Communist China’s Take on Cosmology

   The words a proletarian dictatorship uses when it denounces a field of pure science:

Modern cosmology is "bourgeois cosmology.” It is “counterfeit cosmology” and “shows only the degree of depravity that is reached when the natural sciences fall into the hands of the rotten and depraved bourgeois class.”

The model of an expanding universe “seeks to establish that the capitalist system not only cannot be overcome but will continue indefinitely to expand.” 

The cosmos "has no mathematical or physical explanations, but it has a philosophical explanation"; "the proletariat has its own cosmic explanation"; "the proletariat will write its own new ‘On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies’ in new ‘Idea of a Universal History on a Cosmopolitical Plan.’'"

The author makes this observation about Mao-era socialism:

Mao-era state socialism rested on a "Holy Trinity" of despotism politics, a one-party dictatorship; in economics, a dictatorship of state planning: and in ideology, a dictatorship that resembled that of medieval church in Europe. Each of the three powers needed the other two. Marxist texts had the status of sacred religious texts. No challenge, however slight, of whatever kind, from whatever person, could be tolerated.

The author talks about how the medieval church in Europe adopted the geocentric version of cosmology even though this version was never in the Bible—it originated in ancient Greece. Once it was part of medieval Christian doctrine it became sacred and never to be questioned.

The author goes on:

So the ideological dictatorships of modern socialism and the medieval church had several things in common. They both saw themselves as authorities on cosmology; both adopted an outmoded cosmology as their unchallengeable model; and both used the tools of tyranny to block scientific progress. This helped me to understand that the problem with Communist rule over science was not just those tools of tyranny themselves but an ideology that in its very nature is opposed to the conditions science requires: free inquiry, a spirit of skepticism, and reliance on evidence.

Source: The Most Wanted Man in China. My Journey from Scientist to Enemy of the State (2016) by Fang Lizhi.