Abstract Summary
My study addresses the birth of Republican China’s policy on transnational biological expeditions, which, I argue, was enacted in response to a Japanese biological expedition along the Yangzi River in 1929. Through the engagement, Academia Sinica (Zhongyang yanjiuyuan), China’s national academy of sciences, intended to regulate international researchers’ unlimited access to China’s natural resources, which had been facilitated by extraterritoriality and the loss of China’s tariff autonomy since the 1840s. With its enforcement, the policy essentially established scientific research as a national enterprise and biological resources as China’s national property. Focused on Academia Sinica’s policy on foreign biological expeditions in the 1930s, my presentation examines the driving forces behind the institute’s nationalizing efforts: (1) the political instability in a transitional era that allowed for the possibility of institutional reforms and new policy-making; (2) the newfound Nationalist regime’s commitment to solidify the nation’s borders against colonial activities; (3) the transnational nature of the Japanese marine biological study and its potential involvement in the Sino-Japanese fishing wars on the East China Sea; (4) the formation of international academic communities such as biological associations and the global network for specimens exchange; and (5) the presence of a group of Chinese intellectual bureaucrats who dedicated their political power to modernizing China with science. My presentation will conclude with a reflection on the policy’s unintended consequences on China's scientific community, when science became a collectivist interest of the state.
