Celestial Empire. Nathaniel Isaacson

China’s position in it were shaken to the core. The long-term repercussions of the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) were compounded by political strife following the Japanese victory in the first Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895). The failure of the Hundred Days’ Reform (1898), which was soon followed by the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901) and the ensuing indemnity China was forced to accede to as punishment, confirmed the overdetermined combination of political insolvency in the face of foreign incursion. In the wake of this series of foreign and domestic political failures, the Chinese intellectual framework seemed suddenly inadequate and incompatible with modern global politics. Weakened confidence in traditional philosophy indicated a necessity to grasp both the practice and spirit of science, which had enabled Western advances (Kwok, 6). So intense was the sense of peril that the governor of Hunan declared: “Our country can no longer survive in the world” (quoted in Murthy, 56). A succession of crises led to the conclusion that devotion to the study of Western science would be a critical element of China’s fate as a country (Reardon-Anderson, 9). The establishment of the republic in 1911 (which was soon followed by Yuan Shikai’s attempt to reestablish a monarchy) and the presentation of Japan’s Twenty-One Demands in 1915 illustrated once again that beyond political and material reform, Chinese society itself was in need of fundamental reorganization (Kwok, 8).

      The need for social and political reorganization was part of a decades-long struggle with the paradox of reform: many perceived it to be the case that in order to stave off extirpation, China would have to transform itself in a manner so profound and radical that it would hardly resemble the object that intellectuals had set out to preserve in the first place. The disruption of the tribute system signaled China’s loss of status as the center of the Asian world and represented the emergence of a new world order. The Middle Kingdom had suddenly been shifted to the periphery as new networks of industrial production in Europe combined with related networks of economic and military power, engendering an entirely new set of institutional formations and relationships in a radically altered global environment. The late Qing crisis of reform brought about a radical shift to long-standing approaches to science and literature.

      Two critical issues separate the engagement with European sciences at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the Ming and the rest of the late Qing: First, until the Qing defeat in the Opium Wars and the first Sino-Japanese War, Yangwu arguments justifying the importation of Western ideas and technology on the grounds that they were ultimately of Chinese origin were more or less sustainable, and Western science was not taken seriously until the last decade of the nineteenth century (Wright 1996, 2). The material advantages that are often mistaken for European superiority in the realm of scientific inquiry did not emerge until the industrial revolution. Chinese civilization, over the course of nearly half a millennia, had undergone a period of incorporation of foreign epistemology and a simultaneous reassessment of native tradition. After the first Sino-Japanese War, it became increasingly clear that regardless of the intellectual gymnastics it took to get there, the adoption of European science and technology, especially in the field of military armaments, was absolutely necessary. This change in perspective was precipitated by a sense that the nation was faced with a hitherto unseen moment of crisis, and that regardless of misgivings about science and technology, their adoption was a matter of life or death.

      Second, prior to the end of the nineteenth century, the imperial throne closely guarded any new knowledge introduced by European missionaries, seeing to it that this information remained a part of the theater of imperial power, used in the ritual demonstration of the relationship between the throne and heaven; this knowledge was not popularized, and there was little imperative to do so. In Europe, popularization of technical knowledge in the European industrial revolution occurred as a result of the material need for greater expertise in the processes of mass production—scientific education was not made accessible for its own sake, but for the sake of the vested interests of industrial capital. Moreover, in China, scientific knowledge was not popularized until it was apparent that local national/imperial interests could not be sustained without such an effort.

       Science and Empire

      For centuries Western science had found its way into China, often at the hands of Jesuit missionaries, destined to become a closely held instrument of political influence for the imperial throne. From the late Ming on, Jesuit mathematicians played an important role in helping to assist court mathematicians in correcting problems with mensuration and cartography. Ming and Qing rulers were quick to discern the scientific from the religious, and were adept at turning what was meant to be a symbol of papal and (Christian) divine power into symbols of Chinese (imperial) divine power. Jesuits introducing Gregorian calendrical reforms to China in the early seventeenth century offered a powerful predictive model of the universe, one that played a vital role in the maintenance of imperial power. Their teachings on the predictive power of mathematics, the sciences, and experimentally verifiable evidence were presented alongside the doctrine that the universe was the product of a divine creator and that only Christianity could render an understanding of the relationship between humankind and this creator. Jesuits who first came to China in the early seventeenth century found that their acceptance at the Ming and Qing courts was dependent largely upon their knowledge of astronomy and cartography and their calendrical acumen. The rise and fall of Jesuit influence was closely tied to the fate of the Qing dynasty. Favor bestowed upon the Jesuits by the Qing court resulted in their resentment by non-Manchu literati (Elman 2006, 63–149).¹³ These factors limited the scope of Jesuit influence, effectively curtailing the popularization of scientific knowledge.

      For both the Ming and Qing courts, interest in knowledge of astronomy, cartography, and mensuration was a matter of their potential use as instruments of empire, particularly in terms of agricultural rituals defining the sovereign’s connection between heaven and man, and cartographic work defining geographic territory. The ability to predict cyclical occurrences related to agricultural production and less regular astronomical events was closely guarded by the imperial court and used as evidence that imperial rulers had the Mandate of Heaven (Elman 2006, 15–35). Missionaries like Matteo Ricci believed that the introduction of such principles as Euclidean mathematics “would prepare the Chinese for the higher truths of Christianity,” but Qing intellectuals were adept at separating the Christian and scientific content of the mathematical, astronomical, and cartographical skills that Jesuit priests had to offer (Elman 2006, 26, 107). Ricci’s clocks, maps, and globes aided him in securing permission to open a mission west of Canton, in his attempts to gradually move north to Beijing, and these clocks quickly supplanted indigenous Chinese timekeeping devices. These demonstrations of technological superiority were meant to be seen by imperial courts as a demonstration of the superiority of European technological and spiritual civilization (Landes, 40–45).¹⁴ Thus, science and technology were introduced to China with the specific objective of gaining a new flock of Christian believers and expanding the influence of the church. Science, as much as religion or the sword, was a tool of imperial expansion. Clockwork gears were part of Matteo Ricci’s arsenal of soft power.

      Nevertheless, clocks came to embody an affront to China’s sense of self-regard, and timekeeping was one field among many where Chinese intellectuals began to argue for a Chinese origin to what had by then become a clearly superior European technology. Chinese scholars began to argue that Western clocks were derived from the Chinese clepsydra, and that such methods had since been lost to Chinese craftsmen. Others argued that clocks were merely playthings, and of no real intellectual or practical use. Despite such self-serving rhetoric, “timepieces were among the few Western artifacts the Chinese were ready to pay for” in the early nineteenth century, and such objects were one of the few goods that Chinese merchants were interested in trading for highly valued tea, porcelain, and other goods that brought the British Empire such extreme trade deficits in the run-up to the Opium Wars (Landes, 46–50). The introduction of timepieces, astronomical methodologies, and techniques of mensuration were understood by both sides of the exchange as tools of empire. Chinese rulers’ interest in science was aimed at using its predictive power to reaffirm the legitimacy of their own dominion by arguing that it was expressed in the natural world.

      The shift that distinguished the nineteenth century from previous eras was the sense that Western science and technology were indeed superior and that an adequate response demanded their popularization. The increasingly