ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Sovereignty on the Body: Forensic Science, Nationalism, and the Politics of Life and Death in Republican China (1911-1948)

• In Event: Contested Bodies: Science and Statecraft in 20th-Century China and Taiwan

English Abstract

This paper examines how the human body became a site where scientific knowledge and national sovereignty were co-produced in early twentieth-century China. Following the imposition of consular jurisdiction, Chinese reformers viewed the weakness of forensic expertise as a symbol of national humiliation and judicial dependency. By the early Republic, intellectuals increasingly recognized the importance of legal medicine for asserting national sovereignty. Those trained in Japan were among the first to advocate for forensic modernization, arguing that the state’s support for medicine—as seen in Germany and Japan—was essential to national power and warning that neglecting forensic medicine could lead to wrongful convictions and renewed extraterritorial pressures.

To address this deficiency, the Republic legalized human dissection, marking the first step in introducing Western forensic science, and in 1913 the Ministry of Education formally incorporated legal medicine into higher education. Cultivating forensic professionals was thus central to restoring China’s dignity and scientific authority.

Yet this nationalist investment in forensic modernization also transformed the body into an object of surveillance and control. Drawing on forensic manuals, autopsy reports, and psychiatric evaluations, this paper introduces the concept of forensic necropolitics to describe how forensic science governed both the dead and the living. By classifying deaths and pathologizing deviant bodies, Republican forensic practitioners delineated the boundaries of citizenship, morality, and normalcy. Situating forensic medicine within the framework of scientific nationalism, this paper argues that the development of legal medicine was simultaneously a project of bodily governance—one in which reclaiming judicial sovereignty meant mastering the scientific management of life and death.

Author

• Ting-YU Cai, History Department, Duke University