Chinese Science: a Flexible Response to the West?

Abstract

In this provocative synthesis, Ben Elman argues for the enduring significance of science, technology, and medicine in China from late imperial to modern times. Like other modern historians, he explicitly links abstract science with technologies for handling nature and the human body, and roots intellectual history in broader social trends. This is not a specialized history of science in China, but a world history of China with scientific characteristics. Anyone looking for a concise summary of the best recent scholarship on science in China should start here. Drawing heavily on his longer monograph, In Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550–1900, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), Elman surveys four major periods of scientific and technological development: the encounter with the Jesuits in the late sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, the lesser-known eighteenth century, the Protestant impact of the nineteenth century, and the period of selfstrengthening up through the aftermath of the Sino–Japanese war. He ranges over many fields of investigation, paying attention to astronomy, biology, botany, cartography, manufacturing, mathematics, medicine, and military technology. Most Chinese and Western readers probably still believe that, with a few exceptions, Confucian literati of the imperial age ignored the investigation of nature, and that China failed to initiate a scientific revolution because of this neglect. Elman avoids the unanswerable question of why China did not have the world’s first scientific revolution. Instead, he emphasizes active interaction by literati with the Westerners who brought modern science to China. They showed great curiosity East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal (2007) 1:143–145 DOI 10.1007/s12280-007-9006-5