[ China & Inner Asia, Table of Contents ]
[ Panels by World Area Main Menu ]
[ View the Timetable of Panels ]
Science, Popular Culture, and Everyday Life in Late Qing and Republican China
Organizer: Jing Tsu, Yale University
Chair: Ruth Rogaski, Vanderbilt University
Discussants: Ruth Rogaski, Vanderbilt University and Lydia H. Liu, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
For more than twenty years, the introduction of western science and the development of modern scientism in China have largely been examined as elitist and professional institutions of knowledge transfers. Taking a new approach, this panel examines the less well-defined borders of science, where it crosses into the consumption of cosmetology and hygiene, science fiction about the biological human, and theories about the relationship between telegraphs and the Chinese script. What was meant by “science” in late nineteenth-century and Republican China? Through what nexus did it enter into the perceptions of daily life and transform into a modernist vision? How was it popularized and circulated as a kind of knowledge that individuals can own as a convenience in modern life (telegraphy), practice as self-care (skin), and imagine as a new form of humanism (embryology)? Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this panel addresses these questions from the perspectives of cultural history, literature, cultural studies, and history of science. Each paper examines a different point of intersection between science and culture, analyzing manuals, technological treatises, missionary translations, newspapers, travelogues, serialized fiction, and textbooks. Rather than tracing the transmission of western science exclusively through textual translations, our panel examines the process of making science into practical sense in popular culture. As the speakers and commentators (Ruth Rogaski and Lydia Liu) will discuss, the modern understanding of scientism depended on a wide range of new forms of cultural innovations and individual empiricism that incorporated science into the perceptions of everyday life.
Surface Matters: Skin and Beauty in Modern Chinese Science and Consumer Culture
Eugenia Y. Lean, Columbia University
In early twentieth century China, the surface of one’s body suddenly came to demand elucidation. Skin became a surface to be perfected. Medical columns in newspapers prescribed ways of treating pimples, warts, and acne, and illuminated the diseased epidermis as something that could be medicated and cured. Journal articles on health and beauty (jianmei) identified a blemished complexion as something that could be beautified. Advertisements sold soap, face cream, and tonics and in the process, promised the feel of glowing, supple, perfect skin. This paper seeks to show how this newfound public concern with skin and its perfectibility needs to be understood within the context of the rise of modernist visions of designing a perfect world (and body). This emphasis on the perfectibility of the body’s surface can be traced back to turn of the century missionary textbooks and health tracts that intimately linked hygienic improvement to spiritual salvation. However, it was not really until the rise of a modern urban consumer culture that the understanding of the skin as an object of beauty and potential perfection became widespread. Not merely popularizing a biomedical vision of the bounded body and radically shaping bodily practices, the popular discourse on the pursuit of an ideal complexion also served to narrate the promises of modern science as well as the buoyant optimism of China’s new consumer culture. In an era of national disintegration, social decay, and perilous markets, these promises of surface perfection tapped into deep and profound cultural anxieties.
Telegraph, Mechanical Printing, and the Question of Written Chinese at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Yue Meng, University of Toronto, Canada
At the turn of the twentieth century, telegraphy and mechanical printing came to play crucial roles in the transformation of Chinese culture. . Both the telegraph and mechanical printing, however, had an uneasy relationship with the Chinese written language. Neither telegraphing nor mechanical printing in Chinese had ever been seen as much of a success. Is their unsatisfactory development due to the difficulty of Chinese language or ineptness of modern science and technology? This paper seeks to re-examine the problematic history of telegraphy and printing media in China by looking into telegraphic code books, newspapers, serialized fictions, as well as historical writings about Chinese language published in and outside China. The paper illuminates specific “difficulties” of applying Chinese language to modern media technology. It then investigates the cultural and political issues at stake. It also examines how different historical and cultural subjects tackle with these issues. Both telegraphy and mechanical printing were put to use in China by Europeans at the height of Western nationalism. In what ways were these European commercial and scientific ventures in telegraphy and printing connected with the ongoing cultural process of “containing” Chinese influence back home? Conversely, in China, the “uncontainable” aspect of writings continued and generated forms of “de-containment” and “counter-telegraphy.” To what extent did these forms foretell a counter-history of media technology?
Embryos, Ideals, and Humanism in Early Twentieth-Century China
Jing Tsu, Yale University
Throughout the twentieth century, the question of humanism continually returned to center stage in intellectual discussions. Whether used as a defense or critique, Confucian humanism provided a framework from which to launch discussions on western empiricism, scientific objectivity, and mechanistic views of the social world. This paper, however, looks at humanism as a radically different concept transformed by the concomitant philosophical and intellectual turn to scientism in early twentieth century China. Humanism, I argue, was an inquiry into what it meant to be not only the ethical subject but also the biological human. This transformation was not only taking place in what we now recognize as modern scientism. The distinction between what was and was not science at the time largely depended on how scientific knowledge was circulated by amateurs and writers who propagated their imaginative ideas about “science” to a general populace across different cultural terrains. Intellectuals’ increasing familiarization with western biological sciences since the mid-nineteenth century created a new venue for humanist sensibilities that expressed itself in terms of guidelines for new literature, translated science fantasy, and a new idealization of the human that is visualized through biological and evolutionary developments. My discussion will focus on the idea of the “human sprout” (renya). I will be discussing the works of Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren, German zoologist Ernst Haeckel, and the multilingual translations of American woman writer Louise Jackson Strong’s “An Unscientific Story.”