Chinese Communist writings on the distant past—particularly that of “primitive socialism,” the only prehistoric stage of history—tend to receive less scholarly attention than those on the stages of feudalism, capitalism, and socialism. As evidenced in this pathbreaking and engaging study by Sigrid Schmalzer, however, theories of human evolution played a central role in the canon of socialist thought both within and outside China. As Schmalzer explains, Darwin and Engels were often referred to in the same breath as figures such as Lenin and Mao, using them as a “one-two materialist punch” (p. 71). It was within this discursive terrain that materialist and socialist writers made one of their most important claims: namely, that it was labor that played the principal role in the course of human evolution, sparking the developmental leap that brought about our humanity. As the oft-repeated maxim by Engels put it, labor created humanity.

The focus of Schmalzer's book is one of the most famous fossils in history, known variously as Sinanthropus pekinensis, Homo erectus pekinensis, or simply Peking Man. Discovered and excavated during the 1920s, Peking Man went on to play a leading role in a host of national and transnational narratives involving social scientists, Chinese nationalists, and Chinese Communists, among many others. Based on an extensive survey of textbooks, popular lore, contemporary periodicals, and archival sources (the most exciting of which is perhaps a book of comments left by museumgoers at the Zhoukoudian Peking Man Site Exhibition Hall circa 1956), the author takes us from the fossil's relatively slow incorporation into mass education during the Republican period, through its emergence as an “icon of revolution” during the Maoist period (p. 55), and into its nationalist-cum-transnationalist appeal in the post-Mao era.

Schmalzer's study is more than a posthumous biography of Peking Man, however. Indeed, she makes a valuable contribution to a small but growing body of literature focused on science during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76)—a period often overlooked by historians who, as Schmalzer argues, “do not recognize its priorities” (p. 137). In characterizing Mao-era science, Schmalzer argues that there were two broad facets: a top-down project of “science dissemination” (kexue puji) and a bottom-up project of mass participation in scientific enterprises. She demonstrates convincingly that these two facets “lay in profound contradiction” (p. 135). The top-down project was predicated on an idea, common among elites, that the Chinese masses were bastions of superstition and erroneous ideas. By contrast, the bottom-up counterpart to science dissemination was putatively based on the valorization of nonelite, experiential, mass knowledge. Whereas the first of these policies was undertaken vigorously, the second failed to receive the full backing of the Chinese state precisely because of the widespread belief among Chinese elites in the backwardness of the masses. Thus, despite oft-repeated claims regarding the inherently class-based nature of knowledge, the science policy of the Chinese Communist Party during the Cultural Revolution was ultimately marked by an “absence of a serious, class-based reappraisal of the structure of scientific knowledge” (p. 171).

As evidenced by the author's refreshingly candid prose, and her unabashed commitment to the enlargement of social participation in science both inside and outside China (pp. 16, 135–36, 290, 296), Schmalzer clearly laments the failure of popular science in Mao-era China. The early Communist period, one gathers from the book, represented something like a “last best chance” for the emergence of a truly nonelitist form of science. Despite Mao's explicit commitment to “oppose book learning” and the like, it appears that both he and his party colleagues held fast to the longer-standing, condescending, and distrustful view of the masses. Schmalzer concludes, “Mao was right to think that ‘the masses’ had something to offer science, but he missed the link between mass science and popular culture” (p. 290). And elsewhere, “Jiang Qing and her allies, for all their mistakes and moral failings, were right to reject ‘exceptionalism’ in science, and China scholars would be wise to follow suit in greater numbers” (p. 292).

Ultimately, scientific elitism survived the Maoist period and went on to make a dynamic return under Deng Xiaoping, who at once reestablished science as a “productive force” in history and allowed for the top-down project of science dissemination to proceed unchecked.