The Transformation of Social Darwinism in China, 1895–1930

• In Event: Evolution’s Afterlives

English Abstract

This paper investigates the development of social Darwinism in China from the mid-1890s to 1930 vis-à-vis its ties with social Darwinism in the West, employing a comparative analysis of Spencer, Huxley, and Yan Fu. A form of evolutionism that envisioned a cosmological order based upon strength was transformed into a component of power politics in Republican China, despite unsuccessful political endeavors that illustrated both the triumphs and social malfunctions of evolutionary ideas. In the first decade of the last century, denoting a difference between “social Darwinism” and “scientific Darwinism” in the Chinese context was pointless because a “scientific community” barely existed before the mid-1910s. From the late 1910s, a new variety of social Darwinism arose alongside the scientific one, reflecting the influence of Kropotkin and de Vries, as Chinese thinkers incorporated non-Anglophone texts. The theories that emerged made sense of the changing Chinese adaptations of evolutionary thinking by contextualizing and modifying them within the intellectual and political dynamics inside China and also in China’s evolving relationship with capitalism and imperialism. These forms of social Darwinism, tailored to the Chinese needs, were coherent within the Chinese framework since they were a series of strategies adopted to tackle challenges in face of the Western expansion. This once again confirms the claim that social Darwinism is syncretic and multivalent, as its terms are often ambiguous and subject to change, and commonly adopted by intellectuals to the sociopolitical circumstances of their age and region.

Author

• Xiaoxing Jin, Illinois Institute of Technology