This volume explores the introduction of new systems of knowledge in China during the first half of the twentieth century. The individuals portrayed here illustrate how modern systems of thought gave life to social institutions and generated new social roles and identities in China’s tumultuous transition during the first half of the twentieth century. In particular, we track the formation of academic and professional disciplines that have represented scientific rationality, technical regulation, impersonality, and intellectual enlightenment, all thought to be constitutive, as well as indicative, of modernity. With such a focus, this book joins an ongoing discussion about Chinese experiences of modernity as a social and material process, in addition to encompassing a mindset and new systems of ideas. This book extends this inquiry to consider how the interplay among ideas, institutions, and identities has characterized and shaped Chinese modernity.

Robert J. Culp is associate professor of history and chair of the Social Studies Division at Bard College.

Eddy U is associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Davis. His research interests include political sociology, historical sociology, the sociology of intellectuals, and Chinese society and politics. He is the author of Disorganizing China: Counter-bureaucracy and the Decline of Socialism (Stanford University Press, 2007) and co-editor of Knowledge Acts in Modern China: Ideas, Institutions, and Identities (Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley, 2016).

Wen-hsin Yeh is professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. She has served as the director of the Institute of East Asian Studies and the chair of the Center for Chinese Studies at Berkeley. She has edited and contributed to many IEAS publications, including Mobile Subjects; Mobile Horizons; History in Images; Cities in Motion; Empire, Nation, and Beyond; Cross-Cultural Readings of Chineseness; Landscape, Culture, and Space in Chinese Society; and Shanghai Sojourners.