Abstract
The Elephant and the Dragon in Contemporary Life Sciences begins with the notorious scandal of a CRISPR gene-edited baby, in which the Chinese biophysicist Jiankui He ‘announced the birth of the world’s first twin girls with edited genomes’ (p. 2). Indeed, it is easy to attribute such a scandal to stereotypes of China—and most Southern countries, including India—as ‘hotbed[s] for fraudsters and rogue scientists’ (p. 1). However, Joy Y. Zhang and Sahili Datta Burton, through an excavation of more details, problematise the case; for example: (a) domestic scientists and bioethicists, just like their global/western counterparts, condemned He’s practice immediately, (b) He was genuinely inspired by the western scientific spirit to move science forward and (c) the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing, dominated by western scientific elites, adopted double standards that criticise He’s practice but meanwhile keep the ‘Pandora’s box open’ (p. 3).
Starting from this case, Zhang and Burton laid the foundation for the decolonisation of global science governance. According to them, this initiative not only involves understanding the vertical power structure of coloniality and its influence in socio-political life, but it also aims at ‘counter[ing] epistemic power balances’ in contemporary global science (p. 8). To achieve this aim, the authors call for ‘radical thinking of how we govern, as a collective, and in recognition of heterogeneous, contingent, dialogical and situated nature of contemporary science practice’ (p. 9).
Specifically, the authors analyse the cases of China’s and India’s struggles in the area of life science through the analytical framework of ‘national habitus’ and critical events. National habitus, without essentialising normative or static national characteristics, refers to ‘durable and transposable dispositions of scientific systems within a national jurisdiction’ (p. 14). It is shaped by the cumulative experience of different China/India-related actors in global science, and it provides the schemata for actors’ attitudes, strategies and practices in facing ongoing and future encounters in the field. The shape and effect of such national habitus, they argue, can be found by investigating the critical events, including major scientific breakthroughs and controversies, that ‘shape the course of China’s and India’s domestic discussions on science development’ (p. 14).
Based on the theoretical and analytical foundation laid in Chapter 1, a substantial part of the book treats China and India not only as dragons, the emerging force of excellence, but also as elephants, the latecomers, followers and subverters of the normative landscape of global science.
Zhang and Burton mainly address three dimensions of cooperation and tensions between China, India and their western counterparts: first, between domestic actors within China and India; second, between domestic actors in China/India and global/western actors and third, between Chinese and Indian actors. Building upon these interlaced and dialogical relations, interactions, tensions and inequalities, the authors argue for a need to rethink global science governance from both the Global North and the Global South so as to decolonise it.
Chapter 2 is an overview of the trajectories that show how China and India pursue their own modernisation and globalisation in relation to the rest of the world, as well as the tensions they encounter in this process, especially in the area of science. Such tensions include the subaltern anxieties shared by China and India, their stigmatisation as a hotbed of poor scientific practice resulting from rapid scientific development and the unfair attitudes and treatment they receive from their Western counterparts. All of these serve as a background for their exploration of the national habitus in the field of global science.
Chapters 3 and 4 discuss the national habitus, critical events and tensions in the development of life science in China and India. These two countries have different trajectories and strategies to develop life science. However, they face similar challenges, including ‘domestic disparities, chronic deficiencies in ethical oversight, and increasing entrepreneurship in science’ (p. 16), and they present similar challenges to the Western-centric status quo of global science: ‘Who could do science?’ (p. 18). In the case of China, major government policy initiatives and critical events— including China’s joining of Human Genome Project (HGP), hybrid embryo research, the Golden Rice controversy and the operation of the International Association of Neurorestoration—together reveal the ambivalence of different Chinese actors towards struggles for domestic and international recognition, but, meanwhile, they also result in the formulation of alternative mechanisms of validating scientific knowledge.
As for India, the authors analysed the cases of the Bt brinjal controversies, stem cell therapies and the fifth national science, technology and innovation policy. These critical events show how Indian actors navigate within the dialectic of self-sufficiency and global reliance. They also show how the development of life science in India is both fuelled and trapped by the discursive juxtaposition of imaginaries and practices of the scientific elites and the masses, and of the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’.
While Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the domestic situations of China and India as well as their respective interactions with the world/West, Chapter 5 covers the co-dependence and rivalry between the two. The authors highlight the influence of leftist science populism typical in the countries of the Global South through the case of the COVID vaccine. While China adopted a strategy of independently inventing its own vaccine and calumniating West-invented vaccines, India struggled to occupy and claim an important and recognised position within the existing West-dominated vaccine value chain. Despite these efforts, however, such strategies suffered from common setbacks due to the lack of soft power and, as such, as the book argues, will hinder South–South collaboration in the life sciences. The questions of soft power and South–South collaboration are the two keys to decolonisation of global science.
Chapter 6, the end of the book, urges scholars, practitioners and policymakers to think about the issue of ‘what global science will have been’ (p. 153). To answer this question, Zhang and Burton call for attention to the ‘time’ ‘place’ and ‘people’ of global science. Regarding time, while the old power imbalance caused by colonialism always persists, the rapid development of the third world starts to subvert the existing landscape of global science and call for a paradigm shift in global science governance. As for place, the positions and habitus of actors located within or related to emerging global scientific players such as China and India need more critical investigation. For people, science governance should always be conducted based on the understanding of ‘real-world reflections and negotiations over the question of whom science is for’ (p. 158). The authors thus call for attention to the current power struggles and resource imbalances that will both stimulate and confine emerging sciences in the future (p. 18).
The Elephant and the Dragon in Contemporary Life Sciences is a timely work armed with an innovative analytical framework. Under the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the global inequality and power imbalance in science, the interconnectedness of the world and the need for a balanced global circulation of scientific development are never so clearly demonstrated. The book, through many case studies related to and beyond the pandemic, urges readers to think about the roles of various kinds of actors in the Global South in shaping science and the human future. Through the analytical framework of national habitus and critical events, the authors seize and critically reflect upon the most representative characteristics of the two countries in relation to global science governance and the milestones in their interactions and confrontations with their Western counterparts.