1 - Networks into China’s Northwest

Summary

This chapter charts four social channels leading into China’s Northwest at the time of the great earthquake centered in Haiyuan, Gansu, in 1920: native Gansu networks; national (political and charitable) networks; foreign (missionary and other) networks; and scientific (geological) networks. Using newspaper accounts, telegraph cables, letters and reports as they made their way through journalistic and consular channels, the chapter aims to capture different strands of cultural memory of a monumental disaster as reports of it travelled beyond stricken areas to Chinese cities and overseas. As this chapter shows, exploring the ways in which crisis events were responded to, commented on and remembered reveals a good deal about cultural practices at the time. Writing on the earthquake and wider famine fields of early republican China would reflect three increasingly conflated areas of intellectual activity around the May Fourth movement of 1919: the valorization of science and the scientific method; commentary on China’s ongoing transition to republican politics; and diagnostic exercises on the social and moral health of the nation. One key aspect of the cultural production of this period explored in this book is the invisibility it afforded certain historical actors and the indispensability it afforded others.