Reviewed by: Unearthing the Nation: Modern Geology and Nationalism in Republican China by Grace Yen Shen Lijing Jiang Shen, Grace Yen. Unearthing the Nation: Modern Geology and Nationalism in Republican China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 309 pp. $45.00 (cloth), $36.00 (ebook). Unearthing the Nation provides a lucid account of the uneasy development of modern Chinese geology within China and the discipline’s shifting priorities before 1949. Weaving together scientific literature, biographical materials, and institutional records, Grace Yen Shen shows the complex ways through which Chinese geologists conceived of and represented China as an object for loyalty or as an object for study, depending on their evolving scientific goals and political orientations. In her careful analysis, Shen offers the novel interpretation that internationalizing national science and China’s scientific community was a crucial strategy for promoting domestic geology in 1920s and 1930s China. She also argues that continued development during the Second Sino-Japanese War surprisingly consolidated earlier gains in Chinese geological independence and scaled up the practice of geological surveys despite the harsh conditions of the time. Recently, the question of how native development of science interplayed with Chinese nationalism and contributed to global science has been the topic of several edited volumes as well as monographs focusing on particular disciplines such as biology and paleoanthropology.4 Shen’s book, in this context, is a long-awaited contribution that covers the development of modern geology in China. Perhaps more importantly, the book engages long-lasting questions such as what was nationhood in Republican China and how it related to science at a time when an uncontroversial, centralizing state regime had not been formed. Shen’s answer echoes the voices of Chinese geologists, a group of scientists whose profession dealt with the land itself. By doing so, the author avoids the troubled definition of Chinese nationhood and, instead, clearly depicts how Chinese geologists used the term “China” in flexible and “enabling” ways to justify a domestic science independent from foreign or political manipulation, to argue for the importance of fieldwork, and eventually to motivate projects on petroleum prospecting during the war. These depictions bring us back to an epistemology of the nation held by real scientists and was historically in flux. For geologists, China sometimes denoted the state, but more often, it was about the physical structure of the land, its history, and territory. In addition to this central focus, Shen’s rich historical narrative shows how geologists improvised with material, finance, and pedagogy to promote geology in concrete local and historical conditions. Chapter 1 introduces, with broad strokes, how attention to the structure and resource distribution of the land shifted from evidential studies and compilations of gazetteers in the seventeenth century to an urgent call for geological studies about Chinese land voiced by patriots such as Gu Lang and Zhou Shuren by the early twentieth century. These shifts took place in parallel with the advance of imperial powers that continued to encroach on Chinese natural resources. As foreign studies about Chinese geography and geology multiplied, Chinese intellectuals realized that an essential prerequisite to claiming real ownership of the land was to grasp modern geological knowledge about it. This wake-up call served as motivation for the first generation of geological students to study abroad. After these Chinese geologists returned from abroad, they framed fieldwork as a form of labor that could reform Confucian intellectual ideals and facilitate a collective renewal of the nation through changing its major intellectual method. Chapter 2 introduces the geologists central to the rest of the book: Zhang Hongzhao, Ding Wenjiang, Weng Wenhao, and Li Siguang, who were trained in Japan, Scotland, Belgium, and England, respectively. In 1913, Zhang established a Geological School at Peking University, which Weng and Ding joined the next year. They promoted fieldwork as a new form of intellectual habit of mind and body while training a corps of geological researchers and developing a thriving school of geology by the mid-1920s. Chapter 3 depicts the cosmopolitan ethos of geological developments in the 1920s. The steady growth of the Geological School led to the establishment of its own survey, its journal, the Bulletin of the...