Natural History and Natural Resources through the Earth Sciences in Modern China after 1900
Natural History and Natural Resources through the Earth Sciences in Modern China after 1900

Author: Markes Johnson

Publisher: Ethics International Press

Published: 2024-10-03

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 1804418161

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This book provides an overview of major changes in mainland China since the start of the modern era in 1900, as leaders grappled with how to harness natural resources requiring equal development in the pure and applied sciences based on fundamentals in geology. On one hand, China was put on the global stage with discovery of Peking Man fossils in the 1920s but has continued to win global acclaim for more recent discoveries of feathered dinosaurs and the earliest examples of metazoan life. At the same time, China struggled against outside exploitation to take full control of its own mineral and oil reserves -which today are increasingly imported from abroad to maintain oil and steel production through the Belt and Road initiative. The book concludes with a a discussion of what the ‘Chinese Dream’ may mean in comparison to what many in the United States consider as a birthright with the ‘American Dream’.

Unearthing the Nation
Unearthing the Nation

Author: Grace Yen Shen

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2014-02-13

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 022609054X

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Questions of national identity have long dominated China’s political, social, and cultural horizons. So in the early 1900s, when diverse groups in China began to covet foreign science in the name of new technology and modernization, questions of nationhood came to the fore. In Unearthing the Nation, Grace Yen Shen uses the development of modern geology to explore this complex relationship between science and nationalism in Republican China. Shen shows that Chinese geologists—in battling growing Western and Japanese encroachment of Chinese sovereignty—faced two ongoing challenges: how to develop objective, internationally recognized scientific authority without effacing native identity, and how to serve China when China was still searching for a stable national form. Shen argues that Chinese geologists overcame these obstacles by experimenting with different ways to associate the subjects of their scientific study, the land and its features, with the object of their political and cultural loyalties. This, in turn, led them to link national survival with the establishment of scientific authority in Chinese society. The first major history of modern Chinese geology, Unearthing the Nation introduces the key figures in the rise of the field, as well as several key organizations, such as the Geological Society of China, and explains how they helped bring Chinese geology onto the world stage.

Age of Exploration
Age of Exploration

Author: Elisabeth Kaske

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2024-08-19

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 3111245365

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In the early twentieth century, Chinese intellectuals came to realize that Westerners surpassed them not only in knowledge of the world, but also in knowledge of China itself. A rising generation of Chinese scientists, engineers, and administrators was eager to address this state of affairs and began to retrace the footsteps of Western explorers who had crisscrossed China during the preceding century. The nine case studies assembled in this book show how a new cohort of professional Chinese explorers traveled, studied, appropriated, and reshaped national space from the 1920s to the 1950s. In some instances, the explorers drew directly from the fieldwork practices of their Western predecessors. In others, they trained compilers to collect and systematize local knowledge that could be passed up the administrative hierarchy to government and national institutions. Their projects helped to claim natural resources, prepare for infrastructural development, and create new institutionalized knowledge and public engagement with textual representations of China’s geobody. This book elucidates the ways in which knowledge production in early twentieth-century China centered on space and contributed to China’s transformation into a modern nation-state.

On Their Own Terms
On Their Own Terms

Author: Benjamin A. Elman

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-07-01

Total Pages: 606

ISBN-13: 0674036476

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In On Their Own Terms, Benjamin A. Elman offers a much-needed synthesis of early Chinese science during the Jesuit period (1600-1800) and the modern sciences as they evolved in China under Protestant influence (1840s-1900). By 1600 Europe was ahead of Asia in producing basic machines, such as clocks, levers, and pulleys, that would be necessary for the mechanization of agriculture and industry. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Elman shows, Europeans still sought from the Chinese their secrets of producing silk, fine textiles, and porcelain, as well as large-scale tea cultivation. Chinese literati borrowed in turn new algebraic notations of Hindu-Arabic origin, Tychonic cosmology, Euclidian geometry, and various computational advances. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, imperial reformers, early Republicans, Guomindang party cadres, and Chinese Communists have all prioritized science and technology. In this book, Elman gives a nuanced account of the ways in which native Chinese science evolved over four centuries, under the influence of both Jesuit and Protestant missionaries. In the end, he argues, the Chinese produced modern science on their own terms.

A History of Science in Society, Volume I
A History of Science in Society, Volume I

Author: Andrew Ede

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2016-10-04

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 1442635045

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A History of Science in Society is a concise overview that introduces complex ideas in a non-technical fashion. Ede and Cormack trace the history of the changing place of science in society and explore the link between the pursuit of knowledge and the desire to make that knowledge useful. Volume I covers the origins of natural philosophy in the ancient world to the Scientific Revolution. New topics in this edition include astronomy and mathematics in ancient Mayan society, science and technology in ancient India and China, and Islamic cartography. New "Connections" features provide in-depth exploration of the ways science and society interconnect. The text is accompanied by 27 colour maps and diagrams, and 4 colour plates highlighting key concepts and events. Essay questions, chapter timelines, a further readings section, and an index provide additional support for students. A companion reader edited by the authors, A History of Science in Society: A Reader, is also available.

Empires of Coal
Empires of Coal

Author: Shellen Xiao Wu

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2015-04-22

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0804794731

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From 1868–1872, German geologist Ferdinand von Richthofen went on an expedition to China. His reports on what he found there would transform Western interest in China from the land of porcelain and tea to a repository of immense coal reserves. By the 1890s, European and American powers and the Qing state and local elites battled for control over the rights to these valuable mineral deposits. As coal went from a useful commodity to the essential fuel of industrialization, this vast natural resource would prove integral to the struggle for political control of China. Geology served both as the handmaiden to European imperialism and the rallying point of Chinese resistance to Western encroachment. In the late nineteenth century both foreign powers and the Chinese viewed control over mineral resources as the key to modernization and industrialization. When the first China Geological Survey began work in the 1910s, conceptions of natural resources had already shifted, and the Qing state expanded its control over mining rights, setting the precedent for the subsequent Republican and People's Republic of China regimes. In Empires of Coal, Shellen Xiao Wu argues that the changes specific to the late Qing were part of global trends in the nineteenth century, when the rise of science and industrialization destabilized global systems and caused widespread unrest and the toppling of ruling regimes around the world.

Space-Time Integration in Geography and GIScience
Space-Time Integration in Geography and GIScience

Author: Mei-Po Kwan

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2014-09-18

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 9401792054

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Space-time analysis is a rapidly growing research frontier in geography, GIS, and GIScience. Advances in integrated GPS/GIS technologies, the availability of large datasets (over time and space), and increased capacity to manage, integrate, model and visualize complex data in (near) real time, offer the GIS and geography communities extraordinary opportunities to begin to integrate sophisticated space-time analysis and models in the study of complex environmental and social systems, from climate change to infectious disease transmission. This volume specifically focuses on research frontiers, comparative research, and research and application interactions in this field in the US and China, arguably the two most dynamic loci for this work today. The contributions to this book, by top researchers in China and the US, productively highlight the differences and similarities in approaches and directions for space-time analysis in the two countries. In light of the recent rapid progress in GIScience research on space-time integration in both countries, the book’s focus on research frontiers in these two countries will attract great interest in both countries and in other parts of the world as well as among related disciplines. In addition, the book also explores the impact of collaborative research and publications underway in this area between the US and China and will provide an overview of these collaborative efforts and programs. This book will not only be of interest to university-based GIS researchers and students, but also to those interested in this new area of research and applications like researchers and developers in business, internet mapping and GIS and location based services (LBS).

Visualizing Earth Science
Visualizing Earth Science

Author: Zeeya Merali

Publisher: Wiley Global Education

Published: 2012-04-23

Total Pages: 610

ISBN-13: 111843594X

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Visualizing Earth Science relies heavily on rich visuals to expand on concepts for students and solidify their understanding of them. This accessible format, coupled with the assumption that students have little knowledge of earth science, allows students to navigate through the material with greater ease the goal being to help them understand the world around them and interpret what they see in a meaningful, accurate and exciting way. Authors Zeeya Merali and Brian Skinner focus on visual learning in their debut of their first edition, Visualizing Earth Science. This text weaves illustrated timelines throughout to exemplify how concepts fit together and develop over time. Students will quickly learn difficult concepts with this innovative, visual approach.

Environmental Science and Technology
Environmental Science and Technology

Author: Stanley E. Manahan

Publisher: CRC Press

Published: 2006-10-20

Total Pages: 674

ISBN-13: 1420003216

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Formally established by the EPA nearly 15 years ago, the concept of green chemistry is beginning to come of age. Although several books cover green chemistry and chemical engineering, none of them transfer green principles to science and technology in general and their impact on the future. Defining industrial ecology, Environmental Science and Tec