Remeasuring China: the Global and Local Dimensions of Nanjing Metrological Reform
von Can Li
Datum der mündl. Prüfung:2022-11-25
Erschienen:2022-12-14
Betreuer:Prof. Dr. Dominic Sachsenmaier
Gutachter:Prof. Dr. Axel Schneider
Dateien
Name:Li Can Dissertation.pdf
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Format:PDF
Zusammenfassung
Englisch
This dissertation examines the history of meter, liter, and gram in republican China. It seeks to understand the historical transition of Chinese metrology from indigenous measures to the global metric system and its global entanglements. Nanjing's metrological reform in the 1930s was a result of historical precursors of the Beijing government period and the Late Qing. Chinese customary measures were stigmatized as chaotic and unscientific by foreign and domestic reformists at the time. Inspired by global trends of standardization since the late 19th century, the KMT government aimed to strengthen its monopoly on metrological affairs as an inroad to ensure the political unity of the new nation-state and to build a metricized modern regime of accuracy. The reform incurred complicated responses either from all echelons of society, ranging from small vendors, hawkers, housewives, commercial guilds, and local governments to scientists and other highly educated intellectuals. Out of drastically different motives and grounds, different social players chose to cooperate or resist the reform and developed their own ways to fly under the radar of state supervision. While charting a local story, this dissertation also reveals the global dimension of China's metrological history. China's contested and pluralistic landscape of metrology coincided with the wider trans-Atlantic debate of metrication at the time. Metrology became a forum where new and old, global and local, universal and traditional were constantly debated. The desire to revive Chinese metrological tradition never died throughout Nanjing's reign, and some scholars even proposed to offer Chinese metrology to the world as an alternative to the metric system. The polemic eventually resulted in a public confrontation between the state and scientists in 1935. Throughout the 1930s, Nanjing's ambition expanded from metrological unification to full standardization of cultural, agricultural, and industrial sectors, which were also inspired by the transnational condemnation of Chinese characteristics, circulating western sociological knowledge, and the European experience after WWI. Moreover, Nanjing's acceptance of the French metrological approach of building a nation-state via the unification of measures clashed with the Benthamite tradition of Shanghai’s colonial powers who tended to have a non-intervention attitude toward measures. In sum, using measures as an analytical prism, this dissertation sheds light on various social, economic, and political ramifications brought by this hitherto neglected historical change.
Keywords: Metrication; history of metrology; Modern China; global history