2 - The Translation of Western Books on Natural Science and Technology in China and Japan: Early Conceptions of Electricity 19

Summary

INTRODUCTION

THE 2019 WEB of Science analysis of ‘highly cited researchers’ (the top 1% most quoted in scientific and scholarly journals in all fields of academic knowledge) includes 192 researchers in the field of engineering. Given the trend of ‘China's rise to the highest levels of research’ the evidence for the field of engineering is no exception: among the 192 researchers most cited in the journals analysed, 64 are based in China. Of the names of all ‘highly cited researchers’ in engineering, 105 (54.6%) are Chinese. As a contrast, this chapter looks back about 150 years to the period when the achievements of modern science and technology were otherwise distributed over the globe and were just being diffused to and adopted in East Asia. Decisive factors for establishing any new science and technology include the transfer of theories and applications, the linguistic encoding of this knowledge, and the institutions that accommodate and promote such innovations. This chapter focuses on the encoding and conceptualization of terms in the early phase of transfer, and it studies the China–Japan axis of what can be conceived of as a triangular relationship between the West (Europe and America), China and Japan.

FROM THE WEST TO CHINA AND JAPAN

The transmission of Western science and technology to China in the early modern and modern periods constitutes a well- studied field of research. Both the study of Jesuit translations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and interest in the translation practices of the mainly Protestant missionary teams of the nineteenth centuries as well as secular specialists have stimulated important monographs and collective volumes.

One of the most intriguing facets in this complex process of transmission is the interaction between China and Japan in the nineteenth century. Starting in the 1890s, the second phase of re-adoption or ‘return loans’ to China of the most central terms of politics and sociology coined in Japan is better known than the first. For instance, the important study by Wolfgang Lippert on the origins of Marxist Chinese terminology showed that sociōpolitical new terms were for the most part translations from the Japanese that had been taken over in the last decade of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth centuries.

Yet the transmission of terms for science and technology between Japan and China also occurred earlier, from the 1840s to the 1890s, but has received less attention.