ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Socialist Insects: The Rise of Modern Beekeeping Practice in Maoist China

• In Event: Shaping Nature 2: Insects 20thC

English Abstract

This paper examines the extension of modern beekeeping practice and its knowledge making in Maoist China. Modern beekeeping, characterized by the use of movable-frame hives, saw large-scale promotion following the launch of the agricultural collectivization movement in 1957. Many communes and production teams in China then established collective apiaries and, during the Great Leap Forward, mobilized grassroots beekeepers and employed “tu” (local, native, Chinese) methods of technological innovations to pursue high honey yields. Focusing on the beekeeping practice in Conghua County, Guangdong during the late 1950s and early 1970s, this paper demonstrates how the interactions between human and non-human factors enabled Conghua to become an “advanced socialist agricultural unit” through beekeeping. This paper regards bees as “socialist insects,” the metaphor of the bee colony as an organism that thrives through collective life, together with the fact that beekeeping industry required neither arable land nor chemical inputs yet still yielded valuable products, made modern beekeeping coincides with the concept of collectivism in Maoist China. In addition, through their unexpected “alliances” with politics, bees—especially the native Apis cerana Fab. in Conghua—were active collaborators with grassroot beekeepers in the making of “tu” knowledge and technology, a process that constituted Mao’s “mass science.” The examination of Conghua’s beekeeping history contributes to blurring the boundary between human and nonhuman agents in making “mass science,” an understudied issue in the historiography of science and technology in modern China.

Author

• Haixing Wang, University of Birmingham