Technology, Gender and History in Imperial China

Great Transformations Reconsidered

Francesca Bray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136184284
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

What can the history of technology contribute to our understanding of late imperial China? Most stories about technology in pre-modern China follow a well-worn plot: in about 1400 after an early ferment of creativity that made it the most technologically sophisticated civilisation in the world, China entered an era of technical lethargy and decline. But how are we to reconcile this tale, which portrays China in the Ming and Qing dynasties as a dying giant that had outgrown its own strength, with the wealth of counterevidence affirming that the country remained rich, vigorous and powerful at least until the end of the eighteenth century? Does this seeming contradiction mean that the stagnation story is simply wrong, or perhaps that technology was irrelevant to how imperial society worked? Or does it imply that historians of technology should ask better questions about what technology was, what it did and what it meant in pre-modern societies like late imperial China?

In this book, Francesca Bray explores subjects such as technology and ethics, technology and gendered subjectivities (both female and male), and technology and statecraft to illuminate how material settings and practices shaped topographies of everyday experience and ideologies of government, techniques of the self and technologies of the subject. Examining technologies ranging from ploughing and weaving to drawing pictures, building a house, prescribing medicine or composing a text, this book offers a rich insight into the interplay between the micro- and macro-politics of everyday life and the workings of governmentality in late imperial China, showing that gender principles were woven into the very fabric of empire, from cosmology and ideologies of rule to the material foundations of the state and the everyday practices of the domestic sphere.

This authoritative text will be welcomed by students and scholars of Chinese history, as well as those working on global history and the histories of gender, technology and agriculture. Furthermore, it will be of great use to those interested in social and cultural anthropology and material culture.

SECTION III

Androtechnics

The writing brush, the plough and the nature of technical knowledge

This section does not claim to offer a comprehensive account of the technologies associated with masculinity in late imperial China. Rather, it explores the different expressions of male technical expertise and approved masculine identity generated by one heavily symbolic and materially essential domain of activity, namely farming.

If the iconic womanly work across the classes was the making of textiles, farming was the work that men of high and low status could all undertake with pride. These chapters examine the domain of farming and agronomy to investigate how distinctions between different virtuous male personae (farmers, landowners, serving officials and emperors) were produced and expressed. They investigate different aspects of the production of agronomic science, focusing on how material practices were documented and inscribed, how the goals and forms of knowledge were inflected by the social position of the author, and the conditions in which new kinds of knowledge were produced and transmitted. The historical evolution of technical knowledge and of verbal and graphic techniques for organizing this knowledge suggest interesting comparisons with the rise of ‘useful and reliable knowledge’ and science, and with the forms of masculinity associated with these activities, in Europe. Here it is argued that we can only understand the historical trajectories of agronomy in imperial China if we bear in mind that material and symbolic efficacy were inseparably entwined in the statecraft imperative to ‘promote agriculture’.

6

SCIENCE, TECHNIQUE, TECHNOLOGY

Passages between matter and knowledge in imperial Chinese agriculture

When Joseph Needham began publishing Science and Civilisation in China some 60 years ago, a routine critique was that he implied misleading connections between science and technology. Needham divided the work into volumes corresponding to the major modern “pure” sciences (mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology), each followed by corresponding applied sciences or technological fields. Magnetism and building, for instance, fell respectively under the categories of applied physics and physical technologies. This strategy for connecting ideas and matter expressed Needham’s belief in the reciprocal impact of science and technology, and of scholarly and artisanal knowledge in the production of science.¹ At another level of communication, it also reflected the everyday connections people draw between “pure” and “applied” scientific knowledge, and this was certainly an important factor in the immense public success of Needham’s project. Within the discipline of history of science, however, critics such as Lynn White raised strenuous objections, arguing that by adopting a framework that designated technological activities as applied forms of science, Needham used pre-modern China’s undoubted technical brilliance to imply an exaggerated level of scientific achievement. Meanwhile, in his influential collection of essays entitled Clerks and Craftsmen in China and the West, after arguing for the fertile contributions of official-craftsmen interactions in the early phases of Chinese history, Needham suggested that in the long run Confucianism and the bureaucratic concerns of the late imperial state were inimical to the pursuit of science and technology, not least because the neo-Confucians who came to dominate the late imperial governing elite held artisans and their working knowledge in low esteem. In other words, Needham was inclined to argue for a chasm between the academic knowledge valued by the late imperial state, and the craft skills that built the material world it governed.²

This position has since been amply refuted by an impressive body of research charting the relations between rule, knowledge and material action in late imperial China. What constituted significant or crucial domains of natural knowledge in China did not always conform to Western patterns. Nevertheless, as recent scholarship has amply demonstrated, the late imperial Chinese state and its officers played key roles in producing and disseminating new forms of scientific knowledge, and in mobilizing technical instruments or practices to generate such knowledge, particularly in domains of such obvious statecraft relevance as astronomy or hydraulics.³ Following the strictures of the new, critical history of Western science, however, and still recoiling from Needham’s supposedly imprudent and profligate use of these terms, except when referring to imports from the West, historians of China often prefer to speak of knowledge and practice rather than science and technology.

In this chapter, I argue for the value of reinstating the terms science, techniques and technology as tools for a more precise analysis of governmentality and the workings of power in the late imperial Chinese state. My tactic is to use these three categories explicitly, in order to highlight flows between matter and ideas in the production and reproduction of knowledge. To this end I propose the following definitions.⁴Science I define as knowledge about natural, material processes expressed in declarative, transmissible form; its representations generally aspire to be authoritative beyond the time and place of their production. Techniques I define as the skilled practices that go into the material production of knowledge as well as the production of artefacts. Technology denotes social-material networks or systems, including sets of techniques and equipment, but also trained personnel, raw materials, ideas and institutions. Technology in this sense of networks or systems is here of two-fold interest, first as generating material goods and social relationships, and second as contributing to the production or reproduction of the kind of knowledge I have termed science. Thus defined, science, techniques and technology are not separate kinds of activity but rather overlapping phases of an organic process of knowledge production.

The case I will discuss is agriculture. Farming is a material activity that spans the gap between pre-modern societies and our contemporary world. It is very obviously a materially rooted domain of knowledge, embedded in social networks. It is furthermore a domain of technical knowledge and practice in which the Chinese state has actively intervened since its inception: recording and transmitting technical information, investing in infrastructure and improvements, and directing local practices.

Modern agriculture is generally thought of not as a science in itself, but rather as a science-based productive activity (in today’s popular terms a technology) that applies knowledge from several scientific fields. Following this convention, in Science and Civilisation agriculture, nong, was classified as a “biological technology”.⁵ But if as historians we take a science as a domain of natural knowledge considered primary in its own time, then in imperial China agriculture was a science in its own right. Imperial China was, throughout its duration, an agrarian empire in which the state levied taxes and landlords demanded rent from the peasantry; the land was the source of sustenance and of wealth, of production and extraction. Agriculture was not only the material but also the social and ethical basis of the polity, or — as Chinese political philosophers put it — the “root” or “foundation”, ben. In consequence, it was the object of systematic enquiry and intervention by the governing class.

What kinds of knowledge — and whose knowledge — were inscribed in the Chinese agricultural texts, which have come down to us in such abundance, and in the farming landscapes whose distinctive features we can track over two millennia? Agriculture is a domain of knowledge where it is impossible to separate ideas about matter from the struggles with matter that generate them. Nor are the knowledge and techniques politically neutral: the norms of good farming are a very powerful instrument for ordering society. Agriculture, then, constitutes a wonderfully rich case of the intertwining of knowledge, practice and power; of the production of ideas, material goods and social relations. How is this reflected in the agricultural texts that circulated among the ruling Chinese elite and filtered down to peasant farmers through magistrates and landlords? I address the formation and the power of agricultural knowledge in imperial Chinese society explicitly in terms of the relations between science, techniques and technology. I offer selected examples of the material access to knowledge characteristic of the different groups of actors, and the various processes of their translation or encoding into textual or graphic inscriptions, including, for instance, how the three-dimensional farm implements of peasants and their uses were translated into two-dimensional printable form. I also address the question of how “mobile” and how “hard” the facts of Chinese agronomic science proved, given a written tradition that developed over more than 2,000 years, and dealt — among other variables — with a huge territory including deserts and tropical forests, dry plains and irrigated rice lands.

Before plunging into the Chinese materials, I begin with a general discussion of the relations between ideas and matter, knowledge and power, in terms suggested by recent science and technology studies. Here I take modern agriculture as the illustration, because I feel it is helpful to argue through familiar facts the case for the rather special definitions of science, technology and technique that I have just proposed. In this section I focus on how knowledge flows between science, technology and technique, its passages from matter to idea and back. I discuss processes of inscription and what Feenberg calls the “codes” embodied in such inscriptions, and I draw on Latour’s concepts of “immutable mobiles” and “hardening the facts” to address connections between technology and empir...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Asia's Transformations
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions
• Introduction: the power of technology
• Section I Material foundations of the moral order
• Section II Gynotechnics: crafting womanly virtues
• Section III Androtechnics: the writing-brush, the plough and the nature of technical knowledge
• References
• Index