DISSERTATION PROJECT

History as a Resource for the Future:
Agricultural Reforms and Reception of Antiquities in Late Imperial and Early Republican China

How can a future radically different from any past experiences be made imaginable so as to be implemented? This is a question that the reformers of the late Qing faced in their endeavors to modernize China. Although it has not received as much academic attention as other efforts like industrialization, food production constituted an important issue: a growing population required an increase in agricultural production, but many regions of China were already under intensive use. In the eyes of the reformists, further intensifying agriculture with the help of Western methods and knowledge was the only way to increase productivity. However, this knowledge first had to be spread to the local officials and ideally even to the farmers; thus amid the reformist spirit of the 1890s, the first Chinese periodical dedicated exclusively to agriculture, the Nongxue bao 農學報 (1897–1906) was launched. Its authors and editors were confronted with the challenge of making the foreign scientific concepts they were introducing more easily comprehensible for a wide audience – and looked to the past for guidance. This project examines the use of terms derived from the ancient Chinese context in the Nongxue bao. How were such concepts reappropriated as a means of generating visions of the future of Chinese agriculture? This paper argues that the agricultural, economic and political concepts drawn from antiquity were first resorted to in order to make the foreign-inspired knowledge and reforms more palatable, underwent significant semantic change in the process and were finally replaced by neologisms.