Vernacular Industrialism in China: Local Innovation and Translated Technologies in the Making of a Cosmetics Empire by Eugenia Lean

Abstract

Reviewed by: Vernacular Industrialism in China: Local Innovation and Translated Technologies in the Making of a Cosmetics Empire by Eugenia Lean David Luesink (bio) Eugenia Lean. Vernacular Industrialism in China: Local Innovation and Translated Technologies in the Making of a Cosmetics Empire, 1900–1940. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. xi, 396 pp. Hardcover $65.00, isbn 978-0-231-19348-1. The history of science and technology has long been told as a tale of Euro-American ingenuity unlocking the secrets of nature. It was the English biochemist Joseph Needham who would break the ignorance of the Western scholarly world on this front, while also revealing an ever-expanding number of discoveries and scientific developments that happened first in China. Eugenia Lean has now further advanced our understanding of technological advancement by focusing on the work of a figure who in the early twentieth century innovated, invented, and grew rich while also sharing many of his ideas in do-it-yourself literature. Rather than seeing the early twentieth century as a transitional phase between tradition and modernity, Lean sees important trends that have continued from the Republican period to the present day where local mastery and adaptation of various global technologies and processes of industry have often been dismissed by Western scholars as either imperfect technology transfer or cheap knockoffs. Vernacular Industrialism in China uses the case study of an early twentieth-century small industrialist, writer, and editor, Chen Diexian (1879–1940), to argue that an “unapologetic” biographical approach to a single inventor and “tinkerer” in early twentieth-century China is warranted to tell us something about industrial modernity. Chen Diexian, better known as an author of “Mandarin Duck and Butterfly” escapist literature, was an inventor of consumer products as varied as chemical fire extinguishers, toothpowders, face powders, and pharmaceuticals who nurtured a do-it-yourself movement through his publications while also becoming wealthy from the sales of his publications and products. Eugenia Lean coins the term vernacular industrialism to describe the activities of Chen as a loose translation of xiao gongyi, a term which is sometimes translated as “craftsmanship” or “technical arts,” although Lean argues current [End Page 184] connotations of xiao gongyi do not effectively convey a full sense of what Chen and others were doing in the early twentieth century. By showing how Chen pursued industry and science in ways that made sense to an elite Neo-Confucian who struggled and succeeded in adapting to a world dominated by foreign capitalism, Eugenia Lean shows a clear precedence for China’s global rise as an industrial power in recent decades. The key to this was his tinkering: his inventing, experimenting, imitating, and improving everyday consumer products for the middle classes. Rather than considering a cultural tendency toward imitation as a bug for China, Lean shows it instead as a feature. The book is divided into three parts. The first is a single chapter about Chen Diexian’s earlier years in Hangzhou where he started his “gentlemanly experimentation,” the second explores the forms of public knowledge Chen disseminated in various publications between 1914 and 1927, and the third focuses on some of the consumer items Chen created and “tinkered” with between 1913 and 1942. Chen Diexian has been celebrated in popular Chinese works as being almost like a Chinese Edison who could also write fiction and poetry as easily as writing about chemistry and physics. As one account from his era claimed, “There is nothing he cannot do; he is even well educated in all fields of modern science.” Most crucially, Chen could also practice these sciences, and the products of his successful pharmaceutical company were “the result of experimentation” (p. 1). Lean’s history is less interested in hagiography than in how the life and work of Chen illustrates larger trends in the shift from a Neo-Confucian society where elite men valued only the mental work of reading and writing and becoming an official, to one where fortunes could be made by getting one’s hands dirty tinkering amongst craftsmen. Lean reveals how Chen Diexian popularized knowledge of chemistry in articles in the Ladies’ Journal, which told women how to produce their own makeup. In one...