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China has become a major contributor to world science today, with the largest number of qualified scientific publications in the world, a centralized government willing to sponsor the development of science, and pioneering scientists in all disciplines. Where did this scientific power emerge from historically and how did this history connect with the rest of the world? My dissertation suggests that comprehending the Sino-American intellectual exchange network since the early twentieth century is essential for us to grasp the development of science in modern China. It argues that a Sino-American intellectual exchange network through the China Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Culture (ie., the China Foundation) played a critical role in the development of modern scientific research and education from the 1920 to the 1940s.
In the first half of the twentieth century, leading American intellectuals of the progressive era such as Teachers College’s educational scholar Paul Monroe and Columbia University’s prominent philosopher of pragmatism John Dewey frequently communicated with prominent Chinese intellectuals, many of whom were their former students in the United States. Such face-to-face interchanges across the Pacific ultimately influenced Chinese choices in shaping modern scientific education and research. The impact was generated primarily through the China Foundation.
The China Foundation, financed by the second American remission of the Boxer Indemnity Funds, served as a sponsor of the development of scientific research, teaching and training in modern China. The trustees of the foundation, responsible for the custody and administration of the fund, included prominent Chinese intellectuals (most of whom had received western graduate training) such as Hu Shi (PhD, Columbia), Jiang Menglin (PhD, Teachers College), Zhang Boling (visiting fellow at Teachers College, 1917-1918), Ren Hongjun (H. C. Zen, MA, Columbia), Guo Bingwen (PhD, Teachers College), Ding Wenjiang (aka V. K. Ting, BA, University of Glasgow), Zhao Yuanren (aka Y. R. Chao, PhD, Harvard) as well as the American intellectuals and reformers Paul Monroe, John Dewey, Roger Sherman Greene and John Leighton Stuart.
This dissertation researches the history of Sino-American intellectual exchanges in the China Foundation network, which were central to the establishment of science in modern China. It begins by tracing the cohort of leading Chinese intellectuals trained at American universities, who paved the way for its establishment. They invited leading American educators like John Dewey and Paul Monroe to China, and did the translation work that allowed for their reformist ideas of democracy, education and science to become popular in China. While the American intellectuals aspired to transmit a democratic education through introducing science, the Chinese intellectuals also developed their own rationales to pursue China’s scientific modernization. It also examines the political assumptions and tensions wound up in this Sino-American educational exchange network that illuminates the ways in which the intellectuals on both sides of the Pacific were mutually influenced by their intellectual exchanges.
In asks the following questions: How did American intellectuals of the progressive era design and pursue a democratic vision for the Chinese scientific development, and what were their political assumptions undergirding the transmission of science? How did the Chinese intellectuals respond to the American knowledge of science, translate, and negotiate this transmission of science to China? What aspects of science did they absorb and incorporate for the Chinese national purposes? What ideas did they absorb from the United States, and what aspects did they deliberately eschew? In posing these questions, part of my goal is to shift the predominant narrative of transnational progressive era US intellectual history from “Atlantic Crossings” to a dense and constitutive set of exchanges of knowledge, ideas and practices of sciences across the Pacific.
