ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Translating Power: John Fryer and the Making of Scientific Authority in the Self-Strengthening Era

• In Event: China Observed: Science and the British Encounter with China in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

English Abstract

This research will re-examine the Self-Strengthening Movement (1861–1895) as a formative stage in the construction of scientific and cultural authority in late Qing China, challenging its conventional characterization as a failed experiment in technological and military modernization. By analyzing John Fryer’s activities during the political ascendancy of Prince Gong (1861–1881), this research argues that a popularized and non-religious conception of science had already begun to emerge before intellectuals like Yan Fu and Liang Qichao rose to prominence. This research situates Fryer’s role within the evolving political and intellectual landscape of the Self-Strengthening period, examining how institutional reforms, translation practices, and hybrid conceptions of scientific knowledge and political governance collectively laid the epistemic groundwork for the later transition toward kexue (modern scientific disciplines).

While the Jiangnan Arsenal has long been viewed as an institutional innovation central to the late Qing state’s modernization efforts, supported by reformers such as Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang, it also functioned as a vital arena for redefining scientific knowledge through the conceptual lens of gezhi (the investigation of things). Rather than directly subverting Confucian orthodoxy, Fryer facilitated the formation of a new public sphere of gezhi through his translation and editorial work, particularly through the periodical The Scientific Magazine, which offered an intellectual space that integrated Confucianism with Western empirical rationality, granting new legitimacy to the notion of “useful knowledge.”

Author

• Su Huai, York Univeristy