiting river sections where natural spawning took place, Zhong came to realise that the minimal flow of river water into the pond could not provide the intense torrents that female fish required (Xu, 1983). The next year, Zhong tried to increase the speed of the water flow by putting female fish at the drainage channel of the Qixing Lake. But again he failed. As the Anti-Rightist Campaign reached the institute later in the year, Zhong and his team went for a month-long field trip in the carp spawning areas of Guangdong and Guangxi to learn from the masses. Although they did learn a great deal about carp behaviour during the trip, the detailed ecological and behavioural knowledge seemed to have contributed little to the ensuing breakthrough (Feng, 2003, pp. 28–29).

In 1958, the team chose yet another pond at a location where tidal changes in nearby rivers could flood in and out of the pond constantly. They released both female and male fish into the pond for a new round of experiments. The researchers injected extracts from the hypothalamus of pregnant common carp into the female fish. Because they used both the hormonal stimulation and water flow similar to that of natural spawning areas, they called the strategy an ‘integrative physiological and ecological method’ (Zhong, 1958). Between 24 May and 3 June, the team conducted eight experiments using the method, seven of which successfully induced spawning by female fish. Researchers subsequently collected these eggs and artificially fertilised them. It was reported that by 4 June, about 10,000 fingerlings of silver carp and 20,000 fingerlings of bighead carp were hatched (South Sea Institute of Aquaculture, 1958).

The year 1958 was a time when state claims of ‘centring on fish cultures’ and ‘a great leap in aquaculture’ intersected. Not surprisingly, Zhong’s work received immediate attention from the Ministry of Aquatic Products. In a broadcasted talk, ‘Directions and tasks of the technological revolution in aquaculture’, the Assistant Director of the Ministry, Gao Wenhua, mentioned Zhong’s work as one of the three significant achievements in aquaculture. Two others were the transplantation of seaweed to southern provinces and a successful case of whales hunting (Gao, 1958 [1983]). Gao especially highlighted induced carp spawning as an exemplar in both ‘liberating thought’ and ‘combining the indigenous with the western’. As he understood it, discussions about combining the ‘red’ and the expert and those about ‘taking the politics as the lead’ (zhengzhi guashuai) that took place earlier in 1957 at SSIA were pivotal for the final success, because inducing fish spawning in the pond was unheard of in the long history of aquaculture in China, and researchers had been initially intimidated by the task. Their doubt was nevertheless alleviated by organised discussions on ‘liberating thought’. In addition, although hormone injection was Western in origin, in the final experimental design, the team utilised local water wheels commonly used by local farmers to renew the pond water. This addition proved to be essential because it had helped to adjust the water to an optimal level and increased available oxygen in the water, which encouraged spawning.

Gao’s assessment about what facilitated the achievement was certainly skewed by the political climate of the day. But his assessment was also grounded in scientists’ own reports generated to gain an advantage and in competing with peers. For example, Gao compared Zhong’s breakthrough with other experts’ predictions that artificial carp reproduction would require more funding and time, intimating that Zhong was more ‘red’ and daring than those prognosticators. These experts Gao mentioned included Zhu Xi, who had suggested that the ministry help build a costly water channel to emulate natural water flow. While Zhong worked as a technical expert who had been close to the people and to aquaculture production, Zhu had started his foray into the problem as an academic biologist. Gao’s view revealed the different levels of trust that Zhong and Zhu could receive from party officials.

Reforming Embryology for Socialist Production at IEB

Zhu Xi’s science background was rooted in a tradition of experimental embryology, obtaining his embryology degree (PhD 1931) at the University of Montpelier with the French embryologist Jean Eugène Bataillon (1864–1953). Yet, he had worked as a manual labour in factories and had early contact with Communist Party members. In fact, the harsh working conditions had compelled a number of Chinese students to criticise capitalism and turn to communism in the 1920s; some of them joined the Chinese Communist Youth Party in Europe (Bailey, 1988). While in France, Zhu nevertheless found Kropotkin’s anarchism more appealing than communism and only watched the communist activity from the sidelines (Zhang, 2008).

Between 1932 and 1949, Zhu held several academic positions in universities and research institutes in Beijing, Shanghai, Zhejiang, and Taipei, before working at the Institute of Experimental Biology in Shanghai after the revolution. As anti-rightist movements and the social remoulding of scientists went on in the 1950s, one radical youth at IEB voiced criticism against Zhu. It was said although Zhu continued to produce high-calibre research on silkworms and toads, he had failed to contribute solutions to real problems in socialist production (Chen, 1999, pp. 174–175). Although criticism from the radical youth was discouraging, Zhu was nevertheless well protected for several reasons. Chen Yi, then the mayor of Shanghai, had once been Zhu’s co-worker at the automobile company Citroën during their work–study period in France. As Zhu was criticised, Chen himself visited Zhu to do his ‘thought work’, a kind of ideological education for intellectuals through personal exchange. Equally important was a personal visit from the prominent Soviet agrobiologist, twice winner of the Stalin Prize, Ivan Antonovich Glushchenko in December 1952. Glushchenko offered high praise for Zhu’s research in mixed-species fertilisation of silkworms. According to Glushchenko, Zhu’s research not only provided an excellent example in support of Michurin’s ideas but also had the potential for producing stronger silkworm strains for sericulture (Anonymous, 1952).

With the protection from the Shanghai mayor and the Soviet scientist, Zhu eventually recovered from the criticism and initiated a programme to introduce a South Asian strain of eri-silkworm to the countryside, which achieved some level of success (Zhu, 1956). Later, at the 1956 visionary meeting for science planning, Zhu proposed to solve the long-standing reproduction issue concerning carp aquaculture in artificial ponds as his second project in ‘combining theory with practice’ (Chen, 1999, pp. 165–201).

Zhu’s proposal to induce female carp spawns in the pond was not simply a response to the party’s new agenda in aquaculture but was inspired by a recent visit to the Soviet Union and Ukraine. In an era of global Cold War, Chinese scientific exchange relocated from Western Europe and the United States to the Soviet Union. In February 1953, while visiting the Soviet Union for 3 months with the group from the Chinese Academy of Sciences led by the prominent nuclear physicist Qian Sanqiang, Zhu was particularly impressed by the Soviet Union’s Institute of Zoological Morphology. The embryology laboratory there had focused on the fish development, in part because many recently built reservoirs in the Soviet Union made culture-based fishery increasingly desirable (Zhu, 1953). In 1957, in preparation for tackling aquaculture problems in China, Zhu started to survey fishery conditions in Zhejiang, consulting with fishermen and the provincial fishery bureau to learn about spawning locations. At this stage, Zhu was interested in developing a water channel system that could guide water flow to mimic the natural waves in rivers, which would then trick female carp into spawning. This costly plan eventually incurred criticism from Gao, but for Zhu, the strategy, if successful, would be more sustainable than hormone injection in the long term in terms of labour input and environmental preservation (Chen, 1999, pp. 217–223).

In 1958, as nationwide optimism about the Great Leap Forward heightened and SSIA’s success became known, IEB experienced a level of competition. They started planning to make an offering of pond-produced fingerlings to the CCP for its 1958 celebration of National Day (1 October). At the time, the water channel strategy met obstacles, and Zhu started to organise the Shanghai team to experiment with using hormones to coax the eggs from carp.

The eventual success of Zhu’s team relied highly upon the material resources and expertise available for the studies of embryology and gynaecology at IEB. Regarding biochemical material, the institute had a ready supply of human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG) for research. Specifically, the Laboratory on Experimental Oncology next to Zhu’s laboratory had abundant supplies of urine samples collected from pregnant women working at various textile factories in Shanghai. These urine samples were initially collected for research on gynaecological cancers, and they could readily serve as a source of HCG. Because there was no population policy in effect restricting births—the party was actually celebrating women with many children as communist ‘hero mothers’—pregnant women were numerous among factory workers and were reported to be eager to donate urine for scientific research. Yet, the aquaculture team needed a larger quantity of hormones than the cancer group could offer. Based on earlier contacts, researchers reached out to seven large cotton-weaving factories in the Yangshupu District and a dozen of health stations in the city to obtain information about the number and locations of pregnant women nearby. Four full-time workers were devoted to the task, soliciting urine donations from factory workers and pregnant women registered at health stations. It was said that some of the women being solicited were so enthusiastic about the prospect of contributing to socialist aquaculture that they would save up to 3–4 litres and wait for researchers’ next visit. In the most intense period of carp proliferation research, associates at the IEB could process 60 litres of urine each day and extract a large amount of HCG (The Laboratory of Development and Physiology, 1966, p. 90).

Zhu’s confidence in using the hormone method originated in part from his scientific background in embryology and reproductive biology. His laboratory had developed a way to measure the concentration of chorionic gonadotropin by observing the spawning behaviours of the toad Bufo bufo gargarizans (Jiang, forthcoming). More importantly, Zhu had the goldfish in mind as a model in order to quickly test the effectiveness of injecting hormones. Various Asian carp needed at least 2–3 years to reach sexual maturity, and by then, their bodies, weighing several kilograms, would be unwieldy for massive testing by a laboratory specialising in experimental biology but not in aquaculture. In addition, the complex ecology in ponds offered uneven temperatures, varied levels of sunshine and a number of other species vying for resources, making the eggs inside the ovaries of different female carp rather heterogeneous in terms of their stages of maturation. This heterogeneity rendered controlled experimentation difficult to carry out—when an experimenter injected a dose of gonadotropin but saw no effect, she or he would be at loss in terms of locating the exact cause of such a failure (Zhu, Chen & Wang, 1960).

Overall, the team’s experiments featured more exact controls and close monitoring of laboratory and ecological parameters than SSIA’s approach. They tested the effect of injecting HCG into female goldfish at various stages of pregnancy to calibrate the final design for carp injections. For these experiments, goldfish behaviours were monitored closely, and the egg maturation levels in the ovary were recorded every 2 hours by dissecting the ovaries. From the results of these tests, the institute’s researchers concluded that the successful induction of spawning of healthy eggs did not vary a great deal with the types of hormones being injected—human chorionic gonadotropin and fish-derived pituitary hormones worked equally well. The intrinsic physiological readiness of the fish, however, was more important: the fish must have mature eggs to release, but not too mature so that they started to age; they must have been living with proper light cycles and temperature; and ideally, male fish should be present to ease the release of eggs (Zhu & Wang, 1962).

Following instructions about how to select the proper fish and the correct timing and dose for injection from Zhu’s team, fishery workers at the Zhejiang Fishery College were eventually successful in inducing spawning in both silver carp and bighead carp. For National Day in October 1958, they offered about 10,000 silver carp fingerlings to the CCP from the artificially fertilised eggs (The Laboratory of Development and Physiology, 1966, pp. vii–viii). With this success, researchers at the Zhejiang Fishery College soon wrote up protocols for timing, dosing and injecting the HCG hormone to induce spawning along with subsequent procedures for securing, fertilising and incubating eggs. By 1960, fish hatcheries in eight provinces had adopted these methods. Although the SSIA claimed priority in the initial success IEB’s voluminous publication of manuals became more widely circulated within the close-knit aquaculture network of Jiangsu–Zhejiang region, and their method was said to have ‘improved’ SSIA’s earlier invention. The established embryological expertise, material sharing and laboratory management available at Zhu’s laboratory played an essential role in the orchestration of research and promotion.

A Method in Reconstruction in the Changing Wind

In 1960, a number of hatcheries reported surprisingly large yields due to local adoption of the artificial propagation method—often in a triumphant, exuberant manner that was prevalent during the Great Leap. Many of these reports were dubious in their veracity and might not be reflective of the actual yields. It was known later that because of the nationwide famine between 1959 and 1961, a majority of communes and farmers actually lost interest in and energy for maintaining fish cultures. Instead, due to the lack of all kinds of food, local fishermen usually captured fish as much as they could from nearby rivers, lakes and coastal waters to provide the most needed protein source to villages and towns. Other strategies during the famine included consumption of wild animals, insects, earth and wild herbs (Zhou, 2013, p. 231). In addition, in order to grow more crops, some regions started to reclaim lakes and ponds and turn them into crop fields, which led to the shrinkage of available aquaculture waters. By 1962, the area for pond aquaculture was reduced by about a quarter compared to that of 1957, and total production was cut almost to half of the total yield in 1959 (Chen, Xiang & Liu, 2009, pp. 41–43). In addition to the shrinkage of freshwater culture, in order to fulfill unrealistic goals in fishery, the Great Leap also led to reckless fishing that exhausted a number of natural hatcheries, causing long-term resource deficiency in products such as yellow croakers and shrimp (Chen, Xiang & Liu, 2009, p. 43). As the nation urgently needed to address the famine with direct means, the dissemination of artificial propagation among provinces was brought to a halt by 1959, which only began to revive in 1962 when the direct impact of famine started to subside.

The resumption of research on artificial carp propagation rekindled earlier interest, and a number of fishery research institutes began to compete for the next ‘firsts’. In 1960, artificial propagation of grass carp was achieved almost simultaneously at four research institutes—CAS’s Institute of Hydrobiology, SSIA, the Aquaculture Bureau of Hunan Agricultural Department, and the Yangtze River Research Institute of Aquaculture of the Ministry of Aquatic Products (Wu & Zhong, 1964). Guangdong and Zhejiang, two provinces that had cradled the first two breakthroughs, organised projects to further disseminate the method. Researchers in other provinces started to adapt the protocol for other species and work on modifications that fit local climate and water features. In 1962, the IEB published the book Artificial Reproduction of Domestic Fishes, which was followed by Zhong team’s Biology of Domestic Fishes and Their Artificial Propagation in 1965 (CAS Institute of Experimental Biology, 1962; Zhong et al., 1965). While the former stapled together previous research papers into a book, the latter seemed to have resulted from a grounded effort in providing step-by-step guidance for fish farmers while providing some scientific background. Zhu’s illness and death in 1962 might have affected the level of effort put into the book at IEB, and Zhong’s team seemed to have been intentional in incorporating more basic science. In contrast, manuals published by other provinces usually did not pay much attention to basic science and mostly focused on practical matters. These more pragmatic kinds included one issued by Beijing Institute of Aquaculture in 1964 and one by Heilongjiang Aquaculture Association in 1966 (Beijing Institute of Aquaculture Science, 1964; Heilongjiang Institute of Aquaculture Science, 1966). In 1962, the total domestic yield of artificial fingerlings amounted to 1.2 billion, while Guangdong and Zhejiang provinces could self-supply fingerlings for freshwater aquaculture without resorting to natural supplies (Wu & Zhong, 1964).

While published manuals usually highlighted the certainty of the method, local adoption was far from problem-free. In 1964, it was reported that eggs generated from induced spawning tended to have lower survival rates and weaker constitutions than eggs generated from natural spawning. They also seemed to require longer time to grow after fertilisation, and were reported to have resulted in a higher rate of aberrant fingerlings (Chen, 1964). Researchers tried to dispel the notion that it was the method itself that caused these aberrations, pointing out the importance of the timing and dosing of hormone injections. They noted that some impatient fish farmers had injected hormones before the proper time and had increased the hormone dose, only to produce immature, useless eggs while injuring their own fish stock (The Laboratory of Development and Physiology, 1966).

Despite the interruption from the famine, channels for sharing experiences between different aquaculture research institutes, stations and communes had been well established since 1957 and continued into the 1960s. The experience-sharing infrastructure eased the way for disseminating the method (Freshwater Fishery Bureau, 1960). The Cultural Revolution that had paralysed most scientific activities since 1966 similarly harmed the aquaculture research. Yet, in the later years of the revolution, aquaculture research was one area that was recovered first. Sent-down youth in villages with strong aquaculture practices became trained in artificial propagation techniques and aided local work during spawning seasons.⁴ Such work was nevertheless often window-dressed with ideological slogans. Manuals published during the time were usually adorned with a cover page that printed Mao’s adages, such as ‘liberate and mobilize the masses, yet do everything through experiment’, a quotation from Mao’s commentary published in People’s Daily (Freshwater Aquaculture Experimental Station, 1972; Mao, 1960). Natural dialectical categories such as ‘internal cause’ and ‘external cause’ also became associated with various factors responsible for successful propagation, such as the level of egg maturation and injection timing, respectively (Shanghai Qingpu Freshwater Aquaculture Experimental Station, 1972).

By the late 1970s, the artificial propagation method, along with its syringe, had become a Latourian ‘immutable mobile’ in Chinese aquaculture industry. It had fundamentally altered the yearly activities of fish farmers and operational procedures of fish biologists (Latour, 1988). Yet, the differences in local fish and climate features as well as the variations of hormone sources had prevented the method from being fixed without multiple modifications. The changing political wind that had shifted between the late 1950s and the early 1970s from prioritising the ‘leap’, the crops, to refocusing on the revolutionary nature of the fishery work and workers, continued to shape the very pragmatic and political meanings of the method itself. Similar to the Weberian depiction of how Protestant idea of secular asceticism related to the rise of modern capitalism, it was through these rounds of renegotiation and reconstruction of pragmatic and political meanings of the method itself that the technical existence of the method became a permanent fixture, although most earlier interpretations became obsolete later (Weber, 1930 [1992]).

Conclusion

In the 1970s, aquaculture research in China including artificial carp propagation gained international recognition. As the FAO’s initial study trip in 1975 generated attention for the superior aspects of China’s aquaculture, the FAO eventually led annual study tours in China, with visitors from African and other Asian countries. Zhong was appointed to teach these FAO lectures during the 1980s. Although rarely credited in formal publications, these early developments in artificial propagation of Asian carp probably had some influence on Taiwan’s development in hormone-aided propagation of carp, grey mullet and milkfish in later decades as well.

In the mainland, the technology has paved way for self-sufficiency in carp consumption and for scientific research in transgenic carp. By 1988, HCG-induced fish spawning had spread to more than twenty provinces and generated an estimate of 12 billion yuan in net earnings (CAS Planning Bureau & CAS Information Center, 1989, p. 32). Both Zhong’s and Zhu’s work have been awarded with the highest national prize in science and technology. The wide application of the artificial propagation method eventually helped to make the carp species abundant and inexpensive in the Chinese market.

The artificial induction of carp reproduction also became a crucial step in controlling carp reproduction in the laboratory when transgenic fish became a hotspot for genetic engineering in the 1990s. Unlike zebra fish, whose reproduction could be facilely initiated by the removal of physical barriers between the female and male fish, Asian carp species could not reproduce in the laboratory unless their hormonal levels could be regulated extraneously. Creations of transgenic strains of carp, such as guanli (top carp) that was generated from insertions of extra copies of growth hormone genes, greatly relied on the availability of the method that made controlled carp reproduction in the laboratory relatively easy (Hu & Zhu, 2010).

As artificial carp propagation itself has become a routine in fish farms and laboratories, the earlier breakthroughs became interpreted as ingenious inventions isolated from the intense pressure put upon the country’s agricultural system in the 1950s. Similar to the recent extraction of hybrid rice for global use, scientists and industrialists tend to celebrate scientific ingenuity or collective hard work while downplaying the historically contingent yet substantial concerns about the social economic status of aquaculture in the political fabric of Maoist China. Such neglect denies the very malleability, specificity, and historicity of the fish propagation technology itself and exchanges it with a narrative of biotechnology as a solution to food problem based on neoliberal capitalism. Especially, the production of fry and fingerlings through the technology still involves numerous Asian workers who select fish and inject them with syringes. Rediscovering the mass operation aspect of the technology may well help to make visible the hidden yet intensive labour involved in the current use of the technology. These labours now can be seen as one node in the global circuit of fish production, in a way not unlike how Asian labours make IBM and Apple computers for the world.

In discussing global forms, Ong and Stephen Collier noted, ‘Global phenomena…have a distinctive capacity for decontextualization and recontextualization, abstract-ability and movement, across diverse social and cultural situations and spheres of life’ (Ong & Collier, 2005, p. 11). In process of inventing artificial carp propagation in Maoist China, we saw one such primordial global form of technology encouraged by a socialist move to reform fishery and science, and was assembled through a combination of local fishery knowledge and transnational embryology. This article serves to show the original package of ideas, policies, concerns and executions that often carried a socialist veneer. It was achieved not only through scientific expertise but also through historically specific routes in socialist aquaculture, with the masses contributing their knowledge, labour and even urine. Stripping these crucial historical elements from more recent discussions does not merely result from neglect—it is one way neoliberal and state apparatuses mask political connections and fabricate a narrative of unidirectional progress.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Amit Prasad, Jessica Zu, Hallam Stevens, Bill Summers, Kragen Chien and two anonymous reviewers for suggestions in improving the manuscript. Thanks also go to the organisers and participants of the ‘Decolonizing Science in Asia’ workshop held at the Pennsylvania State University in June 2016, who asked valuable questions that inspired this article.

Notes

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