Unearthing the Nation: Modern Geology and Nationalism in Republican China by Grace Yen Shen (review)

From antiquity onward, Confucian literati shaped and dominated Chinese knowledge of the empire. In Unearthing the Nation, which focuses on the period from 1900 to 1949, Grace Yen Shen argues that geologists and then geological institutions gradually supplanted those inherited historical and literary accounts of China with scientific theories and data based on fieldwork. In the process, Shen maintains, they reimagined China, helped to reassert Chinese sovereignty, and established themselves and their organizations as national models of professionalism, scientific practice, and patriotism. For these achievements, the geological community must be added to the growing list of successful Republican-era governmental and nongovernmental institutions identified by recent historical scholarship.

Geology was a new science in the nineteenth century, but it quickly established its value to government and industry. During China’s Self-Strengthening Movement (1860–95), the first government-led deployment of Western science and technology, the Qing (1644–1912) government hired more than fifty Western geologists, including the Prussian Ferdinand von Richthofen. However, Western (and eventually Japanese) imperialists rapidly began to use the benefits of these discoveries to undermine Chinese sovereignty; Richthofen, for instance, discovered the vast Kaiping coal deposits, but through the intervention of Herbert Hoover, they ended up in foreign hands after the Boxer Rebellion. Similarly, Richthofen’s research led Bismarck to open a “northern Hong Kong” at Qingdao.

The world’s first Geological Society was founded in Britain in 1807. Japan established its Geological Survey in 1882 and a Research Institute of Geology in 1893. Already in 1903–04, the U.S. Geological Survey (est. 1879) began active research in China by building on Richtofen’s discoveries. The Chinese, now eager to compete with the imperialists for understanding and control of China’s resources, initially had few alternatives to overseas study of geology. And, while abroad, they usually had little choice but to inhale the national paradigms of their professors, which often neglected study of China, or studied it only as a precursor to imperialist exploitation.

Organized into five substantive chapters, the book’s narrative structure follows four individuals—Zhang Hong-zhao, Ding Wenjiang (V. K. Ting), Weng Wenhao (W. H. Wong), and Li Siguang (J. S. Lee)—and the various institutions they ran in pursuit of an intellectually muscular, scientific, China-centered geology. In the last days of the Chinese empire and the early ones of the first republic, all were educated abroad (in Tokyo, Glasgow, Louvain, and Birmingham respectively). Upon returning to China, all dominated Chinese geology down to 1949 and (in the case of Li) beyond. In keeping with the book’s subtitle, by drawing on contemporary scientific publications, broader opinion-centered journals, personal writings, archives in North America and China, and current scholarship, Shen shows that the challenge for these four and others went beyond mere disciplinary development. They sought to use fieldwork to create both better geological understanding and improved Chinese citizens.

In 1912, a year after China’s Republican revolution, Zhang Hongzhao proposed the establishment of a Chinese geological society. The following year, Ding Wenjiang managed to create the Geological Survey of China (GSC), a research organization loosely connected to the new government that employed international researchers such as J. G. Andersson (former director of the Geological Survey of Sweden) while training native geologists to use China as their laboratory. In 1919, this latter responsibility was passed to Beijing University, soon said to have the best geology program in the world outside the United States.

In 1922, a non-governmental Geological Society of China appeared, sponsored by the GSC and guided by Zhang Hongzhao. The first non-medical scientific association established by Chinese, it advanced recognition of Chinese geological knowledge through international exchanges and scholarly publications. Among those involved were Canadian Davidson Black of the Rockefeller-funded Peking Union Medical College; Black leveraged Rockefeller finances for a Cenozoic Laboratory to support the Peking Man excavation. The government-run, Academia Sinica–affiliated Research Institute of Geology...