ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Making a Socialist Geobody: Embodied Politics and the National Prospecting Movement in Maoist China

• In Event: Global Perspectives on Science, Technology and Politics

English Abstract

This paper examines the national mineral prospecting movement in Maoist China as a project of making a socialist geobody. Following Winichakul's notion of the geobody as a national body imagined and sustained through mapping and scientific ways of knowing, the paper extends the concept beyond its original focus on territorial boundaries to include the subsurface. Drawing on archival documents, propaganda reports, geological handbooks, and personal memoirs, it demonstrates that embodied knowledge was central to geological science and practice in Maoist China. Between the 1950s and 1970s, millions of farmers, students, and workers were mobilised to walk mountain slopes, handle rocks, taste spring water, smell sulphurous vapours, and visually scan the land for mineral clues. These sensory practices incorporated their bodies into the state's extractive apparatus and rendered them the "sensory organs" of a geobody that linked subsurface resources to state power. Their observations extended state knowledge into strata and fissures, while the patriotic sentiment attached to "discovering treasures for the nation" reinforced identification with the socialist project. Through bodily labour, sensory training, and political emotions, the geobody took shape in ways aligned with Maoist revolutionary ideals. Finally, the paper argues that this geobody was not simply imagined or confined to maps but materially shaped through the mobilisation of human bodies as extensions of limited geological instruments and expertise. The nationwide prospecting movement thus shows how Mao-era scientific practice and political mobilisation constructed a geobody that continues to influence contemporary understandings of resources, territory, and state power in China.

Author

• Qile Xie, Durham University