The Dawn of Science as Cultural Authority in China: Tianyanlun (On Heavenly Evolution) in the Post-1895 Debate over the Engagement with Western Civilization

Abstract

There is an intriguing puzzle to be found in the historiography of science in modern China: Yan Fu's 嚴復 (1854--1921) Tianyanlun 天演論 (On Heavenly Evolution), which was published in 1898 as the Chinese translation of Thomas Huxley's Evolution and Ethics (1893), is widely celebrated as the most influential book in modern Chinese intellectual history. And yet, this science-based book has received little,—if any,—credit in the history of science. Taking this puzzle as a clue, this article argues that On Heavenly Evolution constituted a historic breakthrough in a three-centuries-long struggle to win cultural authority for Western science in China, with the ultimate goal of persuading the Chinese to embrace Western civilization as a whole. The context within which On Heavenly Evolution played this pivotal role was the historical debate over the preservation or abandonment of China's quintessential teachings (jiao 教), which took place in the aftermath of China's catastrophic defeat in the first Sino-Japanese war of 1895. It is well-known that Yan Fu and Zhang Zhidong 張之洞 (1837--1909), the powerful architect of the New Policy Reform (1898--1912), held polarized positions in this debate over whether or not to abandon the most cherished institutions and ethical norms of Chinese civilization. What most scholars do not realize, however, is that these two towering figures based their positions on two opposing conceptions of Western science/technology: Following the strategy set up by Matteo Ricci (1552--1610) in the seventeenth century, Yan Fu fashioned Western science as Neo-Confucian gezhi 格致 (Investigation of Things to Acquire Knowledge) to win cultural authority for it, and thereby created a unique local conception of Western science as “Western gezhi” (xixue gezhi 西學格致). Vehemently rejecting Yan Fu's conception of “Western gezhi” and the resulting status of Western science as cultural authority, Zhang Zhidong created the notion of “Western mechanical arts” (xiyi 西藝) instead and promoted it as an official category in his reform agenda. By making visible their debate over the proper conception of Western science/technology, this article draws readers’ attention to the historic breakthrough moment when Western science became a major source of cultural authority in China. Along the way, it further argues that what was at stake in the debate over China's quintessential teachings—from Yan Fu's perspective,—was nothing less than the universality of “Western civilization” and therefore a wholesale adoption of it in China,—the very first time this radical idea was proposed in Chinese history. When On Heavenly Evolution—as a concrete manifestation of Yan's conception of “Western gezhi”—rose in importance to become the most influential book of modern Chinese thought, Western science finally succeeded in becoming the trusted foundation not only for the universalism of Western civilization, but at the same time also for the Neo-Confucian Way, while also paving the road for “Mr. Science” to exercise a previously unimaginable influence in twentieth-century China. Situating this Chinese debate in the context of the rise of the globally circulating conception of “Western science” in the late nineteenth Century, this article demonstrates the importance of investigating how non-Europeans embraced, challenged, and reconfigured the primacy of science relative to technology, which was taken for granted in that conception.