Chinese Physicists' Construction of Straton (or Mao-particle) in the 1960s: the Chinese search for the structure of Hadrons under the guidance of Maoist philosophy

Particle physics developed rapidly between the 1950s and the 1960s. The discovery of new particles at that time left particle physicists with an urgent need to make classification of them, to figure out their underlying relations and to put forward new conceptual and theoretical models. This brought about the proposition of the well-known Sakata model, Eight-fold way and quark model. What is rarely known is that Chinese particle physicists independently put forward a structure model of hadrons——straton model in 1966 inspired by Mao Zedong’s philosophy. Mao Zedong explicitly supported Shoichi Sakata, a Japanese physicist, in applying materialistic dialectics to physics research, which influenced Chinese physicists in their study of particle physics. Starting in the early 1960s, Chinese particle physicists engaged in the theoretical research of elementary particles. From 1965 to 1966, they analyzed the experimental results and existing theories available to them, made a connection between their work and Mao Zedong’s philosophy and proposed the straton model. In July 1966, the straton model was presented at the Summer Physics Colloquium of the Peking Symposium. Unfortunately, scientific research in China soon came to a halt due to the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), the academic exchange between Chinese scientists and their foreign peers became even more difficult than before. The calculation results of the hadron model failed to be formally published in English as Chinese scientists had wanted. As a result, the straton model did not have the kind of influence upon the development of particle physics at the international level that these scientists had expected.