Wan Zhaoyuan (Beijing Normal University), Secretary-General of the newly founded STS Committee, Chinese Society for the History of Science and Technology

Edited by: Mariana Pitta Lima
03/08/2026 | Report-backs

On 13 June 2026, more than 120 scholars from over 60 universities and research institutes across China gathered at Beijing Normal University (BNU) for the Second Symposium on the Disciplinary Construction and Frontier Issues of Science, Technology and Society (STS). The day carried a special significance: that afternoon, the Science, Technology and Society Committee of the Chinese Society for the History of Science and Technology (CSHST) was formally established — another milestone in the institutionalisation of STS in China.
 

STS comes of age in China

The founding has been several years in the making, reflecting a notable shift in the field’s standing in China. In 2024, China’s Ministry of Education recognised STS as a second-level graduate discipline under the first-level discipline “History of Science and Technology”; in 2025, the National Social Science Fund added it as an independent category for grant applications. Against this backdrop, an initiative launched in late 2024 by a group of scholars — and signed by more than sixty colleagues — received approval from the CSHST to establish a dedicated committee after due preparation. A first symposium at BNU in 2025, three STS panels at the society’s annual meeting, and a steadily growing membership paved the way for this year’s founding.

Welcomes and a keynote on global STS

The opening ceremony began with a welcome from Professor Zhou Zuoyu, Vice-Chair of the BNU University Council, who traced the university’s long tradition in the history and philosophy of science and framed the new Committee as both a continuation of that tradition and a fresh start. CSHST President Zhang Li followed with a historically minded reflection. She traced the field’s passage from “Science, Technology and Society” to “Science and Technology Studies” and its localisation in China, observing that the “science, technology and society” recognised within the National Social Science Fund framework overlaps considerably with — but does not fully coincide with — the academic STS tradition. She urged Chinese STS scholars to preserve the reflexive core of STS while cultivating the capacity to turn critique into constructive proposals — to live in the creative tension between critique and construction, and to serve as the “translators” and “think tanks” of our time.
 

Zhang Li addressing the conference [Image credit: Credits are listed collectively at the end of the report]

For an international audience, the most resonant presence was Wen-Hua Kuo, President of 4S, who crossed the Taiwan Strait to take part. In both his greeting and his keynote, “Diversity and Inheritance: 4S and Global STS,” Kuo reflected on the upcoming 50th anniversary of the 4S meeting — on the society’s internationalisation across organisational participation, research themes, and academic publishing, and asked how a global STS might hold pluralism and inheritance together, with East Asia very much in view. He warmly characterised STS’s spread across Chinese disciplines not as a dispersal of energy but as the making of new friends — unity in diversity.

The plenary brought together five more senior scholars. Wang Yangzong examined the “Chinese characteristics” of the Chinese scientific community—shaped a century ago by imported European and American models of the learned society, remade after 1949 as political criteria entered academic life, and strained since by bureaucratisation — and argued that rebuilding its academic culture is now inseparable from the task of becoming a self-reliant science and technology power. Liu Xiaoli offered a critical reading of Anil Seth’s “controlled hallucination” account of consciousness. Chen Fan argued for a “sinicisation of STS” through the socialisation of AI — that is, for an STS rooted in China's own social realities and a Marxist account of science, technology and society, yet internationally engaged. Liu Bing connected the historiography of science to science education. Yang Jian drew on case studies to rethink the modern history of science and technology in China through an STS lens. Seven parallel panels followed, with more than eighty papers spanning disciplinary paradigms and theory, education and practice, knowledge in the age of digital intelligence, the historiography of science, socially collaborative innovation, material culture, and cross-civilisational histories of scientific knowledge.

The founding itself took place in a closed-door meeting of registered members, and the election produced an executive team. Liu Xiaoting was elected Chair; Liu Yidong, Zhang Meifang, Tang Wenpei, and Jiang Che were elected Vice-Chairs; and Wan Zhaoyuan was elected Secretary-General, with three deputy secretaries-general nominated (Jiang Hongjun, Guan Yuzhen and Li Runhu). At its founding, the Committee consisted of registered members from more than 50 institutions across 18 provinces and regions — over 60% holding senior academic rank — drawn from the twin traditions of philosophy of science and history of science, as well as the broader currents of Chinese dialectics of nature and Marxist theory. A 271-member scholarly group and an official channel already keep the community in regular contact.

The election meeting also unveiled the Committee’s emblem. An atomic nucleus forms its outer ring and a microchip its centre — the signature sciences of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At its heart, a letter “T” shaped like ox horns stands for the force of technology, flanked and gently held in check by two “S”s representing the dimensions of science and society; the encircling lines almost close into a taiji ring, suggesting that technology must grow within the framework of scientific rigour and social responsibility, the three working in complementarity. The emblem even hides a pun — the ox (niu 牛) of those horns is also Chinese slang for “awesome,” a wish for the young field to go from strength to strength.
 

At the closing session, CSHST Standing Vice-President Wang Yangzong congratulated the Committee as having been “born at the right time,” expressing hope that it might one day grow into an independent national STS society. New Chair Liu Xiaoting spoke of an emerging “STS era,” describing STS as an open, integrative platform — moving from STS as research and as an interdiscipline toward STS as a shared platform — that bridges philosophical reflection and historical scholarship.

From the 2024 initiative to the 2025 symposium and this year’s founding, the Committee has travelled a road of patient consensus-building. As it begins its work, it does so looking outward, eager to connect Chinese STS with colleagues worldwide. We look forward to many conversations ahead.

With thanks to the 4S Backchannels editors. Photographs by the conference team consisting of Ding Hongwei, Zhang Chengye, Li Yiting, Li Yelin.