Ordering the social: History of the human sciences in modern China

Abstract

In The Order of Things (1966 [1970]), Michel Foucault unearths the discursive redistribution of the episteme underlying the process 'when man constituted him-self in Western culture as both that which must be conceived of and that which is to be known'.1 His investigation into the historical epistemology of what he called sciences humaines (a term that dates back at least to the 17th-century) has prompted historians of western science to dig deep in a growing body of literature on the history of the related disciplinary subjects.2 Two landmark volumes that have encapsulated the evolving historiography of the human sciences are Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences, 1870-1930 edited by Dorothy Ross (1994) and The Cambridge History of Science Volume 7: The Modern Social Sciences coedited by Theodore Porter and Dorothy Ross (2003).3 With the notable exception of one chapter in the latter volume, historical research on the sciences of social organization and human experience in China, unlike its western counterpart, has only begun to mature in recent years.4 This special issue pushes the field in new directions by highlighting the latest research of an international company of early career researchers. Whereas Foucault's later work on sexuality and power has invited many scholars to wrestle with its Eurocentric burdens, the omission of a parallel mode of historical inquiry for his work on the human sciences denotes precisely what this special issue aims to recalibrate.5 To achieve that goal, the following essays share an attention to the mutually generative relationship of politics and scientific inquiry in 20th-century China.John Feng's opening essay probes the science-politics nexus by focusing on the rise of a discipline in the scientific study of the state in early republican China. Building on the life of Lu Zhengxiang (1871-1949), China's Ambassador Extraordinary to The Hague Peace Conference, it reconstructs the early years of the Chinese Social and Political Science Association (CSPSA), a replica of the American Political Science Association, and analyzes the heated discussions of state-building in its official publication (in English), the Chinese Social and Political Science Review. Already in the final years of the Qing, Lu had submitted a memorial to Empress Dowager Cixi urging China to become more attuned to the new international order of law and constitutionalism. Lu's effort to modernize China through legal and constitutional reform culminated in his collaboration with Paul Reinsch to found the CSPSA in December 1915. The meanings of democracy, state sovereignty, international relations, law, politics, and other key terms in legal science carried significant weight in the visions of CSPSA members, most of whom were cultural elites educated in the west and thus fluent in English. Feng's essay captures an important episode in early 20th-century China during which science, culture, and politics intersected in the envisioning of a new social order that paved the way for the May Fourth Movement.Hsiao-pei Yen's meticulously researched essay extends the investigation of the role of international politics, especially in terms of the antonymous friction between imperialism and nationalism, in the development of republican-era Chinese science. Specifically, it traces the historical transformation of what Yen calls 'from paleoanthropology in China to Chinese paleoanthropology', or simply the Chinese indigenization of the internationally oriented scientific study of ancient human fossils. Yen provides a detailed account of the different archaeological expeditions conducted by scientists of various national origins in central Asia. Between the May Fourth Movement and the Japanese occupation periods, these international scientists acquainted themselves with one another and other like-minded Chinese scientists (who were, again, often fluent in European languages) in cosmopolitan Beijing. However, after their research agenda came to public attention, the foreign scientists were drawn into joint expeditions with Chinese scientists, such as the Sino-Swedish scientific expedition to northwestern China, in order to assure the Chinese that locally excavated materials were not exported out of China to serve the hegemonic ambition of European imperialism. …