Knowledge Acts in Modern China: Ideas, Institutions, and Identities

This volume explores the introduction of new systems of knowledge in China during the first half of the twentieth century. The individuals portrayed here illustrate how modern systems of thought gave life to social institutions and generated new social roles and identities in China's tumultuous transition during the first half of the twentieth century. In particular, we track the formation of academic and professional disciplines that have represented scientific rationality, technical regulation, impersonality, and intellectual enlightenment, all thought to be constitutive, as well as indicative, of modernity. With such a focus, this book joins an ongoing discussion about Chinese experiences of modernity as a social and material process, in addition to encompassing a mindset and new systems of ideas. This book extends this inquiry to consider how the interplay among ideas, institutions, and identities has characterized and shaped Chinese modernity.