Dr Gordon Barrett

Mao-era Chinese foreign policymakers were never fully sold on the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. Theoretical physicist Zhou Peiyuan had their blessing to attend four conferences between 1957 and 1960, but for the following twenty-five years policymakers in Beijing articulated official positions on Pugwash ranging from ambivalence to outright hostility. Nevertheless, Pugwash networks proved remarkably durable in across those two-and-a-half decades. This chapter explores the role and nature of transnational scientific networks as channels of informal cross-bloc communication during this period in which Chinese scientists had no formal involvement in the Conferences in Science and World Affairs. In particular, it highlights the singular significance of two scientists, Zhou Peiyuan and Dorothy Hodgkin, whose networks, international activities, and political connections placed them at the centre of Pugwashites’ efforts to pursue dialogue with China as well as in the PRC’s formal reengagement with the Pugwash Conferences in 1985.