In 1952, the People's Republic of China (PRC) initiated a propaganda campaign against the U.S. army's use of germ warfare during the Korean War. In what followed as "proof race" between the two divisive Cold War powers, the socialist regime produced a massive report out of scientists' on-site fieldwork and laboratory examinations that attested to the truthfulness of the germ warfare claim. Featuring "scientific facts," the report exemplified collaborative efforts to (re)invent scientific narratives for the sake of integrating science into political legitimacy and socialist construction.
This paper maps how narrative modes in the scientific document traveled cross media and genres into the 1954 propaganda play Bright Skies that reflected upon Chinese scientists' participation in the germ warfare investigation. Not only did the playwright Cao Yu refer back to details from the report, Bright Skies also imaginatively delved into untold stories behind the production of objective scientific activities. Through dramatization, the backstories lay bare the entanglements of scientific practices, politics, and personal choices, and thus unintendedly resonate with Bruno Latour's observations on the laboratory life and construction of facts. The text and context of Bright Skies, I argue, provide a glimpse into the reconfiguration of science and scientists in the specific situation of the early 1950s PRC. An intertextual and contrapuntal reading of the report and the play also reveals where science and literature overlap in knowledge production through storytelling.
