Sean Hsiang-lin Lei, Director and a Research Fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica Taiwan, and a Professor at the Institute of Science, Technology, and Society (STS) at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University.

There is an intriguing puzzle to be found in the historiography of science in modern China: While Yan Fu’s Tianyanlun 天演論 (On Heavenly Evolution), which was published in 1898 as the Chinese translation of Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics (1893), is universally celebrated as the most influential book in modern Chinese intellectual history, this science-based book receives little—if any—credit in the history of science.
Challenging the conventional understanding of On Heavenly Evolution in terms of Social Darwinism, this article instead proposes to understand this text in terms of “Western science,” more precisely in terms of “Western gezhi” 西學格致 (Western-Style “Investigation of Things to Acquire Knowledge”)—the term Yan Fu 嚴復(1854-1921) coined to render “Western science” into Chinese so as to fashion On Heavenly Evolution as a representative text of “Western science.”

By foregrounding Yan Fu’s concept of “Western gezhi,” this article re-contextualizes this crucial text of modern Chinese thought as a pivotal moment in a three-century-long struggle to fashion “Western science” as Neo-Confucian gezhi so as to win cultural authority for it in China.
The context within which On Heavenly Evolution played this pivotal role was the debate over preserving China’s “dogma,” which took place in the aftermath of China’s catastrophic defeat in the First Sino-Japanese war of 1895. While leading reformers reached the consensus that Western science should be incorporated into the essential curriculum of the new national school system and tested in the civil service examination, Zhang Zhidong 張之洞 (1837-1909) and Yan Fu went even further to express opposing views over the issue of whether Western science should be viewed as a cultural authority “to take precedence over China’s dogma.” By making visible the little-known fact that Zhang Zhidong rejected Yan Fu’s concept of “Western gezhi” and advocated “Western mechanical arts” (xiyi 西藝) instead, this article calls readers’ attention to the eve of the historic breakthrough before On Heavenly Evolution convinced Chinese literati to treat Western science as a cultural authority. When On Heavenly Evolution—being perceived as a text of “Western gezhi”—rose in importance to become the most influential book of modern Chinese thought, science finally acquired the prestigious position of cultural authority that Matteo Ricci had envisioned for it in the 17th century, and began to exercise a previously unimaginable influence in 20th century China.

Situating this Chinese debate in the context of the rise of the globally circulating conception of “Western science” in the late 19th Century, this article foregrounds the crucial importance of investigating how non-Europeans responded to the primacy of science relative to technology that was taken for granted in that conception.