Saving China through Science: The Science Society of China, Scientific Nationalism, and Civil Society in Republican China

The Science Society of China, the first comprehensive Chinese scientific association, was actually organized in 1914 by a group of Chinese students at Cornell University in the United States. Four years later, many members returned to China, where the association, until its dissolution by the Communists in the 1950s, played a crucial role in Chinese science and society, not the least by publishing the Kexue (Science) monthly. This paper presents a twofold thesis: first, the Science Society of China and the Kexue represent attempts by Chinese scientists to create a civil society and a public sphere in Republican China. Second, in contrast to the conventional Western model, the Science Society, even as it critiqued government actions in public, maintained intimate and complex connections with successive regimes in the Republican era. If professionalism drove the Science Society's rhetoric of autonomy, scientific nationalism, I argue, moderated the association's interactions with the state in practice.