3 - Creating Intellectual Space for West-East and East-East Knowledge Transfer: Global Mining Literacy and the Evolution of Textbooks on Mining in Late Qing China, 1860–1911

Summary

INTRODUCTION: ‘THE STUDY OF MINING’ AND GLOBAL MINING LITERACY

STANDING ON THE verge of collapse, reform-minded late Qing officials placed hope in restoring power through modernizing science and technology in order to resist foreign encroachments. Similar to the emphasis on technical education during the Meiji period in Japan (1868–1912), those Chinese governors attached strategic importance to promoting science and technology in the Self-strengthening Movement (zìqiìng yùndòng,1861–1895), although the Chinese government did not undertake the thorough institutional reform that took place in Japan. By 1895, they had established morethan twenty technical schools modelled on Western systems. Also parallel to the development of Western-style education, more than 500 books were translated by missionaries and their Chinese collaborators from Western languages into Chinese from 1860 to 1900. Although some of these books addressed ethical and religious topics, the majority of them were on scientific and technical subjects, accounting for over 70% of all the translations.

Some of these books, particularly the important translations published by the Translation Bureau of the Jiangnan Arsenal and Beijing School of Foreign Languages, were also quickly exported to Japan. The Chinese scientific terms disseminated to Japan in various books and journals before and after 1860 had a great influence on the early Meiji scholars, who commonly possessed a solid knowledge of classical Chinese. During this period, Dutch works declined in popularity among Japanese scholars, who now began to prefer other Western works, especially those in English. The Chinese translations provided an important and timely vehicle for their quick grasp of English. After 1880, a language standardization reform took place in Japan to unify Japanese speech and writing, and the modern Japanese lexicon in the natural sciences took its initial shape. Although almost no contemporary Chinese scholars paid attention to the changes and development of scientific works in Japan at that time, Japan became a crucial knowledge exporter to China in the decades that followed.

After China's defeat in the Sino-Japanese war in 1895, the Japanese achievements in educational reform during the Meiji period began to draw the attention of the late Qing reformers.