Chien Shiung Wu and the 20th-century Chinese Scientific Diaspora
Alongside my work in philosophy of physics, I pursue a side project: an intellectual biography of physicist Chien-Shiung Wu. The project situates Wu’s scientific contributions within Cold War science, Asian migration, and the institutional struggles of women and minority physicists in the 20th century US. This research contributes to feminist standpoint theory and to global histories of twentieth-century physics. I plan to expand this into a book-length study of Chinese diaspora scientists' migration to and from the US, tracing both the postwar shift toward "big science" and today's "reverse brain drain."
I first became interested in Wu while studying philosophy and physics at Columbia University, where she worked from the Manhattan Project years until her retirement. My early archival trips were self-funded and often planned around other travel opportunities. Over time, I have collected archival materials from Columbia, UC Berkeley, Caltech, and Smith College, as well as from museums in Taicang, Shanghai, and Nanjing. These sources are complemented by oral history interviews with Wu's former students and colleagues. My 2025 archival research was partially supported by a travel award from the International Institute at UC San Diego.
I am developing this page as a place to invite interdisciplinary conversations and collaborations. If you are a Chinese diaspora scientist and open to being interviewed, please feel free to contact me.
Photo Davis Heka, courtesy of AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archvies
Who is Chien Shiung Wu 吴健雄?
Chien-Shiung Wu was one of the most important experimental physicists of the 20th century. Her contributions ranged from wartime research on nuclear fission, to pioneering experiments on quantum entanglement, and to the cobalt-60 experiment that overturned parity conservation. She was celebrated as the "First Lady of Physics" for good reason: she was the first woman to join the physics faculty at Princeton, the first female physics professor to secure tenure at Columbia, the only Chinese scientist invited to participate in the Manhattan Project, and the first woman to serve as president of the American Physical Society (APS). Yet Wu's career was also shaped by exclusion: she was denied the Nobel Prize in 1957, faced systemic barriers to tenure and equal pay at Columbia University, and endured suspicion as a Chinese immigrant during the McCarthy era. Her story reveals how postwar physics was shaped by Cold War politics, gender hierarchies, and immigration policies.
Wu's contributions to physics are relatively well-documented, but the socio-political contexts in which she achieved these milestones remain underexplored. These contexts also gave rise to her remarkable, yet often overlooked, activism. In my project, I aim to uncover those socio-political realities, focusing especially on the challenges she faced as a woman scientist and a Chinese immigrant navigating life in 20th-century America.
Why Chinese Scientific Diaspora?
The narrative of Chinese diaspora scientists — those born in China but working abroad — remains mysterious to me. Their intellectual contributions have been globally significant yet historically underacknowledged. The Jewish scientific diaspora, often exemplified by figures such as Einstein, has been more visible in histories of 20th-century science, celebrated for institutional transformations (e.g., Princeton’s IAS, Los Alamos). By contrast, the Chinese diaspora reveals a different logic: not a celebrated exile but an ambivalent non-belonging. These scientists were simultaneously instrumentalized and distrusted by both their home and foreign countries, their mobility constrained by racialized immigration policy and Cold War suspicion.
I examine how postwar "big science," Cold War politics, and immigration regimes shaped the trajectories of Chinese diaspora scientists — and what historical lessons they offer in light of today's so-called "reverse brain drain" from the U.S. Whereas most accounts of scientific diaspora emphasize knowledge transfer and refugee networks, the Chinese case was fractured by ideological suspicion on both sides: McCarthyism in the U.S. and nationalism in the PRC. To understand the postwar globalization of physics, we need a model of diasporic science that extends beyond exile and refuge to include surveillance, mistrust, and divided belonging.
Chien-Shiung Wu was born in Liuhe in May 1912, just months after the Xinhai Revolution ended the Qing dynasty. Wu's father, Wu Zhong-Yi, a revolutionary and feminist, celebrated her birth and vowed to found a girls' school in their town — a promise that shaped her early education.
Image on the left: a recent photo of Wu's hometown, Liuhe (浏河), an old river port in southern Jiangsu, known for its maritime traditions. The Lu Cao River runs through its center, crossed by six stone bridges linking Ming- and Qing-era houses (originally with wooden structure). Along its quiet banks — "homes sleeping by the river pillow" ("人家尽枕河") — Wu's father founded the town's first girls' school, Ming-De (明德) School, after the fall of the Qing dynasty.
Parity Violation: a "Chinese Revolution" in Physics
Wolfgang Pauli once described the discovery of parity violation as a "Chinese revolution" in physics. The phrase was apt in more ways than he realized. The experiment that overturned one of the most cherished symmetries in physics emerged from a diasporic network of Chinese scientists — Chien-Shiung Wu, Tsung-Dao Lee, and Chen-Ning Yang — whose careers were shaped by the political upheavals dividing mid-century China and the U.S. All three left China during the Republican era, and when the Communist Party came to power in 1949, they chose to remain in America. During the McCarthy years, while their friend Qian Xuesen was expelled as a suspected communist, Wu, Lee, and Yang survived and transformed American physics from within. Their "revolution" was not only conceptual but diasporic. Rethinking parity violation in these terms reveals postwar physics as a circulation of displaced actors whose mobility, enforced or chosen, reconfigured the epistemic geography of modern physics.
In October 1957, Wu was lecturing in upstate New York when she received a call from J. Robert Oppenheimer. He waited on the line until Wu finished speaking, then broke the news: Lee and Yang had won the Nobel Prize. What Wu said in reply is unknown. That she was both pleased and disappointed is almost certain. Oppenheimer later hosted a banquet at Princeton to honor Wu, Lee, and Yang, seating Wu beside him to emphasize her role in the discovery. In the years that followed, she came to exemplify what historian Margaret Rossiter later termed the Matilda effect — the systematic erasure or downgrading of women's scientific achievements.
Image on the right: A hand-drawn card that Wu kept (Southeast University, Nanjing). The author remains unidentified. Possibly Oppenheimer?
The Invisible Labor in Science
Just as feminist scholars have shown that emotional labor and domestic work are made invisible, the administrative and activist labor that sustains scientific institutions is systematically effaced from the history of science. I hope to use Chien-Shiung Wu's career not as a biographical end in itself but as a lens for rethinking the historiography of postwar American physics. By situating Wu’s activist work within the overlapping contexts of the Civil Rights Movement, the feminist movement, and postwar "big science," I argue that what is often treated as peripheral—administrative labor, equity advocacy, and institutional reform—was in fact constitutive of the scientific enterprise. In contrast to the celebrification of figures such as Qian Xuesen (c.f. Geppert and Liu 2025), Wu’s relative invisibility reveals how certain labor in science have been systematically ignored from the history of modern physics.
Image on the left: One of many tables Wu compiled as part of Columbia's 1972 affirmative action program (Columbia University Archives), comparing demographic and salary disparities across departments and peer institutions.