ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

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

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

Scientific nationalism, coined by historian Hiromi Mizuno in 2008, refers to a form of statecraft that views science and the nation as co-constitutive, and in which science and technology represent “the most urgent and important assets for the integrity, survival, and progress of the nation.” This panel wields this insight to interrogate the entanglement between science and statecraft in 20th-century China and Taiwan. As scholars grappled with the notion of a uniquely Asian body, they tended to assume a statist approach to their research. The plurality of the body thus became a site for contestation, concurrent with China and Taiwan’s struggle to stabilize their own statehood. By applying the lens of scientific nationalism to the body, we examine how the understudied sciences below not only reflected national ambitions but also shaped what it meant to be a governable, modern, and postcolonial subject.

First, Ting-Yu Cai examines how in early 20th-century China, forensic science moved beyond the morgue to become a necropolitical tool for managing the living, and how the effort to reclaim judicial sovereignty centered science in statecraft and bodily governance. Second, Nathaniel Pigott identifies an unusual overlap between state-sponsored martial arts and grassroots ping pong in Republican China, both of which critiqued the bodily harms of “intense sport” and claimed that only non-intense physical training could scientifically overcome the weakness and fatigue of Chinese bodies. Third, Weicheng Huang traces how anthropologists in 1960s Taiwan engaged Franz Weidenreich’s phylogenetic ideas while studying protohistoric human remains from China, maintaining that global and colonial discourses of the East Asian body dialectically informed scientific visions of decolonization. Lastly, Adrien Gau follows the emergence of plastic surgery as a modernizing tool of statecraft and the circulation of its techniques and ideals between China, Taiwan, and the US during the Cold War.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Jia-Chen Fu, Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica

Individual Presentations

• Sovereignty on the Body: Forensic Science, Nationalism, and the Politics of Life and Death in Republican China (1911-1948) - Ting-YU Cai, History Department, Duke University

• Against Intensity: Ping Pong, Martial Arts, and the Ideology of Sport in Republican China - Nathaniel Pigott, University of California, Irvine

• Global Evolutionary Theory, Local Nationalisms: The Reception of Franz Weidenreich in Taiwan’s Anthropological Community - Weicheng Huang

• Disciplining Bodies through Disciplining Medicine: Plastic Surgery and Statecraft in 20th-Century US-Taiwan Relations - Adrien Gau, University of Pennsylvania

Session Organizer

• Adrien Gau, University of Pennsylvania