ABSTRACT
In 1959, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) celebrated its tenth anniversary. For this occasion, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) compiled a series of documents called Chinese Science in the Past Decade. Apart from listing new results and highlighting the quantitative growth of Chinese research infrastructure since 1949, these books also triumphantly reviewed the political and ideological transformation of each individual discipline. The volume on mathematics reflected the difficulty of this process in such an abstract field, traditionally focused on finding and proving true theorems in order to gain academic recognition. These difficulties were, however, presented as a thing of the past. Transformation of mathematics had by this time been achieved; it would now reliably fulfil its social function and assist in socialist construction, promised the preface to the volume, thanks to the enthusiastic identification with the goals of socialism by every individual mathematician:
What shall I do in this period of astonishingly great transformation, facing the present infinitely exalting state of our country? This is a question every mathematical worker unwilling to fall behind inevitably has to consider. Searching for a way to make mathematics integrated with the production practice of socialist construction has thus become everyone’s urgent requirement.
