Dr%20Gordon%20Barrett: List of publications

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China's Cold War Science Diplomacy

August 2022
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Book
During the early decades of the Cold War, the People's Republic of China remained outside much of mainstream international science. Nevertheless, Chinese scientists found alternative channels through which to communicate and interact with counterparts across the world, beyond simple East/West divides. By examining the international activities of elite Chinese scientists, Gordon Barrett demonstrates that these activities were deeply embedded in the Chinese Communist Party's wider efforts to win hearts and minds from the 1940s to the 1970s. Using a wide range of archival material, including declassified documents from China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archive, Barrett provides fresh insights into the relationship between science and foreign relations in the People's Republic of China.
History

Minding the Gap: Zhou Peiyuan, Dorothy Hodgkin, and the Durability of Sino-Pugwash Networks

January 2020
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Chapter

Between sovereignty and legitimacy: China and UNESCO, 1946-1953

June 2019
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Journal article
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Modern Asian Studies
UNESCO's founding in 1946 coincided with the resumption of hostilities between China's ruling Nationalist Party (KMT) and their Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rivals for power. The new international organization's officials in Paris and its representatives on the ground in China were thus forced to navigate a fractious and fluid set of national circumstances that would result in an ambiguous outcome in 1949, with regimes on the Chinese mainland and Taiwan both claiming to represent ‘China’. Although the KMT-led Republic of China continued to claim membership in UNESCO until the 1970s, the international organization nevertheless continued to operate within the People's Republic of China (PRC) for a number of years. Exploring the relationship between the issue of Chinese representation in UNESCO and the organization's on-the-ground presence from the mid-1940s through to the early 1950s, this article argues that domestic and international factors were inescapably intertwined in shaping the trajectory of Chinese relations with international organizations during this period. While CCP officials demonstrated a mixture of ideology and pragmatism, similar to their handling of foreign entities and groups present in the PRC after its founding, engagement with UNESCO was significantly shaped by the complexity and depth of the KMT's engagement with the international organization from its inception onwards. The CCP's relations with UNESCO underscore the extent to which the emerging Cold War—and China's place within it—was ultimately characterized by complexity and contingency.

China's “people's diplomacy” and the Pugwash conferences, 1957–1964

April 2018
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Journal article
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Journal of Cold War Studies
Newly available archival sources in China illuminate how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) used transnational initiatives to advance its aims. This article explores Chinese interaction with the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs from 1957 to 1964 and discusses how the People's Republic of China (PRC) made deliberate use of transnational initiatives to further its own Cold War strategy and foreign policy. High-ranking CCP officials were directly involved in selecting China's scientific participants, shaping their message, and determining their objectives at the conferences, including winning over potentially sympathetic foreign scientists, demonstrating Sino-Soviet solidarity and, in 1960, potentially establishing back-channel communications with the incoming Kennedy administration in the United States. Chinese scientists’ involvement in Pugwash shows that transnational relations mattered to the PRC during the Cold War and, more broadly, underscores the importance of governments in transnational relations.
SBTMR