Abstract
Chen Da was one of the foremost sociologists of China from the 1920s to the 1940s. His intellectual habitus took shape from the long crisis that defined Chinese intellectual life from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries, a period of continuous imperial assault on Chinese sovereignty. As China integrated into the capitalist world-system, neo-Confucian structures of knowledge came into question. Intellectuals took up sociology to guide China’s transition from an empire to a nation-state. Through his studies on labor, migration, and population, Chen Da contributed to the institutionalization of sociology in China. Chen sought to craft a theory of Chinese development that followed universal trajectories of progress but was also attuned to the complexity of Chinese society on the ground. Through his efforts to indigenize sociology, Chen developed a non-Marxist historical materialism, a deterritorialized and pluralistic conceptualization of China as a nation, and a theory of eugenic transformation centered on the concept of “mode of living.” The questions which Chen Da confronted are emblematic of the predicament faced by Chinese social scientists today, who again struggle with the dynamics of a deterritorialzied “Greater China,” rising social fragmentation, and refigured eugenic discourses and policies that aim to craft the Chinese people into ideal national subjects fit for post-socialist development.
Highlights
This journal is published by the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh as part of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press
Chen’s decision to stay was not an avowal of Communist revolutionary politics. He recognized that his intellectual project to use sociology to guide nation-making was no longer possible under the Guomindang party-state, which prioritized its own survival over the progress of the people and the nation
A habitus of crisis took root and redefined intellectual life, transforming knowledge production into a political act defined in relation to the conjoined struggles of nation-making and securing China’s sovereignty by ensuring the Chinese people’s survival as a nation, race and culture
Summary
This journal is published by the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh as part of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Drawing on Lamarckian ideas that improving the environmental conditions of the people could secure racial and national progress, Chen Da identified Chinese populations, cultural traits, and modes of living to formulate particular Chinese trajectories of eugenic development within a broader global modernity.
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