This set of essays accomplishes an exceptional feat in the historical studies of the May Fourth Movement: they open up new lines of questioning, injecting new energy into this mature field while invigorating the study of science. And they do so from two different directions.
First, the essays demonstrate the promise of research designs that highlight knowledge and organization, especially the processes and structured relationships in the making and authorization of scientific ideas. The insights, in that sense, invite comparison with those generated in earlier studies of culture and politics in the context of systems of modernity. Second, these essays, conceptualized around the time of the commemoration of the centennial of the May Fourth Movement, command the vantage point of unfolding events of a whole century. The past, as historians are keenly aware, is “unpredictable,” that later events inevitably rearrange our relationships with the past. The passing of time in this case renders visible the merely incipient at the beginning: the ideas that later gained material shapes, including institutional forms and organizational dynamics. As the essays reinvigorate the study of science in the May Fourth Movement, they also show how the events and the aspirations associated with it, whether thwarted or actualized, articulated or repressed, remain critical to our understanding of modern China.
