ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Making Sheep Scientific: Sheep Improvement in China 1920-1945

• In Event: Controlling and Conserving Animals

English Abstract

This paper focuses on the sheep improvement projects and their socio-cultural aspects in China from the 1920s to the mid-1940s. The sheep improvement emerged in multiple provinces of China since the late 1910s, and significantly developed as the Nationalist Government initiated a nation-wide research network of agricultural science after 1927. Crossbreeding local sheep of China with foreign breeds to increase wool yield and quality, the improvement projects sought to secure profit in global trade and alleviate rural poverty in China. In this process Chinese scientists and technocrats translated and applied concepts of animal breeds and purebreds through a transnational knowledge making between China and the U.S., and brought about the transformation of China’s sheep husbandry. The official initiatives from the 1930s to 1945 concentrated on the northwest that was the main sourcing region of sheep, but they were contested because of its incompatibility with local pastoral practices. Local sheep breeds with complicated meanings were deeply embodied in multiethnic pastoral communities, coexisting with communal pastures and community-based grazing. The official husbandry agency in the northwest, however, tried to separate sheep flocks by breeds and demarcate pastures for fodder and breeding experiments. While the conflicts arose between the state and local communities, Tibetan and Mongolian pastoral communities continued negotiating with the state by emphasizing natural adaptation and ethnic importance of local pastoral practice. This paper contextualizes sheep as a nexus of science, politics, and society, and demonstrates how sheep improvement shaped the state building and state-society interaction in Republican China and altered conceptions of animals through the reconfiguration of cultural-natural environment.

Author

• Guanran Cui, State University of New York at Binghamton