Remediating Labor: Hand Replantation and the Technopolitics of Surgery in Socialist China

This article examines the emergence of hand replantation surgery in socialist China to rethink the relationship between industrialization, medicine, and Cold War technopolitics. Developed in response to rising workplace amputations during the Great Leap Forward, hand replantation became more than a surgical technique confined to the operating room. Drawing on medical journals, propaganda materials, and municipal archives, the article argues that replantation functioned as a "remediating" practice that repaired injured bodies while mediating the social ruptures of accelerated industrialization. Surgeons, workers, transportation systems, and improvised materials formed "chains of rescue" linking bodily trauma to socialist ideals of labor protection and collective mobilization. Hand replantation also crossed geopolitical divides-shifting from the Sino-Soviet split to Third World medical aid and Sino-U.S. scientific exchange. By tracing surgery across bodily, social, and geopolitical scales, the article argues that technopolitics emerged through situated technical practices as much as through state systems and ideology.