The Science Society and Development of Science in China

In 1908, the U.S. congress approved of President Theodore Roosevelt's proposal that a certain portion of the U.S. Boxer Indemnity Fund (money China owed to the U.S. as a result of the destruction of American lives and property during the Boxer Uprising, a total of $25 million for the U.S.) be returned to China for educational purposes so that China could adapt itself to modern conditions. Almost $12 million was returned to China, of which a significant portion was applied to the establishment of a preparatory college for sending Chinese students to study in the United States. Tsing Hua College, the name of the preparatory college, was opened in 1911, and offered the first two years of college courses, mostly taught in English. Enrollment was based on competitive nationwide examinations, of which English was an important component. The plan was to send 100 Chinese students to finish the last two years of college in the U.S. from 1909 to 1913, and after 1913, a minimum of 50 students to the U.S. every year. The actual number of students sent to the U.S. did not always reach 100 in the early years, 50 in 1909, and 70 in 1910, and 59 presumably in 1911.* In 1924, a new resolution passed the U.S. Congress whereby the remainder of the Boxer indemnity, slightly over $6 million, would be applied for educational and cultural purposes in China.** Tsing Hua College eventually transformed into a four year college with graduate institutes in 1925, and became one of the most preeminent universities in China. Nicknamed the "cradle of engineers" (since after the Communist takeover in 1949, it was reorganized into an engineering university) and China's MIT, it has produced a large number of top Chinese Communist leaders, including Hu Jintao, president of the People's Republic of China since 2003. The Boxer Indemnity Fund remitted by the U.S. to China in 1908 and 1924 enabled hundreds of Chinese students to travel and study in the United States, and many of them became leading Chinese scholars. Hu Shi, who studied at Columbia University, became one of the leading members of the New Culture Movement, later China's ambassador to the U.S. Zhao Yuanren, a Ph.D. from Harvard University, became a top Chinese linguist, Zhu Kezhen, who went on to become one of China's most famous meteorologists, Bing Zhi, who became a leading botanist, and Qian Xuesen, who was instrumental in building China's first atomic bomb in the 1960s. The Boxer Indemnity Fund contributed to the increase of Chinese students in the U.S., from about 80 in 1899 to 800 in 1911.*** Between 1911 and 1925, a total of 852 students were sent to study in the U.S. on Boxer Indemnity funding, of whom 42 were women.* For most of the Chinese students studying in the U.S., their initial goal was usually salvation of China through practical learning. Thus many of them initially majored in agriculture, and switched to other subjects of learning (philosophy, linguistics, etc.) only later on. Even for those who later majored in the Humanities, science remained an important topic for them, and China's salvation, for them, ultimately lay in science and scientific methods. Therefore the establishment of the Science Society in the U.S. in 1914. The background of the Science Society was the world in war, and China under the rule of Yuan Shikai. The Nationalists had just failed in their "Second Revolution" to overthrow Yuan's rule, and Sun Yatsen, the Nationalist leader, had fled to Japan for temporary recuperation. In the following year, the New Youth magazine would debut in Shanghai, its predecessor being the Tiger magazine founded by Chinese students in Japan. National salvation, through the dissemination of ideas and the mass media (magazines, newspapers) became an increasingly important means in the republican era, and dozens of newspapers and magazines with nationwide circulation appeared in the 1910s and 1920s. The control of mass media and public opinion became increasingly important for Chinese intellectuals as they were increasingly alienated from the warlord governments and had little or no control over national politics. The turn to the control of culture, and the subsequent New Culture movement were their way of exercising the power of the Chinese scholar when political involvement was almost impossible. Still, the control of cultural movements, the establishment of science and other societies, already showed a significant move forward for the Chinese intellectuals in terms of the freedom of speech, compared with the Qing times, when almost all forms of civil organizations had to be conducted in secrecy (secret societies) and public opinion often existed only in its most extreme form: peasant uprisings against government corruption or overtaxation. The article we are reading here, on the establishment of the Science Society in China, a prestigious society that exerted a tremendous influence on Chinese society through a group of influential Chinese scientists, their publication Kexue (Science) and the patronage of the society by financial institutions such as the China Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Culture, created to govern the distribution of the American remitted Boxer Indemnity Fund after 1924, shows the growing importance of the development of new academic disciplines (philosophy, history, literature, philology, meteorology, botany, geology, physics, among others), and the control of public opinion through popularization of science as practiced by the Science Society. Even though salvation of the nation through science or culture, in general, was a scholars' move to continue to exercise his (and now also her) power, the Science Society relied on funding from all sources: private, public, and semi-public. They were instrumental in turning the 1924 returned Boxer Indemnity fund largely to scientific projects in China and to projects conducted by the Science Society, such as the Science magazine and the Biological Institute in Nanjing. That, as author Wang concluded, was the scientists' way to wrestle power and financial resources from the government--in preventing the Chinese government in assuming control over the Boxer Indemnity funds and putting the latter to corrupt use. The Science Society also was instrumental in shaping national public opinion--highlighting the importance of Western science over Western philosophy in China's salvation. In a famous debate titled "science over metaphysics" in 1923, scholars from the Science Society triumphed over opponents who regarded the introduction of a Western philosophy on life as more important than the introduction of Western science. In a way, the prevalent emphasis on the development of science and technology in China, a practice that the Communist regime continued after 1949, owed its origin at least partially to the popularization of science by the Science Society in China. After the Communist takeover, however, the Science Society, like other civil organizations, was dispanded, and its flagship journal Science was merged with Natural Science (to distinguish it from social sciences, or Marxism), even today the most prestigious comprehensive natural science journal in China. The story of the Science Society testified to social and intellectual changes in republican China and helps to explain the rise of the New Culture Movement, in which many members of the Science Society, including Hu Shi and Zhao Yuanren, played a leading role in their attempt to transform the Chinese culture, with Western scientific content or methods. Notes: *T. K. Chu, "150 Years of Chinese Students in America," in Harvard China Review (spring 2004), pp.12-15, at http://www.cie-gnyc.org/newsletter/150_years_chinese_students.pdf. **George A. Finch, "Remission of the Chinese Indemnity," The American Journal of International Law, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Jul., 1924), pp. 544-548. ***http://www.nafsa.org/_/File/_/chinesestudentsfeature111206.pdf.