Chinese Diaspora and Trans-national Science: Chao Yuen Ren and Cybernetics in Cold-War America

• In Event: (Re)Thinking Mobilities and Chinese STS:" The Politics, Practices, and Cultural Logics of Diasporic Chinese Scientists in Technosciences, 1919–2018

Abstract

While Chinese went abroad to study science as early as the first decade of the 20th century, the number of Chinese scientists immigrating to Western countries did not become significant until after World War II. Zuoyue Wang has noted that the large influx of Chinese scientists to the postwar United States led to a sea change both of the American academia and industry’s cultural and ethnic landscapes and of the international networking of the Chinese scientific communities across the Taiwan Strait. Yet, historians and STS scholars have rarely examined how the surge of diasporic Chinese scientists in the West influenced the approaches, content, and practices of scientific research during the Cold War. In this paper, I grapple with these issues via a case study of the Chinese-American linguist Chao Yuen Ren’s work on cybernetics in the 1950s-70s. A leading Chinese intellectual in the 1920s-30s and a prominent American researcher in the 1940s-70s, Chao began to show interest in feedback control in the 1940s and interact with the American cybernetic community. In the following decades, he employed the concepts from information sciences to examine and understand phenomena in Chinese phonetics, opening up a connection between linguistics and information sciences. I argue that Chao’s route to cybernetics was heavily shaped by his own experience as a language researcher and reformer in China in the 1920s-30s. His work thus constitutes a perfect example of trans-national science in which the diasporic scientist transmitted, mediated and integrated knowledge, expertise, and experience from distinct national contexts.

Author

• Chen-Pang Yeang, University of Toronto