Breeding New Knowledge at Home: The Case of the Albanian Olive Friendship Tree in China

Abstract

This article uses the case of the Sino-Albanian Friendship Trees to examine the significance and the limits of transnational scientific exchange in China during the 1960s and 1970s. In 1964, Albania gave ten thousand olive trees to China as a symbol of the eternal friendship of the Chinese and Albanian people; it was then up to Chinese agricultural scientists and farmers to find suitable means to propagate and cultivate them. The author finds that, though the olive trees served as symbols of international friendship and scientific exchange, knowledge about olive trees produced and circulated in the PRC reflected science in context (that is, science within the national-level political context of 1960s–1970s China) more than knowledge in transit (that is, the transnational circulation of knowledge). The importation of olive trees from Albania ended up offering a new application for Chinese agricultural knowledge and for quintessentially “Cultural Revolution”-era systems of knowledge production and circulation.