Chinese/American Physicists: A Transnational History

As part of a broader project on ``Chinese/American Scientists: Transnational Science during the Cold War and Beyond,'' this paper examines the movements of American-trained Chinese physicists following the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. While a majority of these physicists chose to stay in the US (the ``stayees''), a number went back to China in the 1950s (the ``returnees'') against many obstacles during the McCarthy era. After the reopening of US-China relations in the 1970s, the two groups joined hands in promoting China-US scientific and educational exchanges, leading eventually to the coming to the US of a new generation of Chinese physics students and the return to China of some of the original ``stayees.'' This transnational history of Chinese/American physicists aims to illustrate the nature and extent of the Americanization of international science and the internationalization of American science in the post-World War II era.