he opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing featured ancient China's four great inventions: the compass, printing press, paper and gunpowder. The lesson on display, as taught in classrooms across the country that today publishes the most research papers, is that Chinese innovation in science and technology changed the world. Yet less than a hundred years before, the Chinese philosopher Feng Youlan wrote the provocative essay 'Why China Has No Science' 1. The scholar-trained at Columbia University in New York City-argued that from antiquity, the nation's philosophical traditions and unique understanding of the human relationship to nature had prevented the spirit of scientific inquiry from taking root. Feng, like many others at the time and since, urged that science was the only salvation for a nation in precipitous decline. Placing the efforts to change the perceived lack of science in the context of China's turbulent modern history is key to understanding how the nation arrived at its current superpower state. The red thread that runs through China's past 150 years is its unwavering belief in science as the path to wealth and power. The entangled relationship between research and nationalism in China has obscured how this belief grew HISTORY Darwin wrote many letters to the editor of Nature p.36 SUSTAINABILITY Reservoirs offshore could help ease water shortage p.36 MENOPAUSE Women's health needs research, not a reframe p.34 PUBLIC HEALTH Face masks are no substitute for less air pollution p.29 How science saved China Shellen Wu traces the rise of the dominant force in science, in the second of a series of essays on the ways in which the past 150 years have shaped today's research system.
A new phase is in the offing. It will be manifested through an increase in interactions on the seas and on land between Western and Eastern cultures, between both groups of the most populated and productive regions on earth. Just as the situation now is of competition among the people of Europe, the signature of a not too distant future will be competition between all of Europe and East Asia.Ferdinand von Richthofen 1In the time since Richthofen traveled here, Jiaozhou has long since ceased to be ours. Zhou Shuren 2 LONG BEFORE A CURTAIN OF SMOG descended upon China's skylines, on September 5, 1868, the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen arrived in Shanghai on board the steamship Costarica. 3 On the basis of his travels over the next four years and seven expeditions, Richthofen coined the term Seidenstrasse (Silk Road); correctly hypothesized the origin of loess, the yellowish silt-like material covering much of North China; and described to the outside world vast deposits of coal in the Chinese interior. 4 Celebrated in the West as a pioneer of scientific exploration in China and vilified in China for opening the floodgates of imperialism, Richthofen left a legacy that remains contested to this day. In 1885, the Qing official Zhang Zhidong (1837-1909) wrote a lengthy memorial on the need for educational initiatives and the importation of technology from the West. After discussing the I would like to thank Ben Elman, Michael Gordin, and David Strand for their comments and suggestions on an earlier draft; my colleagues at the
Modern science and technology arose in the West after Galileo, but did not similarly arise in China. Was it the Yijing that stood in the way of Chinese scientific development?
It wasn't so long ago that histories of China's rocky transition to modernity featured a small and entirely male cast of characters. In the works of the first generation of American Sinologists, from John King Fairbank to his most famous students such as Joseph Levenson, a few men, from late Qing statesman Li Hongzhang 李鴻章 to reformers and revolutionaries like Kang Youwei 康有為, Sun Yatsen 孫中山, and Liang Qichao 梁啟超, loomed large over the narrative of the Chinese revolution. Into this lacuna Mary Rankin's rediscovery of the late Qing female martyr Qiu Jin 秋瑾 came as a thunderbolt. Her work opened up the possibility that perhaps the problem wasn't the absence of women in China's revolution but the failure of scholars to look for their contribution. Rankin's 1968 article on "The Tenacity of Tradition," and her subsequent book Early Chinese Revolutionaries paved the way for a far more nuanced and complicated new social history of modern China. 1 Rankin's pioneering work opened the door for the subsequent generations of Sinologists to attempt what had seemed impossible-to find women's voices among the dense forest of male literati writings. Susan Mann succeeded in this when she wrote about the talented women of the Zhang family, revealing lineages of women from literati families in the late imperial period. 2 Within the confines of Confucian notions of female virtue, these women exchanged poetry and letters among their network of female relatives. In the prolonged absence of husbands and fathers on distant official postings, they raised children, ran their households, and handled the family accounts, in
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