Kaske E., Köll E. (eds.) Age of Exploration: How Chinese Scientists and Administrators Discovered China

De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2024 — 300 p. — (Volume 17 in Dialectics of the Global). — ISBN: 978-3111245171.In the early twentieth century, Chinese intellectuals came to realize that Westerners surpassed them not only in knowledge of the world, but also in knowledge of China itself. A rising generation of Chinese scientists, engineers, and administrators was eager to address this state of affairs and began to retrace the footsteps of Western explorers who had crisscrossed China during the preceding century. The nine case studies assembled in this book show how a new cohort of professional Chinese explorers traveled, studied, appropriated, and reshaped national space from the 1920s to the 1950s. In some instances, the explorers drew directly from the fieldwork practices of their Western predecessors. In others, they trained compilers to collect and systematize local knowledge that could be passed up the administrative hierarchy to government and national institutions. Their projects helped to claim natural resources, prepare for infrastructural development, and create new institutionalized knowledge and public engagement with textual representations of China's geobody. This book elucidates the ways in which knowledge production in early twentieth-century China centered on space and contributed to China's transformation into a modern nation-state.Introduction / Elisabeth Kaske and Elisabeth Köll
Part I: Exploration
Remaking Hinterland Guizhou: Ding Wenjiang’s (1887–1936) Pioneering Geo-surveys in Southwest China / Hailian Chen
Meteorological Explorations in Republican China: Observations on Mount Emei and Mount Tai during the International Polar Year 1932/33 / Iwo Amelung
A Shared Journey for the Chinese Oil Dream: The Yumen Oilfield, Foreign Geologists and the Localization of Chinese Petroleum Geologists / Lin-Chun Wu
Infrastructure, Ethnography, and the Integration of Xinjiang: The Northwest Reconstruction Expedition of 1943 / Thorben Pelzer
Part II: Representation
Re-shaping the Imagined Community: Postal Maps and the Making of National Space for Young China / Weipin Tsai
The KMT’s Long March: Highways, War, and National Space in China’s Southwest / Elisabeth Kaske
Part III: Reclamation
Planting the Seeds of the Nation: Agricultural Experimental Stations and the Making of the Chinese Geo-Body / Shellen Wu
Spatializing the State Through Forest Surveys: Constructing Verticality and Encompassment in the Early Years of the People’s Republic of China / Julia Marinaccio
Experiments with Scale: The People’s Electrification Campaign of 1958–1961 and China’s Pursuit for a New Energy Future / Ying Jia Tan
Conclusion / Anne Reinhardt
List of Contributors
Index