A Revolution Across Art and Science: Participatory Knowledge Production in China's Great Leap Forward

This volume examines the role of mass knowledge production―whether artistic, scientific, or technical―in China’s Great Leap Forward.

A Revolution Across Art and Science examines how laborers reimagined knowledge during a high point of radicalism in modern Chinese history. Encouraged to become curators, historians, writers, artists, technicians, scientists, and other kinds of experts, Chinese workers and peasants were mobilized to produce new knowledge in the humanities and sciences. Moving beyond the economic questions that have dominated most previous scholarship on the Great Leap Forward, this volume explores the cultural dimensions of the movement to establish the significance of mass knowledge production. Through ten case studies authored by emerging scholars, this volume offers a simultaneously empathetic and critical inquiry into PRC history and its impact on ongoing efforts to democratize knowledge around the world.

Christine I. Ho is an associate professor of East Asian art history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Drawing from Life: Sketching and Socialist Realism in the People’s Republic of China.

Sigrid Schmalzer is a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of The People’s Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in Twentieth-Century China and Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China.