The Chongqing Industrial and Mining Exhibition: Needham's experiences

Joseph Needham spent much of his time in China on the road visiting everything from labs to factories and air tunnels to oilfields. He travelled to the very edges of unoccupied China, at times not far from the fluid front lines of China's war with Japan. These primarily took the form of four regionally focused ‘tours’, as Needham called them, across ‘Free China’: to the North West from August to December 1943, to the South East from April to July and the South West from August to October 1944, and finally to the North from August to November 1945. His willingness to undertake lengthy journeys under very difficult conditions was crucial when it came to his usefulness to both the British and Chinese governments.

This also lent him credibility as a communicator about science, technology and industrial development in China, underpinning his various publications on the subject. We have a much fuller sense of his time on the road than while based in the KMT's wartime capital, Chongqing, as his surviving diaries from this period were travel-related. Compared to Dorothy Needham, whose diaries provide a rich picture of life and work in Chongqing, we know far less about Joseph's activities in Chongqing than we do about his ‘tours’. There were, however, a few exceptions. One activity which he chose to publicly promote was his attendance at the Chongqing Industrial and Mining Exhibition (CIME) during March 1944. Joseph Needham's promotion of CIME through a combination of text and images exemplified two key aspects of his public-facing science diplomacy. First was the centrality of his experiential knowledge within it. The second was that, while he may have been in China as a British representative, he offered enthusiastic public support for science and technology in China based on that experience.

With CIME, Needham amplified an event that was designed to showcase scientific and technological achievements under the leadership of the Republic of China's KMT-led government. The exhibition was sponsored by the Natural Resources Commission (NRC), an RoC body coordinating industrial development.Footnote ¹⁹ Needham's copy of the official English-language guide described it as designed to ‘facilitate the public's close-up inspection of the Commission's multiple activities … The exhibits consist of samples and actual products, models, tables and charts, and photographs and drawings’.Footnote ²⁰ While events such as the UK's Festival of Britain have been analysed as a vehicle for governmental organizations seeking to legitimate controversial technologies, the Chongqing Industrial and Mining Exhibition is best considered in opposite terms.Footnote ²¹ It was a technology-focused exhibition aiming to legitimate government.

The majority of visitors would have been Chinese, particularly those living in Chongqing or surrounding areas in Sichuan, drawn from a local population and elite that had displayed notable reticence about accepting the KMT government's legitimacy or, by extension, the modernizing culture and industrialization it actively promoted.Footnote ²² That the guide was available in English underscores that it was created with the city's foreign population as an intended audience, many of whom were working on behalf of governments, agencies and organizations as part of the war effort. Even so, all the signage and textual content visible in photographs is in Chinese characters, providing a language barrier for many of those foreign visitors. This would have provided the NRC organizers a certain degree of insulation from the need to navigate such visitors’ sensitivities about national achievement-inflected narratives that might naturally arise with such state-sponsored exhibitions.Footnote ²³ The guide would have been a particularly important source of information concerning technology and industry for that high percentage of foreign visitors without a working knowledge of written Chinese.

Needham was one such foreign visitor to the exhibition, albeit a highly atypical one. He did not record that visit in his diary covering spring 1944, but he did take a number of photographs which were included among those for that subsequent ‘southern tour’ through Guizhou, Guangxi, Jiangxi, Guangdong and Fuzhou.Footnote ²⁴ Needham's eight photographs give an excellent sense of the sheer scale of the exhibition, as well as the range of the displays noted in the guide's description.Footnote ²⁵ His camera also captured some of his fellow visitors, including members of the public, among whom were foreigners in civilian and military dress.Footnote ²⁶ In all, Needham's photographs on their own provide a richer sense of the exhibition itself than the official guide – a text more oriented toward describing the NRC's organizational units and achievements than anything else.

This was equally true of what Needham wrote about the exhibition. Mere months later, the 3 June issue of Nature carried an article by him on the CIME.Footnote ²⁷ He moved quickly to write and send this off, given that the exhibition took place in March and he was on the road travelling through the South East from April through July. Other readers will have also encountered it four years later when reprinted in his and Dorothy Needham's book Science Outpost.Footnote ²⁸ His approach to writing about the exhibition was to provide readers with a virtual tour. The text's main sections are framed slightly differently from those in either the guide or the exhibition itself, being simplified down to ‘Mining and metallurgy’, ‘Chemical industry’ and ‘Engineering’.Footnote ²⁹ Still, in terms of content it faithfully follows the ten sequential sections into which the original event was subdivided: natural resources, coal, petroleum, iron and steel, non-ferrous metals, export minerals, chemical products, electrical supplies, electric power, machinery.Footnote ³⁰ In doing so, his aim was to do more than just note the exhibition's existence or argue for its significance for those living outside Chongqing or outside China. He went much further, aiming to convey a sense of what it was like to physically move through the exhibition. Needham did so by including detailed descriptions of its space, presentation, and content. In the second paragraph, for example, he wrote, ‘Facing the visitor in the imposing entrance-hall were the devices … of the 105 mines and industrial plants operated by the National Resources Commission’.Footnote ³¹ He opened the next section with similar language: ‘Proceeding along his fixed path, the visitor came next to the section on coal and oil’.Footnote ³² Throughout the article, he used such phrases to align his text with the sequencing of his journey through the halls, explicitly linking the information and messages conveyed in the exhibition with their means of communication, be they through models, maps or images.

So, too, does he seek to capture a sense of how visitors might interact with the exhibits. He describes how visual materials on the walls in the entrance hall were accompanied by geological samples, writing that ‘one could handle a specimen of the ponderous tungsten ore, wolframite, of which China is the leading world producer’.Footnote ³³ When introducing the sections on electrical supplies and power, he provides detail on the shape and lighting in the hall, going on to explain that ‘Chinese-made radio gramophones’ provided musical accompaniment.Footnote ³⁴ In Needham's article-length textual tour of the Chongqing Industrial and Mining Exhibition, then, readers were presented with a multi-sensory portrait of an event that conveyed a sense not only of the country's modernizing achievements, but also of its wartime importance.

However, readers were not solely reliant on textual descriptions of the exhibition space and displays. This CIME-focused article was the only one out of the nine China-focused ones that Needham published in Nature between 1943 and 1946 to include images.Footnote ³⁵ Any readers of those other articles wishing to see images on related subjects would have had to seek out Joseph Needham's 1945 pictorial book Chinese Science. This experientially focused article was the sole exception, with Nature publishing three images embedded in the text. Photographs therefore played an important and prominent role in the article.

Needham had taken photographs throughout his visit to the exhibition, yet none of these were among the trio printed with his article. Instead, he opted to use ones from a set of eight provided by the NRC.Footnote ³⁶ Among the advantages they provided were quality and clarity. An official photographer would have been better placed to control conditions and set up their shots than an exhibition visitor. One image used was of the entrance hall (Figure 1). Needham had also taken two shots of this hall, including one from a very similar angle. These convey a sense of the space as it was used, with other visitors in each image looking at and moving around the displays.Footnote ³⁷ In contrast, the official photograph includes no people and has been set up at such an angle as to capture most of the room's central console and pillar, containing exhibits on standardization of weights, measures and equipment. So, too, are visible examples of the geological samples, maps and insignia along and on the walls.Footnote ³⁸ This photograph is far less dynamic than those taken by Joseph Needham. Consequently, it provides a more detailed view of the exhibit contents.

Figure 1.

Entrance Hall, Chongqing Industrial and Mining Exhibition. NRI2/10/1/1/8/13/2, reproduced courtesy of the Needham Research Institute.

Content was also important. All had clear connections to what is argued through description in the text. The exhibition's machinery section as captured in the first of these images was very unlike that of the entrance hall in its being far from empty. Although the large machine tools are visible in the image, the space around them is packed full of people.Footnote ³⁹ The crowds in this photograph align well with Needham's assertion near the opening of his article that it ‘attracted daily many thousands of visitors’.Footnote ⁴⁰ It was a much better match than any of his own photographs, in which only a steady stream of visitors appear.

The final photograph included with the article provides an indication of the motivation for such grandiose language. In it, Chiang Kai-shek and senior NRC officials are being shown a model oilfield by Dr Sun Yueqi, general manager of the Gansu Petroleum Administration (Gansu youkuang ju).Footnote ⁴¹ Joseph Needham used language throughout the article that emphasized the exhibition's importance, impact and sophistication. Including this image with the text in Nature helped to reinforce the point through association with the RoC and KMT's easily recognizable leader and the other high-level visitors. Needham took no equivalent photograph during his time at the CIME. These images each served a distinctly different purpose when paired with that text. The image of a crowd filling the final exhibition hall featuring machine tools similarly spoke to the event's impact, while the one showing off the range of exhibits and images contained in the entrance hall underscored the range and sophistication of what was on display. In each case the staging and preparation that will have gone into the preparation of these official photographs all made them attractive and clear companion pieces to the text that they accompanied. Needham, like the KMT, used these images to convey to an international audience this showcase of the country's modernizing ambitions and achievements taking place even as China's war with Japan raged on.

In addition to the CIME focusing on subjects of direct interest to them, the very fact that it was an overt showcase for the National Resources Commission's activities and achievements will have also been a motivating factor. He makes plain his opinion of the NRC when describing photographs scattered throughout the exhibition promoting its welfare-related activities:

Here, as with other aspects of the exhibition, Needham used his own experiences as the foundation for his arguments about the exhibition and, by extension, the NRC. He framed them in terms of knowledge and authority lent by his scientific background, combined with his activities in China. This is central to what made Joseph Needham such a powerful – and attractive – international advocate for the KMT and the CCP alike.

In its initial publication in Nature, Needham's CIME article and the official photographs he selected to accompany it fit well with the image that the KMT sought to convey through the exhibition. The guide stated early on, ‘Innumerable obstacles notwithstanding, the Commission has been making serious effort to meet the wartime situation, and at the same time to lay a foundation for the future industrialization of the country’.Footnote ⁴³ Through the exhibition, the NRC – and by extension the KMT-led RoC party state – aimed to demonstrate the extent to which it was making the best of a difficult situation and contributing to the war effort. Even more, it was simultaneously working toward China's post-war industrial development.

These intertwined messages were nearly exactly aligned with those Joseph Needham sought to communicate in his CIME-focused article. In its concluding section, ‘The future’, he wrote,

In providing a textual and visual portrait of the CIME exhibition, Needham's larger aim was to use it as a vehicle to communicate a much broader set of interlinked arguments. Through a combination of images and descriptive text, Needham intended this first-hand portrait of an exhibition as a vehicle for advancing much bigger arguments about China's scientific and technical capacities, its global importance and trajectory, and the need for his readers to fundamentally readjust their understandings of these things.

Glassware images: Needham's advocacy

Needham's comments in Nature on supporting China's industrialization were rooted in his aim to act as an advocate and interlocutor. A pair of images on the manufacture of laboratory glassware provide a particularly useful lens through which to view his efforts to establish himself as an interlocutor. These images came from the photograph collection Needham obtained of the CCP-governed Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region. The first of these shows a man and a woman involved in blowing laboratory glassware. The other (Figure 2) shows a collection of such equipment laid out on a table.Footnote ⁴⁵ Needham's deployment of the latter within his publications also, in turn, highlights a crucial area of overlap in his framing of science, technology and the modernization agendas of both the Nationalists and the Communists. These images also tangibly exemplify the link between Needham's advocacy impulses in both public and behind-the-scenes contexts.

Figure 2.

Laboratory glassware. NRI2/10/1/1/8/3/12, reproduced courtesy of the Needham Research Institute.

The latter of these laboratory glassware images appears in Needham's pictorial volume Chinese Science, published in 1945. That image of a tableful of round-bottom flasks and other equipment appears at the tail end of a sequence highlighting the work of institutions ‘which manufacture scientific apparatus for university and school laboratories’ in the book's first chapter.Footnote ⁴⁶ It focused on Sichuan Province, which Needham described as the ‘Heart of Free China’ because of its proximity to the wartime capital, Chongqing, and the corresponding concentration of institutions and activities there. Most photographs in this chapter focus on a scientific apparatus factory in Chengdu that Needham visited during May 1943 established by the Sichuan Provincial Bureau of Scientific Instruments.Footnote ⁴⁷ The image came from the border region collection but was not included in the section on CCP-controlled territory. Instead, it was redeployed to support an argument about science under the KMT.

There is little in the photograph to immediately indicate its place of origin. This contrasts the image of glass blowing, in which its border region context is more obvious from the clothing of those pictured, especially in comparison to that featured in a similar photograph from Sichuan that also did not make it into Chinese Science.Footnote ⁴⁸ This underscores the significance of the clothing as a signifier of place and politics in these photographs, much as with those of students in the border region. The lack of such signifiers in the image allowed Needham to redeploy it to highlight an issue common to areas under KMT and CCP control. Through this scientific instruments-focused sequence, Joseph Needham specifically uses glassware in Chinese Science as an example to highlight war-related shortages.

Israel Epstein's article on science in the border region, which Joseph and Dorothy Needham reprinted in Science Outpost, similarly features laboratory glassware. In his text, Epstein uses it to highlight that the shortages caused by the KMT's blockade necessitated the manufacture of specialist glassware locally, as well as the impossibility of doing so effectively for chemical research thanks to the unavailability of required ingredients in the region.Footnote ⁴⁹ In Chinese Science, Needham also used glassware to exemplify the challenging conditions in wartime China. However, his political and geographical focus was entirely different for this photograph of round-bottomed flasks. Instead, Needham referred to the specific circumstances in Sichuan, stating, ‘Other factories produce not unsatisfactory chemical glassware, but since the closing of Academia Sinica's own glassworks owing to the financial situation, it has not been possible to produce good hard or fireproof glass in Free China’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Beyond the wider context of the other photographs and text in this chapter, this mention of Academia Sinica is significant, since it was a government institution central to the KMT's industrial and educational development programme.Footnote ⁵¹ Thus, whether intentionally or not, Needham redeployed this photograph from the border region collection to make a specific point relating to the challenges faced by RoC institutions in the war.

Chinese Science characterized Chinese wartime science and technology in terms of resilience and dynamism taking place in remarkably difficult conditions. A brief review in Nature explicitly noted that the book was more focused on ‘the workers and conditions rather than on the work being done’, while also echoing Needham's framing of China as a soon-to-emerge scientific and technological power, ‘and that urgent as may be China's needs for equipment and supplies, even now the traffic will not be only one way’.Footnote ⁵² A reviewer for the Geographical Journal also picked up on Needham's emphasis on material conditions, arguing that the book's photographs ‘show … the archaic and improvised scientific equipment which often had to be used; what they cannot show is the absolute shortage of reagents and equipment which handicapped scientific work at every turn’.Footnote ⁵³ The first part of this assessment aligned with Needham's presentation of glassware manufacture, while the caption reinforced a message of shortcomings and shortages of equipment and supplies being key impediments to scientific and technological progress in China.

Needham was explicit about his motivation for creating an entire book focused exclusively on photographs. As he wrote at the end of his preface to Chinese Science, through these images he sought to create among readers a sense of connection to China’s war effort and Chinese science:

Needham hoped that such a curated collection of photographs would provide readers a means of seeing Chinese science from his perspective. The Geographical Journal's reviewer noted that Chinese Science worked effectively ‘as an illustration’ of Needham's Nature articles.Footnote ⁵⁵ It was an apt characterization since the book of images cleanly mapped onto the organization and the themes of his unillustrated articles on science in various regions of ‘Free China’. It was one thing to describe things like supply and equipment shortages in writing, but visual examples such as with the manufacturing of laboratory glassware lent these a further sense of tangibility and immediacy.

Needham was not the only actor effectively using images in soliciting international support during the war. For example, the China Defence League (CDL) consistently made effective – and extensive – use of images in its own publications in its 1939–40 annual report. Most photographs reflected the report's primary focus on health-related initiatives, including medical manufacturing, as well as care for refugees and orphans, and educational institutions. Its ‘Anti-Japanese University’ section – which ended with the statement that ‘[d]onations of money and books are urgently required’ – featured two photographs, one of a class being conducted outdoors and another of students with the CCP military general Zhu De.Footnote ⁵⁶ As indicated by Zhu's appearance, the CCP had connections to all projects and places it discussed. Outwith the ambiguous glassware photograph discussed here, the CDL's photographs and those in Needham's border region collection were strikingly similar, likely due to sharing common origins discussed in the next section. As with Needham's use of such photographs, these were also deployed in appeals for international support for China's war with Japan.

Nor was Needham just aiming to act as a public advocate and interlocutor, since those efforts had direct connections to his behind-the-scenes activities. This extended even to the very specific example of laboratory glassware, which also feature in his reports for the UK Foreign Office and the British Council. From 1943 onward, Needham had been advocating for the dispatch of British technical experts in specialist areas. That spring, he had dedicated an entire section to this in his report to the British Council and the Foreign Office.Footnote ⁵⁷ It was a subject to which he returned in 1944 as part of a further report prepared about other ‘Western’ – largely American – technical experts.Footnote ⁵⁸ In that second report, Needham again reproduced a list of what he considered priority areas based on his discussions with his Chinese contacts. Second on that list was a request for a ‘good glassblower able to train good Chinese glassblowers. Glassblowing is one of the arts fundamental to science, both pure and applied; in China it has been neglected. Asked for by Chwingishu’.Footnote ⁵⁹ That final sentence was a crucial part of Needham's messaging in the memo in its indication that there was tangible institutional interest in an adviser on scientific glassblowing. It was one repeated through the list and mirrored language he used elsewhere in his reports. Given his audience and role as a British representative, he also made a great effort to frame his requests and his advice as looking to advance British interests. Still, Joseph Needham was consistent in rooting his requests and advice alike in his own on-the-ground experience, linked to his formal and informal contacts in China.

Border region photographs: Needham's networks

For all that Joseph Needham saw and did during his ‘tours’ through ‘Free China’, he never visited any of the areas under Chinese Communist Party control. These were areas for which Needham lacked direct, personal experience. He therefore depended on his networks of contacts for information, whether gleaned from formal meetings or casual conversations or from printed materials, including formal reports, pamphlets and newspaper clippings – and photographs. Thus, in analysing the significance of images in Needham's science diplomacy, it is important to consider them as objects embedded in diplomatic, social and cultural contexts.Footnote ⁶⁰ Needham was an avid collector, something he had in common with many natural philosophers and scientists before him, with his own collection and exchange of photographs therefore matching long-standing practices.Footnote ⁶¹ His collection of images from the CCP-controlled Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region were tools for communicating to others his own understandings and arguments. They were also a source of information for him, making these photographs a distinct subset within Needham's wider wartime collection.

Needham's lack of direct knowledge about science in CCP-controlled areas was not down to lack of opportunity. For example, among his high-level American contacts in China was none other than David Dean Barrett, a long-term fixture of the diplomatic and military presence of the United States in the RoC, and, by the time of Needham's arrival in China, chief military attaché in Chongqing. In July 1944, Barrett served as the senior military officer for the United States Army Observation Group, the ‘Dixie Mission’, to establish direct dialogue with the CCP leadership in Yan'an.Footnote ⁶² Barrett later published a book on his time on the Dixie Mission, in which Needham handwrote an inscription on the dedication page of his copy: ‘He offered me an air-lift up there several times, but I judged that the scientific and technological aspects of the Communist Region were not important enough make it worth while going’.Footnote ⁶³ This was written over thirty years after the CCP came to power, decades during which Needham had been a vocal supporter and advocate for both the People's Republic and the accomplishments of its scientific community. Nevertheless, the inscription points to his wartime perspective as being that science in CCP-controlled areas was not of sufficient importance to justify making the trip.

However, this was either entirely or in part based on political calculation relating to the Needhams’ roles as British representatives through the SBSCO and Joseph Needham's relationship with Chiang Kai-shek's government in Chongqing. For example, while Dorothy and Joseph were visiting Xi'an in September 1945 during the ‘North China Tour’, both recorded in their diaries that Joseph discussed making a trip to the CCP's capital during one of his meetings with Col. Barrett there. Joseph wrote, ‘Quaere [queried] whether worth going to Yenan. DB [David Barrett] thought would not compromise position if permission from CK [Chongqing], so sent off a radio’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Joseph Needham's interest was great enough to tangibly explore the possibility, but that was tempered by an overriding sense of caution about how such a visit might be perceived in relation to his position.

That decision not to go is notable as Joseph Needham chose to feature photographs of science under the CCP in multiple publications after the war. But to do so, he had to obtain those photographs in the first place. The opportunity came thanks to the Needhams’ networks in wartime China, which extended across a range of not only scientific, medical and industrial communities, but also diplomatic, political and military ones – both Chinese and expatriate. On 28 September 1945, during the Needhams’ visit to Xi'an, Joseph recorded in his diary that in the morning he went out ‘with Commissioner of Health Chang Shan-Chün [Zhang Shanjun] to see the Provincial Health and Hygienic Lab and Vaccine plant in a Tang-founded Temple to the south of the city’, lunched with Commissioner Zhang, and then went ‘to Col. Barrett's and asked for … gasoline and cigars!’Footnote ⁶⁵ The cultivation of such relationships across multiple communities was central to the Needhams’ activities in wartime China.

They were also sources of information about and material from CCP-controlled regions. In Science Outpost, the Needhams thanked ‘Mr Ling’ for the two CCP-related photographs used in the book. Most plausibly, this was Lin Boqu (then known as Lin Zhuhan), whom they each recorded meeting in July 1944.Footnote ⁶⁶ Dorothy wrote in her diary that she met Lin with Austrian medic Fritz Jensen, her friend and frequent companion while in Chongqing, and that the three talked about education in rural China.Footnote ⁶⁷ The initiatives they discussed were focused on areas under CCP control and dovetailed nicely with the collection of photographs in which scientific and technical education so prominently featured.

Lin Boqu headed the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region government when the Needhams met him. His early revolutionary activities and KMT connections saw him repeatedly act as a representative in dealings with the Nationalists and with foreigners interested in the CCP's activities.Footnote ⁶⁸ He was well known and equally well connected in Chongqing, simultaneously involved in both political and propaganda activities for the CCP. Between 1937 and 1941, he had shuttled between the CCP-controlled border region and the KMT's wartime capital during the period of uneasy alliance between the CCP and the KMT. In the spring of 1944 he also travelled to Xi'an and then on to Chongqing for negotiations with the Kuomintang which went into that summer.Footnote ⁶⁹ Lin also prominently featured in foreign-language propaganda material circulating among those sympathetic expatriate residents of Chongqing.

Both Needhams were well connected in these circles; however, Dorothy was more overt in her activities, as her closeness to Fritz Jensen showed. Joseph wrote to a UNESCO colleague in the weeks before the CCP came to power in 1949 that, while he did not disguise his left-leaning political views, he had cultivated the broadest possible networks that included politicians, officials and academics across the political spectrum.Footnote ⁷⁰ Through their CCP connections, both direct and indirect, the Needhams built up a discreet collection of pamphlets about the border region and clippings from Yan'an's Liberation Daily (Jiefang ribao) newspaper.Footnote ⁷¹ These included an annual government report authored by Lin Boqu and the pamphlet I Visit Yenan by Israel Epstein.Footnote ⁷² Like Col. Barrett, Epstein was another member of China's wartime expatriate community with direct experience of the CCP's capital who formed a part of the Needhams’ networks. But, like Lin, Epstein was actively working to support the party's activities especially through the China Defence League, which by 1943 was primarily involved in aiding ‘medical projects, cooperative drug production, children's work, and refugee famine relief in the Border Regions’.Footnote ⁷³ A left-wing journalist who had grown up in China, Epstein joined the group of foreign journalists whom the KMT allowed to pass through its blockade of the border region, and stayed there for five months.Footnote ⁷⁴ Dorothy Needham recorded seeing him socially in March, April and May 1944. The last of these meetings took place just two days before Epstein's trip to Yan'an.Footnote ⁷⁵

The Needhams’ 1948 book Science Outpost included an article by Epstein based on that trip. It had originally been written for publication in 1945 by the New York-based China Aid Council, a major CDL funder.Footnote ⁷⁶ The Needhams further amplified Epstein's depiction of the CCP's approach to science-related research and education in the border region with photographs from Joseph's border region collection. The CCP-related material's very inclusion in the book afforded it a particular prominence.

The two photographs they included in the book featured students at Yan'an University. The university was the border region collection's focus, featuring nine of twelve images showing lab work and lecturing related to botany, chemistry, embryology, engineering and mathematics. Established by the CCP in 1941, the university was an early foray into crafting its own vision for higher education. As reflected in the images, natural sciences featured prominently from the outset, as did an ideologically inflected emphasis on practice and application in education.Footnote ⁷⁷ The photographs and Epstein's text presented scientific education in the border region in such terms and with little distinction between workers and students: ‘No one is afraid to dirty his hands’.Footnote ⁷⁸

This agenda had been explicitly articulated in university regulations shortly before Epstein's mid-1944 visit. Its objective was to develop cadres’ ‘practical work in political, economic and cultural reconstruction suited to the needs of the war of resistance [against Japan] and the reconstruction of the Border Region’, with ‘research workers’ and students required to contribute to ‘practical work’ and engage in labour.Footnote ⁷⁹ This aligned with the CCP's 1943 production movement to reorganize and develop the regional economy toward a goal of self-sufficiency. Members of the military and cadres at all levels were therefore expected to contribute to production.Footnote ⁸⁰ As Pauline Keating has put it, these efforts ‘were meant to produce revolutionary new officials and intellectuals, people who worked with their hands as well as their minds and who had renounced the elitist values that typified old-style teachers and bureaucrats’.Footnote ⁸¹ Education and research at Yan'an University were therefore very much a part of the CCP's mutually supporting goals to simultaneously remake the border region's society and economy.

Moreover, as texts and images coming from the border region all emphasized, the social and economic context that the CCP sought to transform and in which Yan'an University functioned was rural, isolated, and poor. Literacy levels were low and there were few schools or trained teachers, making post-secondary provision ultimately only a small part of a developing education system focused in the first instance on expanding at the primary level.Footnote ⁸² And, as the laboratory glassware photographs and the texts by CDL and Epstein all emphasized, scarcity of everything from basic resources to specialized equipment was a further formidable obstacle.Footnote ⁸³ Outwith salt exports, it was a region with little existing industrial capacity or expertise and one heavily dependent on imports that were then disrupted by Nationalist blockade.Footnote ⁸⁴ Given these challenges in producing, obtaining and maintaining essential materials and equipment, photographs featuring equipment, such as Figures 3 and 4, stand out within a collection that otherwise emphasized issues of scarcity and the basic nature of conditions in which the university operated.

Figure 3.

Needham's original caption: ‘Shensi Border Area, surveying class’. NRI2/10/1/1/8/3/3, reproduced courtesy of the Needham Research Institute.

Figure 4.

Needham's original caption: ‘Border Area, chemist at work’. Source: NRI2/10/1/1/8/3/1, reproduced courtesy of the Needham Research Institute.

Yet even these images stress practical work and focus on applied science along with the ideological agenda associated with these dynamics. This, too, was reflected in Science Outpost. The first of the border region photographs reproduced in the book focuses on surveying and showed three people working outdoors with a tripod-mounted theodolite (Figure 3).Footnote ⁸⁵ The second showed an individual working with an analytical balance (Figure 4).Footnote ⁸⁶ The clothing worn by all people in the photographs immediately lends them a distinctive character. Indeed, the CCP's dress reforms were intended to serve as signifiers of societal transformation under its leadership by downplaying differences, be they social status, profession or gender.Footnote ⁸⁷ The people appearing in these images therefore are much more readily identifiable as living in an area under communist control. The photographs thereby cast scientist academics and students in the role of scientific workers rather than rarefied – or reactionary – members of the ideologically problematic intellectual class (zhishi fenzi). The category of intellectual was a broad one in this rural context, including those with more than primary education, so that in practice their differing backgrounds led to varying levels of engagement with mass mobilization.Footnote ⁸⁸ Varying local conditions across the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region also encouraged both community building and class struggle.Footnote ⁸⁹ The photographs thus conveyed the educational institutions’ roles in fostering intellectuals’ engagement with the CCP's ideological and developmental programmes, complementing the arguments found in Epstein's article.

Ultimately, the Needhams’ inclusion and curation of this CCP-related content in Science Outpost clearly communicated aspects of their ideological interests and relied upon a wider breadth of wartime networks than reflected in the Royal Society's and the AAAS's science-diplomacy-inflected character sketch of Joseph. Reviewing the Needhams’ book for Pacific Quarterly, Wilma Fairbank described the volume as a ‘compendium’ of wide-ranging material, from poems to travel diary excerpts, speeches and Nature articles, the last of which served as the ‘backbone of the book’. Collectively, the book's contents provide ‘an interesting picture of Needham himself’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Fairbank was well placed to make such an assessment as she was a key official in the US State Department's Cultural Relations Program, which had sent out the numerous technical advisers Needham discussed in his 1944 report to the British Council and the Foreign Office.Footnote ⁹¹ In that report, Needham also wrote at length about her husband, John King Fairbank, who had also been based in Chongqing, representing the Library of Congress. Alongside his effectiveness and impact in that role, Needham noted that ‘he was highly cooperative with the British side’.Footnote ⁹² Thus, when Wilma Fairbank characterized the book as providing a ‘summary and uncritical’ portrait of wartime Chinese science, she did so as someone highly knowledgeable on the subject who was also familiar with the Needhams.