Peking University Forum on the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, Lecture 45
Time: Friday, December 14, 2007, 3:00–5:00 p.m.
Venue: Academic Lecture Hall, Ke-She Center, Chengze Garden
Speaker: Wang Zuoyue, Associate Professor, Department of History, California Institute of Technology
Topic: A Casual Discussion of Transnational Studies in the History of Science
Professor Wang’s talk was excellent, but it was not able to turn into the “roundtable discussion” he had hoped for, because everyone knew too little about “transnational history of science”; today we were mainly listening to Professor Wang’s introduction.
Remarkably, today’s forum did not even have a “commentator.” Only Professor Wu raised a question that was said to be “sharp” — for the study of the history of science and technology in modern China, what is actually “new” about the perspective of “transnational history of science”? Since a perspective that breaks through national borders may well be a breakthrough in the history of science of the United States, China’s history of science and technology in the modern era has from the outset been a history of “the westward spread of learning from the West,” so it seems to have been transnational history from the very beginning. Professor Wang’s answer was that although the history of science in modern China does discuss transnational scientific exchange and has paid attention to phenomena such as studying abroad, it has not probed deeply; it has not explored what these periods of study abroad or migration actually “mean.”
As I understand it personally, what is called “transnational history of science” is in fact a further development of “national history.” For before national history, the general practice of the history of science was in fact based on the idea that “science knows no national borders”; traditional disciplinary history was, rather than “transnational” history of science, a history of science “without borders.” In the vision of traditional history of science, there is no “nation,” or rather, the national background is of no great significance to the development of science. National history begins to notice the importance of borders and holds that the national background is extremely important. By the time we get to “transnational history” and then “break” borders, this is actually built upon precisely that emphasis on borders.
Thus, the reason one says that traditional history of science in modern China still lacks the perspective of “transnational history of science” is that although the traditional approach has noticed the “westward spread of learning from the West,” its focus has always been only on how China learns science from the West. But because people believed that science knows no borders, they rarely cared about “where” China introduced science from; they cared only about the introduction of science itself. Yet once one attaches importance to the “borders” of science, and holds that American science, Soviet science, or Japanese science each has its own distinctive features, then one can examine China’s introduction of science more deeply and more finely.
December 14, 2007
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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