Previous accounts of the scientific relationship between communist China and the Soviet Union have depicted it as one of subordination, with the Russians exporting knowledge to the Chinese or scavenging from their bodies of knowledge. A new article in Isis, however, posits that the relationship between Chinese and Soviet scientists was instead one of mutual exchange. In “Brief Encounter: Acupuncture, Pavlov, and Scientific Exchange Between China and the Soviet Union, 1949-1961,” authors Liang Wan, Simon Huxtable and Sarah Marks explore the role of acupuncture in uniting the Pavlovian science of the Soviets and traditional Chinese medicine, forming an arena for Sino-Soviet collaboration.
Acupuncture and mutual exchange in Chinese and Soviet science
