There is an intriguing puzzle to be found in the historiography of science in modern China: Yan Fu's 嚴復 (1854--1921) 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 widely celebrated as the most influential book in modern Chinese intellectual history. And yet, this science-based book has received little,—if any,—credit in the history of science. Taking this puzzle as a clue, this article argues that On Heavenly Evolution constituted a historic breakthrough in a three-centuries-long struggle to win cultural authority for Western science in China, with the ultimate goal of persuading the Chinese to embrace Western civilization as a whole.
The context within which On Heavenly Evolution played this pivotal role was the historical debate over the preservation or abandonment of China's quintessential teachings (jiao 教), which took place in the aftermath of China's catastrophic defeat in the first Sino-Japanese war of 1895. It is well-known that Yan Fu and Zhang Zhidong 張之洞 (1837--1909), the powerful architect of the New Policy Reform (1898--1912), held polarized positions in this debate over whether or not to abandon the most cherished institutions and ethical norms of Chinese civilization. What most scholars do not realize, however, is that these two towering figures based their positions on two opposing conceptions of Western science/technology: Following the strategy set up by Matteo Ricci (1552--1610) in the seventeenth century, Yan Fu fashioned Western science as Neo-Confucian gezhi 格致 (Investigation of Things to Acquire Knowledge) to win cultural authority for it, and thereby created a unique local conception of Western science as “Western gezhi” (xixue gezhi 西學格致). Vehemently rejecting Yan Fu's conception of “Western gezhi” and the resulting status of Western science as cultural authority, Zhang Zhidong created the notion of “Western mechanical arts” (xiyi 西藝) instead and promoted it as an official category in his reform agenda.
By making visible their debate over the proper conception of Western science/technology, this article draws readers’ attention to the historic breakthrough moment when Western science became a major source of cultural authority in China. Along the way, it further argues that what was at stake in the debate over China's quintessential teachings—from Yan Fu's perspective,—was nothing less than the universality of “Western civilization” and therefore a wholesale adoption of it in China,—the very first time this radical idea was proposed in Chinese history. When On Heavenly Evolution—as a concrete manifestation of Yan's conception of “Western gezhi”—rose in importance to become the most influential book of modern Chinese thought, Western science finally succeeded in becoming the trusted foundation not only for the universalism of Western civilization, but at the same time also for the Neo-Confucian Way, while also paving the road for “Mr. Science” to exercise a previously unimaginable influence in twentieth-century China.
Situating this Chinese debate in the context of the rise of the globally circulating conception of “Western science” in the late nineteenth Century, this article demonstrates the importance of investigating how non-Europeans embraced, challenged, and reconfigured the primacy of science relative to technology, which was taken for granted in that conception.
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“There is absolutely no relationship at all between gezhi (“investigation of things to acquire knowledge”) of the Great Learning and Western gezhi (science)”— Zhang Zhidong, An Exhortation to Learning (1898)
An intriguing but little-noticed puzzle exists in the historiography of science in modern China: While Yan Fu’s Tianyanlun 天演論 (On Heavenly Evolution), the Chinese translation of Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics (1893), is widely celebrated as THE most influential book in modern Chinese intellectual history, this science-based book receives little credit in the history of science.
Let me first elaborate on the puzzling nature of this phenomenon. It is common knowledge that the Western books translated by Yan Fu 嚴復 (1854--1921) played a crucial role in causing Chinese literati to finally confront the unprecedented challenge posed to Chinese civilization from the West. To express his unreserved admiration for Yan, Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873--1929), for example, celebrated him as the “pivotal figure of Western learning,” highlighting Yan's unique role in launching the irreversible transformation of modern Chinese thought. Among the Western books Yan translated, none was more influential than On Heavenly Evolution published in 1898; it is Yan Fu's rendition of Huxley's Evolution and Ethics that addressed the controversy over using Charles Darwin's theory of biological evolution as a foundation for ethics. Given that more than five hundred prominent intellectuals and political figures recalled the impact of reading this book in their autobiographies (Cao Citation2003:112), it is no wonder that On Heavenly Evolution has been universally recognized as the single most influential book in modern Chinese thought. Paradoxically, no historian of science offers a comparable status—if any status at all—to this science-based book in the history of science in China. As perhaps the most prominent example, On Heavenly Evolution is mentioned only twice and very briefly in Benjamin Elman's monumental work On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550–1900 (Elman Citation2005: 324, 349).
