Network and Actions of Science in Modern Asia

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

This panel explores various aspects of networking in science in which we see non-human agents also playing major roles in the development of science and technology in Asia. Network, in this panel, is an integrating framework of science, technology, resources, social actors (scientists, officials, intellectuals or lay people), institutions and private industry. Miyamoto examines prison management in British India and presents prison as a site for modernity embracing the value of reason and human right to health that generated a discursive environment for a scientific management of body/mind improvement. Otsubo analyzes the Siberian Intervention participated by the Japanese Army and the microbiological links connecting Allied troops, refugees, military horses and local inhabitants in the outbreaks of cholera, typhus, and influenza. She identifies an active role of these epidemic pathogens enabling the international military cooperation in 1918 and later International Health Organization in the League of Nations. Mizuno investigates the network of chemical fertilizer under the Japanese Empire transforming itself in the postwar and cold war eras. She demonstrates the complex picture of infrastructure of chemical industry as Japan re-invented itself in Southeast Asia through technical aid projects. Chung’s study focuses on the appropriation of Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilization in China by both the ROC and PRC governments. Needham’s work and nuclear technology not only proved the world China’s capability in science in the past and present, but also were presented as means of nation-building. This panel, thus, complicates temporal, territorial and cultural network of science in Asian Regionalism.

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing-Diaspora

Session Organizer

• Yuehtsen Juliette Chung, National Tsing Hua University

Chair

• Nicholas A. Kaldis, Department of Asian & Asian American Studies Binghamton University (S.U.N.Y.)

Individual Presentations

• Introduction of Scientific Methods into Prison Management in British India - Takashi Miyamoto, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies

• Japan and the Wider World from a Perspective of Public Health: The Imperial Japanese Army, the Siberian Intervention and the Commission Sanitaire des Pays Alliés - Sumiko Otsubo, Metropolitan State University

• Networks of Japanese Fertilizer in Asia - Hirom Mizuno, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

• Renaissance versus Revolution Across the Taiwan Straits: Nation-Building and Science/Technology in the 1960s-1970s - Yuehtsen Juliette Chung, National Tsing Hua University

Discussant

• Shiyung Michael Liu, Academia Sinica