Writing the People's Science: One Hundred Thousand Whys and the Politics of Science Popularization in China, 1931–1975

Abstract

This article focuses on One Hundred Thousand Whys (Shiwan ge weishenme), modern China's single most popular book series for science dissemination. A translation of a 1929 work from the Soviet Union, it took on new life throughout China's eventful twentieth century. Challenging the prevalent understanding that antisuperstition was the most important goal of science dissemination in Mao-era China, I illustrate how science dissemination in the 1960s aimed to spark readers' interest in natural sciences and prepare them to contribute to national construction. I argue that, during the Cultural Revolution, when political propaganda was bluntly integrated into science dissemination materials, these materials remained consistent with previous editions and continued to serve as reliable references for readers seeking scientific knowledge.

Before the Cultural Revolution, I would spend my free time on Sundays reading and rereading these books, especially A Hundred Thousand Whys. I had learned from it why there are little holes in bread, why a zebra has stripes on its body, why hens lay more eggs in summer, and why I would have a different weight on Mars. I wanted to be a scientist or an astronaut so that I could ask more whys and publish the answers in books.

Bai Di, "My Wandering Years in the Cultural Revolution"¹

One Hundred Thousand Whys, the book Bai Di credited for sparking her interest in science, was the single most popular series for science dissemination to appear in China during the modern era. Science dissemination had been a priority of educators, publishers, and the state since the May Fourth period. At the moment that Bai describes in this passage—on the eve of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976)—the series was about to undergo changes, from being directed primarily at school-age children to being aimed at a broader audience that included working adults. Yet, despite the politicization that the 1970 edition of One Hundred Thousand Whys would go through, it would remain a reliable reference for readers seeking scientific knowledge.

In twentieth-century China, "science" as a catchphrase was never out of fashion in grandiose blueprints for strengthening the nation. From the late 1910s, when May Fourth intellectuals advocated inviting Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science to modernize the country, to the late 1970s, when Deng Xiaoping made the famous claim that "science and technology are the primary productive forces" (科学技术是第一生产力), intellectuals associated science and technology with progress, renovation, and anticipation, instrumental to the renewal of the Chinese nation.² In accordance with science's close ties to nation building, the science-state relationship dominated scholarship on scientific development in modern China from the late 1980s to the early years of the twenty-first century.³ Recently, scholars working on the Maoist period have complicated the science-versus-state dynamic by investigating the role of mass participation in knowledge production. Their work has moved away from a dismissive attitude toward mass science (群众科学 qunzhong kexue).⁴

This scholarship has greatly enriched the current understanding of scientific activity of Mao-era China, but gaps remain to be filled. First, because this scholarship tends to investigate the production of new knowledge, it inevitably focuses on the development of specific scientific disciplines. As Arunabh Ghosh observed in 2019, whereas older scholarship primarily focused on the question of the state's control over science, newer studies turned to concerns about histories of individual scientists, disciplines, and institutions.⁵ The shift from macro policies to micro experience in the field is welcome, but it leaves out significant questions about the broader dissemination of scientific knowledge. Where did readers interested in more basic scientific knowledge—such as why there are little holes in bread or why a zebra has stripes on its body—turn during the Mao era? Second, while there is no longer a Mao-era lacuna in the research on the history of science in China, the Cultural Revolution period has received much less attention than the 1950s and the early 1960s. The prevailing assumption seems to be that science dissemination was interrupted by the Cultural Revolution and did not resume until 1978, when the long-awaited "springtime for science" (科学的春天 kexue de chuntian) suddenly arrived.⁶ Through an examination of the creation and transformation of One Hundred Thousand Whys, this article argues that science popularization was the state's sustained focus throughout the Maoist years. Although almost all public-facing journals were suspended during the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, including popular science-themed journals such as Science Pictorial (科学画报 Kexue huabao) and Knowledge Is Power (知识就是力量 Zhishi jiushi liliang), materials focused on science dissemination were among the very few choices that were both accessible to and popular among readers, even at the height of the Cultural Revolution.

The title One Hundred Thousand Whys became synonymous with science popularization in the People's Republic of China (PRC). From the first PRC edition published in 1961 to the sixth edition published in 2013, the distribution of the series exceeded 100 million copies, and the books influenced Chinese readers of several generations.⁷ More significantly, One Hundred Thousand Whys provides a rare example of a meeting point of multiple perspectives in science dissemination: it was published by a state-sponsored publishing house and often reflected the state's priorities for areas of national construction in its coverage, but it was well received by a popular readership across the country and also included details and minutiae about everyday objects and phenomena. The history of One Hundred Thousand Whys advances the current understandings of the socialist state's policies on science popularization and of the way in which science was communicated to a broader audience, which fosters a more nuanced understanding of the Mao era and its complexities.

One Hundred Thousand Whys: From Soviet Russia to Republican China

One Hundred Thousand Whys is a household name in China, but it originated as a Soviet work introduced to the country in the 1930s through translations by left-wing intellectuals. At that time, China was facing national crises, urging intellectuals to prioritize cultivation of talents through scientific education to achieve future national rejuvenation. The introduction of One Hundred Thousand Whys demonstrated to Chinese authors how to explain scientific knowledge through lively and interesting storytelling, ultimately nurturing readers' curiosity and passion for learning science.

Published in 1929, the original One Hundred Thousand Whys (Sto tysâč počemu) was a slim book authored by Mikhail Il'in (1896–1953), a Soviet engineer and rising writer who was dedicated to science popularization.⁸ The full title of Il'in's version is One Hundred Thousand Whys: A Trip in the Room; Il'in drew inspiration from the line "seven million Whys" in a Rudyard Kipling poem to express what he saw as children's insatiable curiosity.⁹ Il'in used this poem to illustrate that, to children, even their daily environment is an exciting wonderland, full of questions to be asked and answered. Il'in further explained in the preface: "We are passionately reading about travels to distant and unexplored countries and do not know that two steps away from us, or even closer, lies an unfamiliar, amazing, mysterious country called 'Our Room.'"¹⁰ In a sketch of a room, Il'in marked six stations to which he guided his readers: water tap, stove, dining table, kitchen shelf, cupboard, and wardrobe (Figure 1). For each station, he grouped several questions together. For example, at the water tap station, the questions included "Why do people wash with water?" and "Why do we need to drink water?"¹¹ At the stove station, "When did people learn to use fire?" and "When were matches invented?"¹² For each question, Il'in wrote a short essay to provide an explanation. Following Il'in's questions and answers, readers would realize that every corner of a room provides opportunities for learning. If one slows down and starts to notice, there is unlimited knowledge even in limited spaces.¹³

Il'in's idea that "everything in your room is a mystery" accorded with the thenemerging modernist literary theory of defamiliarization, which became particularly influential in the Soviet literary circle at the time of the publication of One Hundred Thousand Whys.¹⁴ Soviet literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984) explained the concept of defamiliarization in his 1917 essay, "Art as Device." Arguing for the need to revitalize something that has become overfamiliar, like a cliché in the literary canon, he wrote:

In order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art. The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition. By "estranging" objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and "laborious." The perceptual process in art has a purpose all its own and ought to be extended to the fullest. Art is a means of experiencing the process of creativity. The artifact itself is quite unimportant.¹⁵

Similarly, what Il'in tried to achieve through One Hundred Thousand Whys was to estrange daily objects and everyday life, transforming them into entry points of scientific inquiry. As Il'in suggested, people are familiar with daily objects only in terms of knowing how to use them; he encouraged people to ask "What," "Why," "When," "How," "Where," and "Who" about those seemingly familiar objects. In other words, like artifacts to Shklovsky, knowledge itself was less important to Il'in than the process of discovery and the willingness to learn about the seemingly known.

Figure 1.

A sketch of a room with six stations from a 1934 Chinese translation of Il'in's One Hundred Thousand Whys. Mikhail Il'in, Shiwan ge weishenme [One hundred thousand whys], trans. Dong Chuncai (Shanghai: Kaiming shudian, 1934), 6.

In 1934, three successive Chinese translations of Il'in's One Hundred Thousand Whys were published.¹⁶ The fact that three translations of the book were issued in the course of several months demonstrated that Il'in's way of narrating scientific knowledge had garnered significant attention from Chinese intellectuals. Translators agreed that Il'in's works stood out among other science-themed reading materials because they were engaging stories that held young readers' attention, whereas most other works tended to be "boringly" "dry and tedious," as one of the translators, Chen Shaoping (陈少平), put it.¹⁷ From the 1950s to the present, the version of Dong Chuncai (董纯才 1905–1999) has been the most frequently cited as the earliest translation of One Hundred Thousand Whys, even though it came out several months after Chen's. Dong, a core member of a science dissemination movement directed at underprivileged children, recalled the words with which a friend pointed him to Il'in's works in 1932: "Those of you who write science books for children should really have a look at that way of writing."¹⁸ Il'in's works exemplified to Chinese writers and readers alike how to transform numbers, diagrams, and formulas into captivating stories.

In the 1930s, what Chinese intellectuals found most inspiring in Il'in's works was not the specific knowledge itself but rather the narrative approach to the presentation of scientific knowledge. As their ultimate objective was to involve young people in scientific endeavors and contribute to national salvation, science popularization went beyond the mere transmission of a body of facts and techniques; it also aimed to propagate purportedly scientific sentiments and attitudes. Authors like Gao Shiqi (高士其 1905–1988) and Dong Chuncai considered Il'in's works the best examples of "literary scientific works" (文艺性科学作品 wenyi xing kexue zuopin), a writing style that would dominate future science popularization writing in China.¹⁹ Targeting children as the primary audience had led science popularization writers to strive for a writing style that was both educational and entertaining.

Reincarnation in Socialist China

In 1958, the Shanghai-based Shaonian ertong chubanshe (少年儿童出版社 Juvenile and Children's Press) planned a series of science dissemination books for children. This initiative led to the reincarnation of Il'in's One Hundred Thousand Whys in socialist China. Unlike Il'in's original single-authored volume, the Chinese version involved a diverse group of authors, and school-age children—the main target audience—notably played a significant role in its creation. During the initial stages, the editors actively sought children's input on which questions to include, and they ultimately learned from children how to present scientific concepts in a way that resonated with young readers.

The editors clearly drew inspiration from Il'in's work. In addition to the title, many questions that appeared in the Chinese version were borrowed or adapted from Il'in's original version. In the initial plan, the editorial team envisioned publishing five volumes, on mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy and meteorology, and physiology and hygiene.²⁰ This organization differed significantly from Il'in's version, which was one slim volume that addressed about 20 questions. The Chinese version was designed to be a major multivolume project, with the aim of building a solid knowledge foundation in the natural sciences for children. The editors first recruited teachers from Shanghai schools to author the chemistry volume, but the draft was unusable because it adopted a structure and style resembling those of standard-issue textbooks.²¹ An editor named Hong Zunian (洪祖年) suggested that the publishers should solicit questions from school-aged children, since "good questions lead to good answers."²² They subsequently printed 10,000 questionnaires and distributed them to dozens of Shanghai middle schools, elementary schools, and children's after-school clubs. The questionnaire was simple in design, printed with only one question on it: "Please ask some questions to which you would like to know the answers."²³

In three months, the editors received about 7,000 responses. Some of the most frequently asked questions were: "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" "Did monkeys become humans?" "Can monkeys become humans now?" "Why do some children grow white hair?" "Why do dumplings float when they are cooked?" "Why is the lower half of the big tree by the road painted white?" "Why do popsicles emit white smoke?"²⁴ The responses confirmed Il'in's suggestion that for children everyday life was full of intriguing spectacles that invited exploration. The children's questions made the editors realize that, to make the series stimulating for young readers, it was most important to see the world through a child's eyes and not to take commonplace phenomena for granted. Although the children who responded to the questionnaires were supposed to be the receivers of knowledge, to some degree, they educated the editors and authors about how to write books that would appeal to them.

Subsequently, the editors played an important role in each step leading to the publication of One Hundred Thousand Whys. They decided which questions to adopt, sent the questions to potential authors, reviewed the authors' sample drafts, made a selection, and revised the drafts to ensure their readability for children.²⁵ From April 1961 to December 1962, eight volumes were published in succession, covering physics, chemistry, astronomy and meteorology, physiology and hygiene, agriculture, geology and mineralogy, zoology, and mathematics. Notably, the final series included three volumes more than had been originally planned, in response to readers' requests.²⁶ The publishers also deviated from their initial plan to focus on the theoretical sciences by publishing the volume on agriculture in the first phase. This decision was likely related to the series' compilation during a time defined by famine and extreme food shortages, during which the editors were concerned with the immediate utility of science popularization at the same time that they wished to align the series with Zhou Enlai's 1956 call to focus on "theoretical sciences" (理论科学 lilun kexue).²⁷ The final volume, on mathematics, which was widely considered the foundation of all natural sciences, was not published until December 1962. The editor recalled that it was particularly difficult to write sufficiently engaging mathematics-themed entries.²⁸ The elimination of the mathematics volume from the first phase of publication signified the editing team's determination to find the best way to narrate knowledge and make learning an exciting journey.

Despite their extensive preparation, the editors initially seemed not to have high expectations for sales of this series. For the first print run of the physics volume, only 5,000 copies were printed. One month later, though, when the chemistry volume was sent to press, the number increased to 30,000.²⁹ Readers' positive feedback boosted the editors' confidence in the series.³⁰ Around August 1961, praise for One Hundred Thousand Whys began to appear in major newspapers and periodicals, including Xinmin Evening News (新民晚报 Xinmin wanbao), China Youth Daily (中国青年报 Zhongguo qingnian bao), and People's Daily (人民日报 Renmin ribao). In 1962, Hu Yaobang, then secretary of Central Committee of the Communist Youth League, proposed that every Youth League cadre should read One Hundred Thousand Whys.³¹ Liberation Daily (解放日报 Jiefang ribao), one of the most important state-sponsored newspapers, published a front-page editorial entitled "Cultivating Children's Love of Science" (培养孩子爱科学 "Peiyang haizi ai kexue"), highlighting the series' contribution to sparking children's interest in science, educating children with Marxism, and laying the foundation for construction of a new society by cultivating talent for the future.³²

Although the editors envisioned school-age children as the target readership, the actual readers of the series were not only children. One journalist wrote, "In bookstores, readers are enthusiastically purchasing the books [One Hundred Thousand Whys]; in libraries, this series is often on loan and unavailable. Many teachers use this series as reference material for their teaching, while numerous parents consider it supplementary reading material to enrich their children's knowledge."³³ Praise for One Hundred Thousand Whys from various sources agreed that the series not only enhanced readers' scientific knowledge but also stimulated their desire to explore nature.

From the conception of the series in 1959 to the eight published volumes in 1961–1962, actual children's involvement, direct or indirect, was indeed remarkable, especially considering the impact the series would have in the following decades. Highlighting the significant role of children challenges the prevailing understanding of science dissemination during the Mao era, which focuses nearly exclusively on antisuperstition. Existing scholarship agrees that science dissemination was an urgent task for the newly founded socialist regime, mainly because science was in line with the materialist ideology that the government was striving to establish nationwide. Science, accordingly, was primarily understood as an antidote for superstition. For example, Sigrid Schmalzer has noted that, in socialist China, the goal of science dissemination was to "transform the worldview of every member of the new society—to rid the people of superstition and introduce them to science and socialism."³⁴ Similarly, on the basis of her study of the Love Science and Eliminate Superstition Exhibitions of the 1960s, Denise Ho has argued that science was always presented as the opposite of superstition, in terms of worldview and class origin, among other social markers: "Science was what superstition was not."³⁵ While the understanding accurately pinpoints antisuperstition as a primary goal of science education, for war-torn China in the 1950s and 1960s, science and technology also had more concrete and utilitarian purposes, because they were crucial to national security and economic recovery.³⁶ If there was, as Schmalzer put it, "a united front against superstition" among government officials, scientists, and intellectuals,³⁷ these parties would also have had a shared interest in disseminating science to cultivate talents in agricultural science, engineering, and military technology, for instance. I argue for looking anew at the field of science dissemination by moving away from the preoccupation with antisuperstition and exploring what the state prioritized in introducing knowledge to the younger generation and the methods by which that knowledge was introduced.

Furthermore, even though existing scholarship has made it evident that mass participation was a key component of knowledge production in the Maoist years, those consulted were usually adult peasants and workers who had extensive practical experience. The involvement of children thus complicates the understanding that Mao-era science dissemination involved either top-down or bottom-up approaches, or both, as Richard Suttmeier observed in 1974.³⁸ The publication process for the first edition of One Hundred Thousand Whys demonstrates that science popularization in the early 1960s was not necessarily a strictly top-down effort that primarily concerned ideological education, nor was it purely a strictly bottom-up production of knowledge that unapologetically eulogized the wisdom of the working classes. Rather, throughout the process of soliciting questions, deciding on topics, finding suitable authors, and editing volumes, each step leading to the reincarnation of One Hundred Thousand Whys in China reflected an implicit negotiation between the state's needs, the readers' interests, and editorial decisions. Since the children and the editors were neither the "top" nor the "bottom," the process also demonstrates that elements of top-down and bottom-up approaches were not always "in profound contradiction" as Schmalzer has suggested they were.³⁹ Instead, in the early 1960s, science dissemination could be produced through conversations and collaborations of the top and the bottom and, more importantly, many forces in between. This is a significant difference from the production of textbooks at the time, which was unquestionably top-down. As Rui Kunze has pointed out, from 1949 to 1966 the Chinese Communist Party emulated the Soviet mode of education that gave the state total control over curricula.⁴⁰ As extracurricular reading material, One Hundred Thousand Whys was less institutionalized and thus had more room for experimentation. The editors had much more agency in the whole process of writing and editing, ranging from deciding the content to determining the amount of royalties to pay each author.⁴¹ Science dissemination thus was not necessarily always under the state's total control and did not just passively reflect the state's policies.

Educating through a Question-and-Answer Format

One of the distinguishing features of the 1961 Chinese version was its expansion of the question-and-answer (Q&A) format used in Il'in's original version. Not only did the editors use this structure to introduce novel scientific information in a way that went beyond Il'in's original version, but they also emphasized topics important to the PRC's national construction.

The adoption of the Q&A format allowed the editors to make One Hundred Thousand Whys a means of unbounded exploration for its readers, at once widening their scope of knowledge and encouraging their passion for discovery. For each volume, readers would first encounter an extensive list of questions, which functioned as the table of contents and ran for 10–15 pages (Figure 2). The questions appeared in a random sequence. The first two questions in the physics volume, for example, were about why spaceships can fly to and from Earth, and the third question jumped to "Is there a way to catch smoke?"⁴² The mathematics volume began with a question introducing the Möbius strip and topology: "Why does a paper circle only have one surface?" More basic questions like "Why can't 0 be used as a divisor?" and "Why are honeycombs all hexagonal?" appeared much later in the book.⁴³ Such a structure is certainly related to the way the books were written and edited, since many of the initial questions solicited from the children were not necessarily systematic in nature. Perhaps unintentionally, the editors also used the Q&A structure to encourage a nonlinear way of reading and learning: readers would be able to learn something interesting without having to read the books from cover to cover. Shuffling through the pages and pausing anywhere, they could immediately embark on an excursion into the scientific explanations of commonplace phenomena that had been taken for granted.

In addition, the Chinese version differed significantly from Il'in's version in that the editors made it possible to educate readers with both the questions and the answers. Il'in put a twist on the assumption that people ask questions when they are confused by pointing out that one can still be curious even when one is not confused. As Il'in urged his readers to discover the hidden knowledge in daily life, his questions were driven by common sense or "tacit knowledge," as Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) would have called it. Readers are generally familiar with this knowledge but cannot explain it: "How can matches start a fire?" or "Why must we cook potatoes to eat them?" For Il'in, the main message lived in the answers, and the questions were mostly functional, in terms of providing structure for the content. To learn something, readers had to read the answers. For the Chinese version of One Hundred Thousand Whys, however, the message usually lay in the questions as much as in the answers. One could gain scientific knowledge just by reading the list of questions: "Why are fluorescent light bulbs more energy-efficient than incandescent ones?"⁴⁴ "Why do children have faster heartbeats than adults?"⁴⁵ "How can we make glass with stone?"⁴⁶ In addition to explaining the scientific mechanisms behind commonplace phenomena, the Chinese version also introduced phenomena that were not well known to many readers, such as fluorescent light bulbs being more energy-efficient than incandescent ones or children having faster heartbeats than adults. The carefully formulated questions went beyond tacit knowledge and directed readers' curiosity toward specific topics.

Knowing this, a contemporary reader might feel less surprised to encounter questions like "Can watermelons be used as cannonballs?" or "Why do we also need salt when we make bombs?"⁴⁷ The connections between daily objects and military supplies suggest a specifically contextualized understanding of everyday life. For the young readers of 1960s China, firearms were as mundane as food or clothes. Also, before the intended readers were taught how to use watermelons and salt as weapons, they were first taught that watermelons and salt can be used as weapons. On the one hand, the infiltration of military terminology in a book for children signaled the military confrontation that was still hot during the Cold War period and, on the other hand, it suggested an image of an ideal socialist youth as someone who can act as a soldier and think as a scientist. To some extent, the Chinese version of One Hundred Thousand Whys deviated from Il'in's intention by incorporating knowledge that was not necessarily present in daily life. Beyond fostering a general passion for learning, the Chinese version strategically used the questions to guide readers' attention toward specific scientific disciplines and knowledge areas. This approach aimed to prepare them to become the talents that were urgently required for national development and construction.

Figure 2.

One page of a table of contents for the first edition of the multivolume Chinese One Hundred Thousand Whys. Shiwan ge weishenme [One hundred thousand whys], vol. 2 (Shanghai: Shaonian ertong chubanshe, 1961), 13.

Denise Ho has noticed the pitfall of Q&A format in her study on the antisuperstition exhibitions in 1960s Shanghai. Ho argued that the exhibitions presented science as incontrovertible facts and fixed first principles rather than as a way of knowing or questioning.⁴⁸ I argue that the Q&A structure is not inherently negative. At least for the purpose of disseminating knowledge, Q&A proved an efficient way of improving readers' scientific literacy. Nevertheless, Ho is insightful in underscoring that the Q&A format presents information as unassailable truth, limiting readers' agency of interpretation. Therefore, efficient as it is, Q&A can potentially work as a tool to channel attention and disseminate any kind of information, including political propaganda. Inspired by children's spontaneous curiosity, ironically, Q&A could also be mind-controlling, restraining rather than liberating the thoughts of readers, regardless of their age.

Narrating Science under a Protective Cover

The outbreak of the Cultural Revolution had profound consequences for the One Hundred Thousand Whys project. Like many publications of the time, the popular book series was attacked for its allegedly incorrect class stance and linguistic errors. As a result, it went through a thorough revision. The 1970 edition of One Hundred Thousand Whys nonetheless retained most of the content of earlier versions, but within a protective "shell" of political quotations, demonstrating that even at the height of the Cultural Revolution the state did not abandon its preoccupation with science dissemination.

Shortly after the successful release of the second edition in 1965, the Cultural Revolution broke out, and One Hundred Thousand Whys was harshly criticized.⁴⁹ Ironically, the series' popularity became the main target of criticism. One pamphlet mentioned the editorial in Liberation Daily: "As is well known, publishing an editorial for a particular book happened only once before, and that was in 1960, when the fourth volume of the Selected Works of Mao Zedong (毛泽东选集 Mao Zedong xuanji) was published. Yet One Hundred Thousand Whys received equal attention and was on an even larger scale. . . . If this can be tolerated, what cannot?"⁵⁰ The criticism seemed to convey a simple message that what was wrong was not scientific knowledge itself, but the way it was received. When something became too popular—even more popular than the Selected Works of Mao Zedong—it became a threat. Many people involved in the making of One Hundred Thousand Whys were removed from their positions and sent to labor camps, including the editor in chief, Wang Guozhong (王国忠 1927–2010), in 1969 and author Ye Yonglie (叶永烈 1940–2020), who wrote most entries for the first two editions, in 1966.

When a work was criticized during the Cultural Revolution, the state would often ban its publication thereafter. Yet in 1970, more than four years into the Cultural Revolution, a third edition of One Hundred Thousand Whys was published. That is an important reminder that the PRC government's preoccupation with science and technology never lessened despite the political turmoil, even during the Cultural Revolution. Contradicting the prevalent understanding that chaos from Mao's mass movements had upended scientific research during the Cultural Revolution, science and technology remained on the central stage of socialist construction.⁵¹ As Wang Guozhong recalled, an officer found him in the labor camp in July 1970 and said, "There are no books for sale in the bookstores, so you have to revise and publish One Hundred Thousand Whys." The order came with a firm deadline: Wang was required to organize the team and finish the revision by October 1, 1970, to celebrate National Day.⁵² As for the reasons that One Hundred Thousand Whys was chosen to solve the book shortage, much remains unknown, but since other science-themed journals were not approved to resume publication, the unmatched popularity of One Hundred Thousand Whys and its signature Q&A style may at least partially explain its revival.

The editors of the 1970 edition of One Hundred Thousand Whys were certainly aware of the importance of ensuring its political correctness: the editors of previous versions had also responded to similar political demands. As Perry Link has argued, the PRC government tended to rely on self-censorship to keep writers and journal editors under control. Since how and when control would be enforced was not always clear, writers and editors proceeded with "speculative" caution.⁵³ Preparation for the first edition began in 1959, in the aftermath of the Anti-Rightist Campaign (1957), and the editors understood the necessity of steering clear of politically sensitive fields. For instance, during the 1950s and 1960s, biological research in China was heavily influenced by Soviet theories that denied the existence of genes and considered the environment to be the dominant factor affecting species. As a result, the first two editions of One Hundred Thousand Whys avoided mentioning genes and genetics in related questions.⁵⁴ For questions like "Why are giraffes' necks so long?" or "Why do zebras have stripes?" the answers would explain the length of the neck or the black and white stripes as resulting from natural selection.⁵⁵ During the Cultural Revolution, however, criticism of publications often extended beyond the content; even minor linguistic flaws or loopholes in wording could bring trouble to the authors.

As a result, the self-censorship of earlier periods was not adequate to protect the two 1960s editions from political attack in the opening months of the Cultural Revolution. Despite the editors' careful deliberation over the content, One Hundred Thousand Whys was still attacked for its wording and phrasing. As Ye Yonglie recollected, the entry titled "Why does the sun have sunspots?" (太阳为什么有黑子 "Taiyang weishenme you heizi?") was criticized for "viciously attacking Chairman Mao, the most red Red Sun in our hearts"; the entry "How can cotton be used as dynamite?" was criticized for "promoting Khrushchev's pacifism" and "paralyzing the revolutionary fighting spirit of the proletariat, as the greatest function of explosives should be to blow up a new Red world."⁵⁶ Looking back at that moment, Wang Guozhong used the word "dramatic" several times to describe the criticism: "It left us speechless, not knowing whether to laugh or cry."⁵⁷ Such criticisms did not prompt the editors to engage in further self-censorship of the content; instead, it made them more cautious in their choices of words and expression.

To publish the third edition while maintaining the integrity of the content, the editors needed to find a way to demonstrate the subordination of knowledge to socialist state ideology, to illustrate that the popularity of the series was not a threat and that the series was under party control, and, most importantly, to create a narrative strategy that would be immune from literary inquisition. The seemingly daunting task could also be achieved easily enough: given that it took the editors more than three years to publish the first edition and two years to publish the second edition, it would be impossible to finish a thorough revision in less than three months. What could be done in three months, though, was a skin-deep revision that looked correct on the surface but did not change the content.⁵⁸ Instead of completely overhauling the questions and answers, the editors needed a protective shell made of revolutionary rhetoric to safeguard the content.

The protective shell consisted mainly of ubiquitous references to Mao Zedong, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels. The editors innovatively used Mao's words to validate the importance of science dissemination and presented them as the guiding thought of One Hundred Thousand Whys. Opening each volume, readers would first find four quotations from Mao:

In the fields of the struggle for production and scientific experiment, mankind makes constant progress and nature undergoes constant change, they never remain at the same level. Therefore, man has to constantly sum up experience and go on discovering, inventing, creating, and advancing.⁵⁹

For the purpose of attaining freedom in the world of nature, man must use natural science to understand, conquer and change nature and thus attain freedom from nature.⁶⁰

Chinese people have determination and capability to catch up and surpass the worldleading powers in the near future.⁶¹

Be prepared for war, be prepared for natural disasters, and serve the people.⁶²

Extracted from different texts and from different contexts, these four quotations were selected, edited, and rearranged to be read as a coherent argument that fully addresses the why, what, and how of science dissemination.⁶³ Each of the quotations points to a different perspective, from the general history of mankind's evolution to the specific challenges that the PRC was facing in the early 1970s. Read as a whole, the combination of quotations demonstrates an awareness about China's present and future in the global order, claiming that, through learning natural sciences, Chinese people would be able to overcome the current difficulties of war and natural disasters and eventually become world leaders. Each of the four quotations also appears separately in various places throughout the 21 volumes, functioning as frequent reminders that the specific knowledge being introduced was under the purview of Mao's vision.

Along with Chairman Mao's guidance, the editors' notes also acted as a shield that protected the content of the subsequent volumes. Following the full page of Mao's quotations are the editors' notes, explaining the major revisions in the third edition. These notes begin with a paragraph-long self-criticism, an element included in each volume:

In the past, One Hundred Thousand Whys (first edition published in 1962, revised in 1965), under the influence of the renegade, traitor, and scab Liu Shaoqi's antirevolutionary, revisionist Black Line of arts and literature, contained many mistakes. It failed to actively disseminate Marxism, Leninism, and Mao Zedong Thought; it was separated from the reality of class struggle, the struggle for production, and scientific experiments; much of the content wrongly advocated the idea of knowledge as all-powerful; it aimed to be entertaining; and it disseminated feudalism, capitalism, and revisionism. In the great proletarian Cultural Revolution, numerous workers, peasants, soldiers, and Red Guards have harshly criticized the mistakes of the series, eliminating the pernicious influence of the Black Line of arts and literature and the Black Line of publishing.⁶⁴

Ye Yonglie called it a "peculiar essay" (奇文 qiwen) and cited the whole passage in his recollections about the revision.⁶⁵ It is indeed peculiar: although it covers a wide range of "mistakes," this lengthy list remains superficial. The mistakes read like an emotionless enumeration that employs phrases frequently applied to nearly all publications denounced during the Cultural Revolution. Instead of actually engaging in reflection or self-reformation, the editors were only using formulaic revolutionary language to demonstrate their political stance.

Beyond this protective shell, the content of the first 14 volumes of the third edition was largely identical to the previous edition. The editors noted that the revision "deleted the incorrect content, and about one third of the questions were newly added."⁶⁶ In other words, more than two-thirds of the questions in the first 14 volumes of the 1970 edition were held over from the 1965 edition. The "incorrect content" consisted mostly of questions prone to literary inquisition, such as "Does the sun rise from the east?" or "Why do people become lazy and sluggish in spring?" The editors removed these questions to avoid potential attacks on wording and phrasing.⁶⁷ Revision of the remaining questions mostly involved only the addition of quotations from Mao, Marx, or Engels out of context. For example, in answering the question "Why do we need to categorize plants?" in the botany volume, the third edition differed from the second only by quoting Engels, while the rest of the essay, including the illustrations, remained unchanged.⁶⁸ Given that Wang Guozhong was ordered to finish the revision in less than three months, it is hardly surprising that most changes were merely cosmetic.

One of the most significant revisions in the 1970 edition was the new front cover, which made explicit the leading role of state ideology in science dissemination and the subordination of scientific knowledge. The covers of the two 1960s editions had been designed to appeal to children, featuring high-contrast color blocks and images of children playing against a dark-colored background (Figure 3). On the covers of the first 14 volumes of the third edition, playing children are replaced by serious-looking adults and different shades of red are the dominant colors. In a top-to-bottom layout, the top one-third contains the same image, featuring representatives of the leading classes—a soldier, a worker, and a peasant—standing tall and straight against the background of a waving red flag and a globe emerging from the horizon. The three characters join hands, holding an oversized copy of the Selected Works of Mao Zedong. Together with the flag, the book is portrayed as a source of light that resembles the sun, with beams radiating to reach the borders of the image. On the lower half of each volume appears an assemblage of illustrations selected from the specific volume (Figure 4). Taken as a whole, the images illustrate that specific

Figure 3.

The cover of the first edition of the multivolume Chinese One Hundred Thousand Whys. Shiwan ge weishenme, vol. 2 (Shanghai: Shaonian ertong chubanshe, 1961).

Figure 4.

The cover of the third edition of One Hundred Thousand Whys, revised during the Cultural Revolution. Shiwan ge weishenme, 3rd ed., vol. 1 (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1970).

knowledge is literally under state ideology, represented by the leading classes and their ideological weapon—Mao Zedong Thought.

Not all images went through such radical changes. In fact, the majority of illustrations from the first two editions were retained in the third edition. If the cover design of the third edition demonstrated science's subordinated status, the illustrations retained from the first two editions can be read as quiet resistance. For example, the entry "Why are most of the counting and counting methods based on the decimal system?" in the third edition included three quotations from Mao throughout the essay. Juxtaposed with the texts was an illustration kept from the second edition that featured two smiling children counting with their fingers (Figure 5).⁶⁹ Even though the editors' notes cited the aim "to be entertaining" as a mistake to be corrected, some entertaining elements from previous editions stayed intact in the third edition. Despite the political attacks on the series, much of the content of previous versions remained in the 1970 revision, under the "protection" of politically sound quotations and imagery.

"Serve the People" vs. "Learn from the People"

The revision nonetheless often required more than repackaging of the existing questions. About one-third of the questions in the third edition had been newly added. Many of the new entries attempted to exalt the leading role of the laboring classes in knowledge production. Even in these entries, however, the editors were able to impart knowledge that was on a par with what had been disseminated in the years prior to the Cultural Revolution.

As Wang Guozhong summarized it, the new questions in the third edition were mostly "technical topics" (技术性题目 jishu xing timu).⁷⁰ Designed to "serve the people," these questions were supposed to be helpful in agricultural and industrial production and better serve the workers, peasants, and soldiers.⁷¹ Children were no longer the only intended readers. On the one hand, the shift signaled that, at the culmination of the Cultural Revolution, class background had become the defining label for individuals. On the other hand, it appeared that long-term planning for the future—as represented by cultivating children's love of science—had given way to more immediate political needs in scientific endeavors. With the intended audience expanding from school-age children to include working adults, the purpose of the series was supposed to move from being an inspiring encyclopedia to becoming a field manual capable of offering practical solutions to agricultural and industrial production issues. However, it is often neglected that to "serve the people" and to "learn from the people" are inherently contradictory. The goal of writing science for the people undermines rather than reinforces the people's leading role in knowledge production. Most of the newly added questions were intended to be helpful in real working scenarios, such as "How can one make chemical solution No. 920?" and "Why can '5406' work as a fertilizer?" These questions introduced effective pesticides and fertilizers, as well as methods for making solutions of desired concentration. However, they clearly placed peasants in the position of learning rather than teaching.⁷² Even though the laboring classes were portrayed as the leaders in knowledge production on the front cover, they still needed to receive education by reading content compiled by experts.

Figure 5.

Illustration of children counting on their fingers from the third edition of One Hundred Thousand Whys. Shiwan ge weishenme, 3rd ed., vol. 1 (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1970), 2.

Many new entries highlighted the role of the masses, as opposed to experts, as the subjects of knowledge production. On the level of the words alone, One Hundred Thousand Whys was perfectly aligned with existing understanding of Mao-era knowledge production. For example, Schmalzer has observed that, in the early 1950s, Chinese scientific journals started publishing articles about the experiences of "old peasants." The peasants played a consultative role not only due to their personal experiences but also because they were considered conduits of "traditional" knowledge.⁷³ Similarly, entries in the third edition of One Hundred Thousand Whys often spoke highly of the old peasants' and old workers' wisdom gained through years of experience.

However, as experience can only be gained and not taught, readers of One Hundred Thousand Whys still had to rely on the more tangible content of science dissemination, as opposed to the words exalting workers' and peasants' personal experience, as the primary channel for the acquisition of knowledge. For example, the mathematics volume contained an entry titled "How is the number of balls that fit in a bearing calculated?" The essay introduces the mathematical formula that people need to calculate this and next emphasizes that "old workers" with extensive experience can decide how many balls will fit solely by intuition. The entry implies that calculations and formulas would be unnecessary for experienced workers to use.⁷⁴ On the surface, the entry appears to elevate work experience to the same level as theories of calculus. The illustrations within the essay, however, tell a different story (Figure 6). The sketches of the ball bearing represent a method of abstraction that is strictly based on accurate measurement. In this entry, there is a significant tension between the accuracy of the visual illustrations and the vagueness of the narrative praising the wisdom of old workers. While the narrative unequivocally extols the wisdom of old workers, the instructions and illustrations for measurement and calculation are necessary for solving the presented problem. As Marc Matten has argued, state institutions often found it necessary to visualize the unknown to effectively popularize science. In this process, empirical evidence and visual representations played a significant role in determining what was considered scientific knowledge and what was not.⁷⁵ For the third edition of One Hundred Thousand Why, when the words had to show subordination to state ideology, the illustrations took on the responsibility of providing scientific explanation. Teaching with the illustrations and carrying out ideological education with the words, the editors achieved two goals at once: they fully affirmed the wisdom and the leading role of the laboring classes and at the same time quietly demonstrated to readers how to do calculations accurately.

While it is impossible to know exactly how each reader responded to the inconsistency between the words and the images, it is evident that readers did gain knowledge from reading the third edition of One Hundred Thousand Whys. Cao Yanfang (曹燕芳), an editor who participated in the editing of all three editions, recalled that, in the early 1980s, many recent college graduates expressed gratitude to her, telling her they were able to pass the college entrance examination that resumed in 1978 only because they had read One Hundred Thousand Whys.⁷⁶ The readers' feedback indicates that, although the content of science education in One Hundred Thousand Whys was embedded in the propaganda of class struggle, they were able to extract the information they wanted from the Mao-style linguistic maze. As Ji Fengyuan discovered, even for the Red Guards, mere exposure to revolutionary language did not guarantee learning or acceptance of its message. Ji argued that humans inevitably use various strategies, such as humor, subversion, indifference, and simply daily routine to navigate propaganda.⁷⁷ For readers of One Hundred Thousand Whys, the illustrations may have provided a way of reading around the words. By juxtaposing the wisdom of old workers with accurate illustrations, the editors established the old workers as a model that was at once admirable and dismissible. One should not read the editors' work as intentionally steering readers toward dismissing the wisdom of laboring classes. Rather, one should understand that, despite needing to include political propaganda in the third edition, the editors took measures to work around it and preserve the integrity of the content, making it consistent with the previous editions published prior to the Cultural Revolution.

Figure 6.

Illustrations of ball bearings from the third edition of One Hundred Thousand Whys. Shiwan ge weishenme, 3rd ed., vol. 1 (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1970), 200–201.

Conclusion

In recollections of One Hundred Thousand Whys, people usually recall the first two editions fondly and avoid mentioning the third. As Bai Di mentioned in her childhood memory of reading the book, the Cultural Revolution seemed to be the end of reading science, as the Red Guards would soon take away her books, including One Hundred Thousand Whys.⁷⁸ The editor in chief of the third edition, Wang Guozhong, repeatedly expressed remorse for having allowed science dissemination to be contaminated by the politics of class struggle.⁷⁹

For readers at the time, the publication of the third edition was nonetheless exciting. In October 1970, when the first five volumes of the third edition went on sale at the Xinhua Bookstore on East Nanjing Road in Shanghai, people stormed the counters, and all the copies were immediately sold.⁸⁰ It is also important to recognize that the readers' interest did not vanish when they realized that extensive propaganda came with the revision, as about 37 million copies were released, making the third edition the most widely circulated version.⁸¹ For readers familiar with the first two editions, the third edition was probably less engaging, but given that people were well versed in ideological rhetoric before reading the third edition, perhaps it was less bothersome to them than it would be to contemporary readers.

The first two editions of One Hundred Thousand Whys illuminate the fact that science popularization in 1960s China carried forward the enlightenment and salvation tradition established by leftist intellectuals in the 1930s. When the translators introduced Il'in's works to Chinese readers, their goal was to ignite children's interest in science and, ultimately, empower them to contribute to China's progress. Similarly, One Hundred Thousand Whys sought to guide readers' attention to areas closely related to national development through carefully designed questions. During the Cultural Revolution, this tradition was not completely interrupted but rather continued under the protection of rhetorical strategies. When school education was completely interrupted, One Hundred Thousand Whys, as extracurricular reading material, was able to spark readers' curiosity, sustain their passion for discovery, and act in place of textbooks to maintain the undertaking of science dissemination throughout the political turmoil.