This book investigates how and why relativity was introduced to China; it explores characteristics of the Chinese assimilation of relativity in a series of biographical studies of Chinese physicists; and it examines Chinese public reactions to Einstein and the theory of relativity between 1919 and 1979. Based on both published and unpublished primary source materials, the book demonstrates a significant Japanese influence on the introduction of relativity to China. Moreover, it argue that the absence in China of a tradition of research and education in classical physics was crucial in the reception of the relativity theory: it
helped lead to a quick and unanimously positive reception in the 1920s and 1930s. Finally, it shows that political and ideological interference in the name of dialectical materialism led to increasingly disparaging Prologue lic opinion on Einstein and relativity and eventually resulted in an organized criticism movement during the Cultural Revolution. Although this story focuses on one branch of theoretical physics, it exemplifies the survival struggle of basic theoretical science and the violent conflict between natural science and Marxist philosophy in twentiethcentury China.