Redrawing China's Intellectual Map: Images of Science in Nineteenth-Century China

REDRAWING CHINA'S INTELLECTUAL MAP: IMAGES OF SCIENCE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY CHINA David C. Reynolds Conventional wisdom has it that China failed twice to adopt Western science and technology: first, when the Jesuits, beginning in the seventeenth century, brought knowledge of pre-Renaissance Western mathematics and astronomy to China; second, in the post-Taiping Rebellion period (1865-) when Western Protestant missionaries offered the Chinese knowledge of postRenaissance Western science and technology. These early attempts to bring science and technology to China floundered, in the conventional account, on the shoals of traditional culture and Confucian orthodoxy. Only the iconoclasm of the New Culture period (1915-1927) which discredited Chinese tradition and substituted science as the "functional equivalent" of Confucianism provided the cultural conditions necessary for the emergence of a nascent, but weak, scientific community in China.1 If these conventional accounts are correct in their argument that the formation of a scientific community and institutions of scientific research in China awaited the twentieth century,2 their explanations of the earlier "failures " are misleading. As recent research has demonstrated, many in the community of "evidential scholars" (k'ao-cheng) that developed in the lower Yangtse valley during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw science as a legitimate form of intellectual work.3 Other research has suggested "resonances " between traditional learning and modern science.4 If traditional culture and Confucian orthodoxy did not impede the scientific interests of many 1Goldman and Simon 1989; Baum 1982. 2Jonathan Porter (1982) argues that "by the late seventeenth century scientific activity in China evinced many characteristics of a continuous and systematic social activity." Nonetheless, as he points out, this nascent scientific community was at best ill-defined and fragile. Science "was not yet perceived as a form of knowledge having inherent goals" and "the social status of scientists remained imperfectly differentiated, and often linked to nonscientific activity." Only in the twentieth century did a fully professionalized community of scholars who self-consciously saw themselves as "scientists" emerge in China. See Buck 1980 and Reynolds 1986. 3Elman 1984:62-64, 79-85. 4Henderson 1980; Henderson 1986. Late Imperial China Vol. 12, No. 1 (June 1991): 27-61© by the Society for Qing Studies 27 28David C. Reynolds important 17th and 18th century scholars, other research strongly suggests that China's "failure" to undergo a scientific revolution may be as much the result of the inability of the Jesuits to introduce Copernican and Newtonian science as the results of any limitations imposed by "Confucianism."5 Paradoxically , China's "failure" in the pre-Taiping Rebellion period was, perhaps, more a Western failure than a Chinese failure. Like their counterparts in the pre-Taiping period many Chinese in the late Ch'ing were eager to see science as a legitimate interest for Chinese scholars. Their efforts, as this essay will demonstrate, succeeded in creating intellectual space for science in China.6 Traditional culture and Confucian orthodoxy did not impede the creation of that intellectual space. Rather, the very complexity and diversity of China's traditional culture allowed nineteenth century writers to adopt rhetorical strategies that provided a sense of legitimacy for science within the Chinese intellectual world. The rhetorical strategies adopted in post-Taiping writings on science can be seen as a part of the institutional construction of science in China. According to Thomas Gieryn, rather than viewing science as an institution as an objective social fact, an institutional contructivist approach to science sees science as socially constructed in that its "definitions, relationships, values, and goals are negotiated by ordinary people in ordinary settings."7 Like functionalist approaches to the institutionalization of science, social constructivist approaches stress the importance of differentiation. However, constructivism differs from functionalism in its "attention on actor's constructions of institutions like science, on what people mean when they use the words science, scientist, or scientific."8 This approach leads to a focus on "rhetorical accomplishments " : "Processes of differentiation are to be found in the actor's discursive efforts to draw 'maps' of their society that show overlapping, contiguous , or distanced institutional territories-and in their efforts to persuade others that this or that map is reality."9 Gieryn's application of an institutional contructivist approach to...