Michurin-Lysenkoism and the Politics of Grafting in Early PRC

About this event

Speaker: Ying Qian, Associate Professor of Chinese Cinema and Media, Columbia University Title: Michurin-Lysenkoism and the Politics of Grafting in Early PRC Abstract: This paper is an exploration of grafting 嫁接, a technique with a long history in Chinese horticulture and further popularized in the early 1950s as part of Soviet Michurin-Lysenkoist agrobiology. I show that agricultural and horticultural technique such as grafting, transplantation, and environmental conditioning, when practiced by amateur groups, state farms and educational institutions across the country, provided models for envisioning and cultivating socialist collectives that emphasized interdependence and adaptation, while allowing for the persistence of difference. This paper treats Michurin-Lysenkoism not as discredited, faulty science, but as specific understandings of organism-environment relationship and heredity, with a critical distinction between Michurin’s localized and specific practices and Lysenko’s hegemonizing and encriminating theorization. Taking “grafting” to mean broader techniques of suturing, assemblage and fitting, this paper discusses biological sciences’ constitutive influence in political and social imaginations in socialist China.