the postal system, steamships, and print culture and later through the telegraph (Secord, 32–37). Merchant ships did not only carry goods; they also carried people devoted to the production of knowledge, and in many cases the merchants aboard these ships were themselves involved in the production and dissemination of knowledge (Delbourgo and Dew, 7). In other words, the expansion of our scientific understanding of the world, the expansion of Atlantic and Asian trade networks, and the expansion of empire were simultaneous and mutually reinforcing processes, often occurring aboard the same oceangoing vessels and at the same colonial outposts. These developments resulted from cooperative efforts of colonial administrators and local collaborators. Recognition of the reciprocal nature of these intellectual and material exchanges offers the opportunity to move beyond both the impact-response and China-centered approaches to China’s intellectual history, understanding history in terms of global relationships (Fa-ti Fan, 5).
Colonial Modernity
Chinese SF is arguably best geographically and culturally contextualized in terms of Tani Barlow’s “colonial modernity.” This critical framework approaches the changes of the early twentieth century in terms of the transnational traffic of ideas, cultural trends, and material culture engendered by the expansion of European colonialism. This heuristic perspective elucidates the relationship between local developments and global exchanges, acknowledging the pervasive influence of colonialism upon these exchanges. In Barlow’s words,
“Colonial modernity” can be grasped as a speculative frame for investigating the infinitely pervasive discursive powers that increasingly connect at key points to the globalizing impulses of capitalism. Because it is a way of posing a historical question about how our mutual present came to take its apparent shape, colonial modernity can also suggest that historical context is not a matter of positively defined, elemental, or discrete units—nation states, stages of development, or civilizations, for instance—but rather a complex field of relationships or threads of material that connect multiply in space-time and can be surveyed from specific sites. (Barlow, 6)
Critiques of colonial modernity bring to light the uneven terrain in which the economic and intellectual relationships that emerged in the colonial context were established, and the cultural hybridity that these exchanges engendered.
Labeling China’s position in the global political sphere, especially in a way that recognizes the cultural uniqueness of port cities like Shanghai that found themselves at the vanguard of colonial modernity, is no easy task. While coastal cities relevant to global trade were incorporated into the European colonial project, much of the Chinese interior remained under Chinese rule. Meng Yue notes that one might identify Shanghai as a peripheral city in Wallerstein’s “world systems” (1989), feeding the European core with labor and resources. Yue imagines Hardt and Negri (2000) labeling Shanghai as a “node” in the global “empire of capital.” As a counterpoint, Yue suggests that Andre Gunder Frank (1998), Hamashita Takeshi and Kawakatsu Heita (1991), or Peter Perdue (2005), with their competing visions of an Asian-oriented world economy, might have emphasized the degree to which Shanghai was in many ways a global core city, especially in terms of late imperial China’s relationship to central and Southeast Asia prior to the rise of European and Japanese colonial empires, ultimately concluding that “Shanghai is found somewhere between semi-colonialism and cosmopolitanism” (Yue, viii–xi).
A complex web of relationships among China, Japan, Europe, and the United States, colonial modernity resulted in an eclectic and often contradictory array of responses to the transnational traffic of ideas, cultural trends, and material culture that characterized coastal Chinese cities in the late Qing. Both Lydia Liu and Wang Hui have devoted critical attention to the question of how this unevenness played out in the translation of notions of individualism, science, literature, and modernity into the Chinese lexicon, often via the distorting lens of Meiji Japan.21 Colonial modernity was a global phenomenon characterized by transnational exchanges in the context of imperial expansion, the colonial presence, and its accompanying economic and sociological discourses, which resulted in widely variegated local responses that often shared similar core features.22 These responses were in turn conditioned by changing historical and social conditions, by varying levels of wealth and education, by conflicting and occasionally opposing ideological and philosophical approaches, and in many cases by creative misunderstandings, misreading, and artistic license.
Empire, science, and the fictional imagination that propelled imperial expansion were inextricably intertwined. Asia and the Americas provided both material resources and networks for scientific research that played a vital role in the creation of modern Europe.23 The Western world was “only able to create the great transformation of the nineteenth century in a context also shaped by Europe’s privileged access to overseas resources” (Pomeranz, 4). Europe was not the “unshaped shaper of everything else” (Pomeranz, 10); the geopolitical shifts of early modernity through the twentieth century, though unequal, were nevertheless mutual.
The ways in which Western science and technology were appropriated and acculturated are as multifaceted as the ways in which indigenous Chinese culture and intellectual life were modified, reimagined, and often reinvented. Charlotte Furth also adds that the transformations engendered by this encounter were far from unilateral: “One danger of the concept [of a Chinese ‘response to the West’], however, is its tendency to suggest that the process was one of linear substitution of ‘Western’ ideas for native ones; and that Chinese played an intellectually passive role” (Furth 2002, 15).
The challenges of European military hegemony most certainly provided a stimulus to the intellectual field of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China, but the response was far more complex than a matter of dialectical antithesis. In other words, colonial modernity enabled a repertoire of linguistic, symbolic, and cultural practices that may be deployed in formulating perspectives on one’s self and society. These often included the internalization or repetition of Orientalist discourse, but also encompassed strategies of appropriation, resistance, subversion, and filtration that were both consciously and unconsciously deployed, to varying degrees of success. Likewise, the resulting short- and long-term outcomes have proven to be much more complex than simple replacement or synthesis. Thus, there are conceivably as many iterations of modernity as there are individuals, or perhaps more. As a socially contingent phenomenon, local iterations of colonial modernity are often constructed around shared experiences or understandings; however, they are neither essentialized nor universal. The parallels and intersections visible in the experiences of modernization, urbanization, and the response to Westernization common to China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam should by no means mask the vast historical and individual differences in these countries’ encounters with these forces.
Colonial modernity is the hybrid offspring of the encounter between margin and periphery in the context of imperial expansion. Hardt and Negri define empire as the exercise of virtual forces of control at the margins, intervening in “breakdowns in the system” (38–39). I contend that it is at these marginal locations where the influence of empire is experienced most immediately, in the form of the constant presence of the colonial order. For China, the imperial form also had already taken on the diffuse character that Hardt and Negri argue contemporary techno-scientific empire is destined for, as power executed through international treaties. The military defeats of the Opium Wars and the first Sino-Japanese War were, historically speaking, relatively short-lived, but their ongoing consequences—the “lease” of Hong Kong and other treaty ports, and the annexation of Taiwan—were felt as ongoing effects of the war, and produced hybridizing exchanges of knowledge and technology, especially in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Shanghai. Meng Yue argues that Shanghai was a space between both “overlapping territories” and “overlapping temporalities” whose rise was in many ways facilitated by the domestic and international failures of the Qing Empire (Yue, vii–xxix).
The introduction of Western science to China was inextricably intertwined with the rising tide of European and Japanese empire. In exchanges between Jesuits and the Ming and Qing courts prior to the Sino-Japanese
