Histories of science in late nineteenth-century China often examine the circulation of scientific knowledge from Europe and the United States in China and the institutions and people which facilitated such circulation. This paper seeks to move beyond this dominant geographical paradigm by exploring an under-appreciated side of Chinese science in these decades: the circulation of Chinese technology and expertise within Asia. In the 1870s and 1880s, statesmen in the Qing empire sought to take advantage of the booming global demand for silk and reinforce imperial control in Xinjiang (Chinese Turkestan) at a time of geopolitical instability by undertaking a program of sericulture improvement among the primarily Turkic Muslim inhabitants of the region. They built sericulture bureaus and hired Chinese experts to train Turkic apprentices in all aspects of the silk production process. One cornerstone of this program was the attempt to transplant living organisms—silkworms and mulberry trees—from eastern China's Zhejiang province into the empire's Central Asian territory. These organisms were employed by their Chinese handlers as embodied technologies whose morphology and productivity represented claims to Chinese expertise about the natural world vis-à-vis their Turkic colonial subjects. This paper pays attention to the role of these embodied technologies in the circulation of Chinese knowledge within and beyond the walls of the sericulture bureaus.

The knowledge of why people should eat fruit and how fruit should be grown and utilized has historically varied. Focusing on such questions, this paper examines the history of the “hometown of Chinese honey nectar peach,” Longquanyi district of the city of Chengdu. In the Republican era, new varieties of honey nectar peaches were grafted on Longquanyi soil as a result of transnational exchanges of knowledge among missionaries, Western and Chinese elite scientists, and local landlords. In the Maoist years, the state imposed particular ways of knowing and doing upon local peasants in the name of the building of socialism, while the peasants tried to adjust to fruit farming as subsistence agriculture on their own. Based on the case of Longquanyi peach, this paper suggests adding the metaphor of “grafting” to the vocabulary list of global history of science. Features of grafting techniques, namely the dependency of a scion of imported variety on a local rootstock and the visibility of artificial attempts to integrate existing differences, help us emphasize power dynamics of knowledge encounters and local actors’ adaptive agency. The metaphor of grafting does not essentialize the binaries of Western, modern epistemologies and those of indigenous and traditional by understanding the relationship of scion and rootstock as relative. Global flow of scientific knowledge can be imagined as a vast orchard filled with grafted trees plastered with bandages, rather than indistinguishably “entangled” stems and roots underground.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) sought to train a strong military to ward off the Nationalists and Japanese in wartime Yanan, but faced tremendous challenges in protecting the health of its residents. Scholars have focused on the role of Norman Bethune in developing health care and scientific research in the base areas. This paper highlights the understated role of the Overseas Chinese in financing, managing, and reforming treatment for the sick and wounded through the Chinese Red Cross Medical Relief Corps and the China Defense League. They developed a new form of biomedicine that stressed cosmopolitanism and dialecticism, challenging the straightforward nationalistic rhetoric that colored understandings of science, medicine and society in the region. While appearing to promote the manufacturing of Classical Chinese Medicine, the CCP in reality, saw such pharmaceuticals as merely as a cheaper alternative to western drugs. They saw classical medicine through western scientific lens, even though that would change after 1949. Even though the CCP often articulate nativist sentiments towards medical development, their doctors eagerly embraced foreign assistance to establish self-sufficiency in the base areas. While advocates of a nativist Communist ideology shaped representations of healthcare in Yanan, the Overseas Chinese medical personnel, and their local counterparts were fashioning a cosmopolitan form of biomedicine that saved lives in wartime China.

In 1968, Taiwanese planners began to consider how to market their considerable expertise in agricultural science, accumulated after decades of success at increasing agricultural yields and raising daily caloric intake.  At the same time, the rise of the Green Revolution placed high-yield crop cultivars front and center globally, starting with wheat and maize, followed by miracle rice.  Taiwanese scientists in 1971 and 1972, in conjunction with US Agency for International Development and Rockefeller Foundation officials, founded several international scientific research institutes built along similar lines: the Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center (AVRDC) and the Food and Fertilizer Technology Center (FFTC), to disseminate Taiwanese vegetables such as broccoli rabe to other subtropical, Global South societies. 
This paper discusses the rise of international science networks as centered on agricultural research institutions, and how they embodied changing scientific ideas of agriculture and nutrition.  It argues that scientific networks and research institutions were shaped by political headwinds: the expulsion of Taiwan (The Republic of China) from the United Nations and the shifting importance to the Global South; the increasing global attention to humanitarian issues of poverty and hunger; and the politics of nutritional science that shifted from calories to minerals and vitamins.  Taiwan attempted to position itself at the vanguard of these trends by leveraging their scientific expertise.  Although "modern science" sometimes proved a powerful ideological tool, Taiwan in the 1970s and 80s was ultimately unable to utilize science to transcend politics.