China’s Mao-era science diplomacy involved strategies and structures that underpinned the hosting of foreign visitors such as scientists. Chapter 5 focuses on networks of individual relationships – professional, personal, and political – that ran through Chinese involvement in the organisations and events discussed in this book, focusing on some of those that developed between Chinese and left-wing British scientists from the 1940s through to the 1970s. Considering the experiences of J. D. Bernal, Howard E. Hinton, Dorothy Hodgkin, Kathleen Lonsdale, and Kurt Mendelssohn, it elucidates the range of motivations, responses, and outcomes on either side of scientists’ visits to China as part of everything from ‘friendship’ delegations made up of political sympathisers to lecture tours organised by scientific organisations. These British scientists had much in common with many other sympathetic visitors from the time, at least in broad strokes; nevertheless, this chapter identifies several key characteristics that set such scientists apart as a category of foreign visitor during the Mao era.

Elite Chinese scientists’ prominence within the World Federation of Scientific Workers during the 1950s opened many new opportunities for those scientists and the Chinese party-state alike. Examining the origins and evolution of the on-again off-again relationship between China and the early Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, Chapter 2 discusses the decision-making processes and key episodes that shaped this relationship. From Chinese policymakers and officials’ internal debates over the Russell-Einstein Manifesto in 1955 through to the end of Mao-era engagement with Pugwash at the fateful Moscow Conference in 1960, Chinese involvement in Pugwash during this period shows the shifting dynamic tension created by a system in which foreign policymakers expected scientists to act as state agents in their international activities. Much of the time, this saw senior Chinese Communist Party leaders or foreign relations officials able to actively shape the Chinese side of these international encounters; however, particularly in the case of those taking place in person and overseas, scientists were the ones who were carrying out the interactions, creating the potential for them to exercise some agency in how they were conducted and reported back.