Struggle for national survival: Chinese eugenics in a transnational context, 1896-1945

My dissertation is a historical investigation of the relationship between science and society through the comparative study of eugenics movements as they developed in both Japan and China from the 1890's to the 1940's. Overall, I envision this project of eugenics as a specific case study against a greater background of the transmission of Western science.; The dissertation is organized into an introduction, five chapters, and an epilogue, The introduction lays out the theoretical terrain and outlines the historical landscape from which eugenics came forth as a subject of interest. The second chapter delineates the emergence of “science” as a set of distinct disciplinary subjects, out of the holistic category of Western Learning (J. yôgaku and C. xixue) contributed by the Jesuits and premodern Eastern intellectuals. Subsequently, this chapter examines how modern scientific terminology was coined and refashioned within the interlocked linguistic context of Japan and China, and the parallel process that the eugenics ideas were going through in this context. After the initial stage of mere introduction of ideas into East Asia, the third chapter accounts for the process of eugenics being received as a branch of “science,” and for its transformation locally, by considering the Galtonian biometric strategy as a route toward scientific justification. With the progress of eugenics and its transformation into a form of public knowledge and a social movement in both countries, the fourth chapter examines their multi-layered social debates on, and politics of, heredity versus social influence on the body. As part of the social development of eugenics, the birth control movement was embraced by the feminists and socialists, but it soon ran up against the hard-line eugenics agenda. Focusing on the eugenicist perception of morality as inherent in sexuality, the fifth chapter analyzes the scientific basis assumed for the gendered assignment of biological function and the intriguing positions of women scientists. The sixth chapter studies the second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) which was perceived by both Japanese and Chinese eugenicists as a war of population. It deals with the eugenicists' representations and the scientists' efforts to forge a cohesive self-identity and national identity in the mobilization campaigns of both governments. It also analyzes the eugenicists' involvement in the State's implementation of population policy and eugenics bills, which were the embodiments of their conception of ethnic nation and racial body. The epilogue brings together prewar and wartime issues of eugenics in a discussion of the revision of the eugenics bill in Japan and the reinstatement of the eugenics bill in the People's Republic of China in the postwar era.; Throughout the thesis, I develop an understanding of “comparativism” as a methodological approach to simultaneity which encompasses plural nonsynchronic consciousnesses and temporalities, in addition to the conventional use of comparativism as juxtaposition to locate parallels of similarity and difference. I also develop a framework of “transnational science” as a more flexible concept to incorporate both local science and colonial science, and other possible forms of international cooperation, competition and circulation of the sciences and technologies. By analyzing the understudied subject of eugenics movements in Japan and China, this study contributes to our understanding of how science in its global transmission was transformed and grew in its local habitats.