Rabbit Spleen and Medicinal Herbs: Animal Infectious Diseases, Grassroots Communes, and the State in Maoist China.

This article explores how Mao-era China responded to major epizootic and zoonotic diseases. It foregrounds a series of patterns in fighting contagious animal diseases-lockdowns, quarantines, disinfection, mass animal vaccination, mass education, and prioritizing the treatment of infected animals over mass culling-which were together called the Comprehensive Prevention and Treatment (CPT). Shedding light on this understudied topic in the fields of the history of medicine and of the People's Republic of China (PRC), the author argues that it was not the central or provincial governments but rather local communes that led the effort to protect livestock from animal infectious diseases.

Dialectical Materialism Serves Voluntarist Productivism: The Epistemic Foundation of Lysenkoism in Socialist China and North Vietnam.

This essay asks why Chinese and North Vietnamese agricultural scientists in the 1950s and 1960s willingly adopted the Soviet agricultural sciences represented not only by agronomists Ivan Michurin and Trofim Lysenko but soil scientist Vasili Williams. The answer, I argue, is that they were fascinated by the promise of Soviet agrobiology that I conceptualize as a combination of dialectical materialism and voluntarist productivism: if one masters the interconnectivity between plants, microbes, organic and inorganic materials, and soil, one can overcome the given biological and environmental limits, manipulate and optimize the material flow, and ceaselessly maximize agricultural production. Engaging the historiographical debate about Lysenkoism-which has mostly paid attention to the Euro-American cases (the Soviet, Eastern European and even "capitalist" Western), genetic controversies, and geopolitical specificities of each locale-as a global phenomenon, I shed fresh light on the understudied Chinese and North Vietnamese cases, the intersection between Lysenko's theories and Williamsian soil science, and epistemic commonality across national differences.