| Nineteenth-century China witnessed radical social, political and intellectual changes. Among these changes was the arrival of Western civilization including Western science. What happened to traditional Chinese science with the introduction of Western science in the second half of the nineteenth century? What happened to the Western science when it was introduced into China? Standard histories pay little attention to these issues. Existing studies that do pay attention to these issues suffer from the use of simplistic concepts such as "modernization" and "transition".; Facing the power of Western science, many Chinese intellectuals of the late Qing worked hard to learn Western science and to introduce it into China. These intellectuals can be classified into two groups: those who stayed in China and those who studied abroad. The first group of Chinese intellectuals constituted the major force for the introduction of Western science into China during the second half of the nineteenth century. My thesis primarily concerns this group. It tries to provide some answers to the above questions through an analysis of the introduction of algebra and the calculus.; The nature of the mutual relationship between traditional Chinese mathematics and the introduction of Western mathematics during the period 1859-1903 is the primary focus of my thesis. On the one hand, Chinese mathematicians recognized the power of Western mathematics in problem solving. On the other hand, they strongly argued for the usefulness of traditional mathematics. The result of the negotiation between Western mathematics and traditional Chinese mathematics was to merge Chinese and Western mathematics. That is, Chinese mathematicians created a new mathematics that included components from both Chinese and Western mathematics. They studied and taught both Chinese and Western mathematics. They also applied Western mathematics, in particular algebra, to solve problems of traditional Chinese mathematics. With the enactment of a new educational system in 1904, however, China started to convert to Western mathematics. This conversion led to the end of the movement of merging Chinese and Western mathematics and the discarding of the products of this movement, namely, the translations and other mathematical works published in the spirit of merging Chinese and Western mathematics.; With the introduction of Western science, we see another crucial change in the intellectual history of modern China. That is, mathematics (along with science in general) was promoted to a higher status in general learning. Mathematics in traditional Chinese learning belonged to the category of Qi (instrument) as opposed to Dao (principle). At the end of the nineteenth century, however, many Chinese intellectuals started to argue that mathematics contained Dao. For them, mathematics became a subject that every intellectual must know. The importance of this change can be seen in the rise of scientism in China during the 1920s and 1930s. |
