The Long-Distance Transmission of Knowledge and Technology from the Bronze Age to the PRC
Friday
9:00 am – 10:45 am
Room 2
- Organised by Dongming Wu
- Yijun Wang, Chair
- Dongming Wu, “Exchanges beyond the Western Zhou World: Remodeling the Metal Economy in the Western Zhou Dynasty (1045–771 BCE)”
- Yijun Wang, “Migrant Miners and Global Trade: Transmission of Tin Mining Technology from China to Southeast Asia, 1700–1850s”
- Yuanxie Shi, “European Lace, China Made: Localisation of Chaoshan Lace Production in the 20th Century China”
- Dongxin Zou, “Women in Reproduction and Representation: Chinese Obstetric Care in Rural Algeria and Morocco”
From the Bronze Age to PRC China, knowledge and technology travelled across regional and cultural borders with the movement of people and commodities, bringing social, and cultural changes. Concerning the long-distance transmission of the knowledge and technology of mining, textile, and medicine between China, Southeast Asia, Europe, and Africa, this panel looks at how technology moved across geo-cultural boundaries and how the movement of knowledge transformed social networks, political economy, and cultural perceptions in three millenniums. Dongming Wu discusses the transmission of bronze goods and technology within and beyond the Western Zhou world. He shows how the metal economy contributed to the formation of political-economic networks in the Western Zhou (1045–771 BCE). Yijun Wang follows the transmission of tin mining technology from China to Southeast Asia from 1700 to 1850s. She demonstrates that the social organisation of Chinese miners played a key role in the successful spread of Chinese mining technology. Yuanxie Shi examines the localisation of European lace production in Guangdong province in the Republican period to show how traditional craft skills affected the geographical distribution of labour in the modern textile industry. Through a study of Chinese medical aid in north Africa, Dongxin Zou shows how the cross-cultural experience of Chinese female doctors constructed the nostalgic perception of socialist health care in post-Mao China. Standing at the intersection of the history of technology and medicine, this panel contributes to the understanding between knowledge, culture, society, and power.
Dongming Wu, “Exchanges beyond the Western Zhou World: Remodeling the Metal Economy in the Western Zhou Dynasty (1045–771 BCE)”
This paper examines how the transmission of bronze goods, casting technology, and the bronze culture of the Zhou dynasty contributed to the formation of the network of the metal economy within and beyond the Western Zhou world. The Western Zhou economy has been regarded as a redistributive model in which strategic resources were regulated by the central court. In discussing new archaeological evidence from southern China, this paper adopts a bottom-up perspective to discuss the limitations of the central court in the borderland and the agents involved in the metal economy. I identify three political-economic powers: the central court, the regional states established by the Zhou, and the local peoples beyond the Zhou world. Although the central court held the authorities in ideological and technological powers, they had to rely on the regional states to secure the long-distance transmission routes, who seized the opportunities to develop themselves and even rebelled against the core. Moreover, the central court relied on local peoples to exploit raw material and used foreign traders to reduce the costs of direct management, who selectively adopted cultural forms rather than waiting to be annexed by the centre. By demonstrating the vital roles of different players in the metal economy, this paper reexamines the redistributive model and argues that the maintenance of the Western Zhou economies results from the negotiation and cooperation of different political-economic powers within and beyond the Zhou world.
Yijun Wang, “Migrant Miners and Global Trade: Transmission of Tin Mining Technology from China to Southeast Asia, 1700–1850s”
This paper examines tin mining technology and its transmission from the east coast of China to Southeast Asia in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Beginning in the 1700s, tin became an international commodity that was as important as silver in the global trade. Following the itinerary of tin and the migration of miners, this paper discusses how Chinese miners transferred their mining technology across regional boundaries. Furthermore, it explores how Chinese intellectuals and European natural philosophers understood Chinese technology of mining. This paper argues that in contrast to our current perception of industrial technology, which emphasises machinery and tools, the social technology of mining was the key for Chinese miners to establish a capital- and labour-intensive industry. The social technology of mining, which was embedded in the social organisation of the Chinese mining community, enabled the long-distance travel of technology from China to Southeast Asia. On the other hand, the close connection between the social organisation and mining technology also limited the spread of large-scale mining operations from Chinese migrant communities to native communities in Southeast Asia.
Yuanxie Shi, “European Lace, China Made: Localisation of Chaoshan Lace Production in the 20th Century China”
The paper concerns the localisation of Western technology in twentieth-century China by examining the export lace industry in Shantou and Chaozhou in Guangdong Province. Often regarded as a quintessential Western craft and technology, lacemaking was first introduced by Western missionary groups to Chinese port cities in the late 19th century.
With the development of the industry throughout the 20th century, lace designers incorporated Chinese taste (e.g. blue-and-white or polychrome colouration) as well as traditional iconographies (e.g. dragons and phoenix) into visual expressions, which expanded Western lace vocabulary at large. Moreover, newspapers and government reports of the Republican Period claimed that rural female artisans applied indigenous Chaozhou-embroidery techniques onto the making of lace products. For instance, padded embroidery (diangao xiu) was used to imitate the raised relief effect of those made in Appenzell, Switzerland or Madeira, Portugal. Yet, such a localisation process is often difficult and ambiguous to identify due to the visual and technical similarities, but the claimed localness uncovers another layer in the process: technology is socially perceived. Locally perceived technology further impacted the social organisation of production. The specialisation of local skills shaped the distribution of orders and labours among cities, suburbs, and villages, which I would call “geo-technicality.”
Dongxin Zou, “Women in Reproduction and Representation: Chinese Obstetric Care in Rural Algeria and Morocco”
This paper examines the obstetric care provided by Chinese women ob-gyns in Algeria and Morocco and their perceptions of local reproductive culture and ideas of the female body. The Chinese government has sent medical teams since 1963 to mostly rural provinces of Algeria and 1975 to Morocco, to offer primary health care for rural and suburban communities. Among a whole range of medical branches in the Chinese service, obstetrics and gynaecology practised by almost all women doctors have been in persistently high demand. This paper explores this little-known history of China’s medical engagement in post-colonial North Africa, and in particular, the experiences of women professionals—not white middle-class women as variables for all women—in health care, and the complexities of their association with their women patients. Drawing on an ever-expanding pool of Chinese medical “mission literature”—medical reports, doctors’ testimonies, and published memoirs, this paper argues that while Chinese women ob-gyns claimed “sisterly” solidarity and sympathy with their patients, they essentialised the North African female patient as ignorant and vulnerable. Furthermore, this paper explores a reversed process of using “peripheral” experiences to reflect upon the medical system and health care culture in China. It argues that the doctors’ experiences in North Africa offered them a comparative venue to construct a nostalgia for a lost golden past—or a past that never was—of socialist medicine as well as a site of criticism about the moral tensions between doctors and patients in China’s for-profit health care system.
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The Long-Distance Transmission of Knowledge and Technology from the Bronze Age to the PRC