Minerals, mining science and the making of modern China’s territory (1860-1937)

© 2017 Dr. Xi MaIn the history of modern China, science has too often been trapped in a Whig interpretation of the past in accordance with the metanarratives of modernisation and industrialisation. Seeking to escape this trap, this thesis uses mining science (kuangxue) to examine the relationship between science and socio-cultural change in late Qing and early Republican China (1860–1937). In particular, it explores the ways in which the theoretical and applied knowledge of minerals and mining intersected with the conceptualisation of the territory of modern China. Mining science, upon its introduction into China in the late nineteenth century, initiated the knowledge of mineralogy, geology and mining technology, which projected minerals into the domain of modern science. This knowledge in the first instance challenged China’s traditional understanding of things in nature; that is, minerals. It further reconfigured the materiality of the land as composed of minerals. Beyond and above this, mining science navigated through spatial imagination, historical writing, international relations, and even the awareness of social stratification, acquiring implications for the nation beyond industrialisation and modernisation in the nation-saving (jiuguo) agenda. This thesis argues that modern mining science permeated the intellectual and public understanding of modern China, its people and the land it occupied. Thus, on various levels it imagined and demarcated China’s territory through discourse. In this way, this thesis tests the relationship between the ‘modern’ in modern China and the ‘modern’ in modern science, contending that it is on the premise of the former that the latter became intelligible. The thesis follows a roughly chronological order, yet it is also organised thematically, with each chapter focused on one aspect of the entanglement between mining science and China. Chapter 2 seeks answers to what mineral and mineralogy were in modern China by examining the contested understanding of natural things through translations. Chapter 3 is concerned with the spatial organisation of mineral deposits and mineral resources in China during the Qing period, contending that mining science changed the way of understanding China’s space. Chapter 4 considers the ways in which the use of mineral was written into Chinese history in the late Qing, revealing the intricacy between historical writing about minerals with the awareness of China’s boundaries and positions in opposition to other countries. Chapter 5 analyses the expropriation of mining science in literary writings to construct and deconstruct social boundaries by examining the miners’ body and underground mining space in China. The final chapter adopts a transnational perspective to explore how the knowledge of mineral deposits within China’s territory became an arena for international contests by scrutinising an American expedition to China in the 1910s and its relationship with the governments of China