Events

The East is "Scientific": Scientists, The State, and Credibility Crises During China's GMO Controversy Brown Bag Lecture Speaker: Speaker: Abigail Coplin, Ph.D. (Sociology), Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for the Study of Contemporary China, University of Pennsylvania Moderated by: Wendy Leutert, Fellow, Columbia-Harvard China and the World Program (2018-2019), School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University Summary: State legitimacy and food security have historically been deeply entwined in China. While China initially embraced genetically modified organisms (GMOs), vociferous controversy destabilized this consensus. Drawing on 37 interviews with key actors, 11 months of field-research, and textual analysis of Chinese media sources, I make a dual-pronged argument. First, I show how the Chinese state and its scientific allies have tried to “purify” GM-foodstuffs by portraying these crops and, by association, themselves, as national products tasked with rescuing the nation from starvation and foreign dependence. Second, I use the controversy to expose the instability of the co-opted expert position in a technocratic, authoritarian state. “Science” has become the dominant political ideology of contemporary China. This places China’s GMO scientists in a difficult position. While researchers’ ties to the state have afforded them unprecedented influence over China’s developmental trajectory, their politicized professional identity has also undercut their ability to make credible scientific claims in public controversies and made them targets of public censure. While the Chinese Communist Party-state seeks to harness science and technology as a legitimizing ideology and economic driver, semi-incorporating scientists within the state also gives rise to new, often unintended, dynamics.