This paper argues that Mr. Science and the May 4th Movement was a significant chapter in the global history of science. To contextualize the story better, I will adopt three broad interpretive frames. First, I shall place Mr. Science and May Fourth in a longer view than the particular events in the 1910s–1920s. This will allow us to trace the historical changes and the evolving institutions, discourses, and practitioners of science over a few generations. Second, I shall highlight the most relevant global conditions. Western imperialism was of course a crucial setting, but there were more specific historical moments that also deserve attention. Finally, comparisons and connections; it is necessary to examine the transmutations of ideas, knowledge, and institutions across political and cultural borders. In other words, we should study Mr. Science and May Fourth in the mode of global intellectual history. Other than China, my main comparative cases are India and Japan, though I will also refer to Ottoman Turkey. Taken together, these examples provide a range of comparisons central to our inquiry into Mr. Science and the global history of science.
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“If we support Mr. Democracy, we must oppose Confucianism, rites, chastity, old morality, old politics. If we support Mr. Science, we must oppose old arts, old religion … . In their [the Westerners’] effort to champion Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science, how many disturbances have been caused and how much blood has been shed? Only because of this, could Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science gradually rescue them from the darkness and bring them into the world of light. We now believe that only these two Messrs. can eliminate the darkness in China’s politics, morality, learning, and thought. In supporting these two Messrs., we will not be cowed by the oppression of government and by the jeers and attacks from society—even if we have to spill our blood and lose our lives.”--Chen Duxiu
Many had died and many more would die for the political idea of democracy in China when Chen wrote these words in 1915. Indeed, twentieth-century China would become a sorry example that proved his point. But a cri de coeur for dying for science? Blood spilling and heads rolling? There was perhaps a degree of hyperbole in Chen’s rhetoric, yet he was serious. He was calling to the New Youth, a new generation of young Chinese intellectuals, to shoulder the burden of awakening China from its slumber. To achieve that, radical measures, so it appeared, must be taken. It was a time of crisis. It was a matter of life and death, light and darkness, and nothing short of a cultural revolution, an extreme dosage of democracy and science, would do.
