ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Standardizations and Other Histories of Measurement in Modern China

• In Event: The Politics of Standardization

English Abstract

In the first half of the 1930s, officials in China’s Bureau of Weights and Measures worked to enforce a new system of measurement which the government touted as scientific, rational, and modern— the metric system. In this process, they encountered reluctant compliance, prolonged negotiations, and outright resistance. This paper examines the ways in which two communities responded to the government’s campaign of national metrological standardization: Sellers of logs who used a system of measuring the volume of logs based on their circumference dating to the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), and retail purveyors of oils, sauces and alcohols who traded using a system of volume based on density. Although the national authorities assumed that the metric system could and would serve everyone’s metrological needs, the petitions submitted by representatives of these sectors and the records of officials who had to enforce the new regulations reveal that these communities had objectives and concerns which were ignored or even contravened by the Nationalist (Guomindang) government’s campaign to standardize weights and measures across China. By looking closely at these two case studies, this paper clarifies the objectives at the core of the Nationalist government’s metrological reform, and recovers other metrological projects which ran parallel to or fell by the wayside as the Nationalist government pursued a certain vision of metrological modernity.

Author

• Yi Ci Lo, NUS College, National University of Singapore