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In early twentieth-century China, Chen Diexian (1879-1940) was a
maverick entrepreneur-at once a prolific man of letters and captain
of industry, a magazine editor and cosmetics magnate. He tinkered
with chemistry in his private studio, used local cuttlefish to
source magnesium carbonate, and published manufacturing tips in
how-to columns. In a rapidly changing society, Chen copied foreign
technologies and translated manufacturing processes from abroad to
produce adaptations of global commodities that bested foreign
brands. Engaging in the worlds of journalism, industry, and
commerce, he drew on literati practices associated with
late-imperial elites but deployed them in novel ways within a
culture of educated tinkering that generated industrial innovation.
Through the lens of Chen's career, Eugenia Lean explores how
unlikely individuals devised unconventional, homegrown approaches
to industry and science in early twentieth-century China. She
contends that Chen's activities exemplify "vernacular
industrialism," the pursuit of industry and science outside of
conventional venues, often involving ad hoc forms of knowledge and
material work. Lean shows how vernacular industrialists accessed
worldwide circuits of law and science and experimented with local
and global processes of manufacturing to navigate, innovate, and
compete in global capitalism. In doing so, they presaged the
approach that has helped fuel China's economic ascent in the
twenty-first century. Rather than conventional narratives that
depict China as belatedly borrowing from Western technology,
Vernacular Industrialism in China offers a new understanding of
industrialization, going beyond material factors to show the
central role of culture and knowledge production in technological
and industrial change.
The historical relationship between science and capitalism has long
stood as a central question in science studies, at least since its
foundations in the 1930s. Taking inspiration from the recent surge
of scholarly interest in the "history of capitalism," as well as
from renewed attention to political economy by historians of
science and technology, this Osiris volume revisits this classic
quandary, foregrounding the entanglements between these two
powerful and unruly historical forces and tracing the diverse ways
they mutually shaped each other. Key attention is paid to the
practices of knowledge work that enable both scientific and
capitalistic action and to the diversity of global sites and
circuits in which science/capitalism have been performed. The
assembled papers excavate an array of tangled nodes at the
science/capitalism nexus, spanning from the seventeenth century to
the twenty-first, from Nevada to Central Asia to Japan, from
microbiology to industrial psychology to public health.
"This book is at the forefront of the next generation of
scholarship on early 20th century China. Lean makes a number of
important claims about sentiment and modernity, puts forward
broader claims that go beyond China Studies, and poses stark
questions about the place of 'rationality' in modernity that will
compel others to defer to her study for many years to come."--John
Fitzgerald, author of "Awakening China: Politics, Culture and Class
in the Nationalist Revolution"
"This ingeniously crafted book provides intriguing ways of linking
the past to the present, weaving debates that stretch as far back
as the Qin with questions of contemporary Chinese culture and
politics. Through exhaustive examinations of media, political, and
judicial records, the author vividly shows how the debate on
emotions that Shi's case engendered was a manifestation of a
'modern public' in China."--Ruth Rogaski, author of "Hygienic
Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China"
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