Vernacular Industrialism in China - (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia Un) by Eugenia Lean (Hardcover)

About the Book

By examining the manufacturing, commercial, and cultural activities of the maverick industrialist Chen Diexian (1879-1940), Eugenia Lean illustrates how lettered men of early-twentieth-century China engaged in "vernacular industrialism," the pursuit of industry and science outside of conventional venues.

Book Synopsis

In early twentieth-century China, Chen Diexian (1879-1940) was a maverick entrepreneur--at once a prolific man of letters and captain of industry, a magazine editor and cosmetics magnate. He tinkered with chemistry in his private studio, used local cuttlefish to source magnesium carbonate, and published manufacturing tips in how-to columns. In a rapidly changing society, Chen copied foreign technologies and translated manufacturing processes from abroad to produce adaptations of global commodities that bested foreign brands. Engaging in the worlds of journalism, industry, and commerce, he drew on literati practices associated with late-imperial elites but deployed them in novel ways within a culture of educated tinkering that generated industrial innovation.

Through the lens of Chen's career, Eugenia Lean explores how unlikely individuals devised unconventional, homegrown approaches to industry and science in early twentieth-century China. She contends that Chen's activities exemplify "vernacular industrialism," the pursuit of industry and science outside of conventional venues, often involving ad hoc forms of knowledge and material work. Lean shows how vernacular industrialists accessed worldwide circuits of law and science and experimented with local and global processes of manufacturing to navigate, innovate, and compete in global capitalism. In doing so, they presaged the approach that has helped fuel China's economic ascent in the twenty-first century. Rather than conventional narratives that depict China as belatedly borrowing from Western technology, Vernacular Industrialism in China offers a new understanding of industrialization, going beyond material factors to show the central role of culture and knowledge production in technological and industrial change.

Review Quotes

One of the great pleasures of reading Lean's study is how she brings together Chen Diexian's full range of literary
and entrepreneurial achievements for this portrait. She completes it with new analytical approaches to the social history of modern science and small-scale manufacturing in twentieth-century China.

-- "Technology and Culture"

This book, with its focus on light industry and consumer goods, is altogether a welcome addition to the fields of business and economic history of modern China.

-- "East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine"

A riveting microhistory with broader historiographical ambitions . . . Lean's decision to focus on an individual entrepreneur makes this book highly readable for students of modern Chinese history and general readers who are interested in business history, knowledge production, science, and industry.-- "Business History Review"

Lean's study contributes a deeply researched argument regarding an identifiable social fraction she calls 'vernacular industrialists.'-- "H-Net Reviews"

Lean's volume is an important contribution to our knowledge of Chinese industry's progress in the first half of the twentieth century.-- "Technology and Culture"

This is a highly learned book. Lean reads her sources closely and effectively situates her observations within a deeper Chinese past and across multiple thematic fields. . . [H]er observations shed much new light on the workings of the wider industrial modern world, and her concept of vernacular industrialism will find purchase in contexts far beyond cuttlefish bone-strewn Chinese shores.-- "Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society"

Thoroughly researched and elegantly crafted . . . [this book] sheds fresh light on early twentieth-century China at a time when the nation was just entering global capitalism.-- "Journal of Chinese History"

Vernacular Industrialism in China is an astonishingly rich and original microhistory. In telling the fascinating story of Chen Diexian, Lean challenges us to rethink large swaths of modern Chinese history. An outstanding achievement of wit, erudition, and insight.--Fa-ti Fan, author of British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter

This pathbreaking book conclusively demonstrates that the values and habits of classically trained Chinese literati, so scorned by May Fourth modernizers, were fully reconcilable with modern science and technology. Eugenia Lean's "vernacular industrialism" will be a touchstone for all future work on the history of science and technology in China.--Sigrid Schmalzer, author of Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China

Eugenia Lean has written an engrossing study of how popular industrialism arose in early twentieth-century China. Chen Diexian emerges from its pages as both representative and remarkable: an amateur scientist and literary celebrity turned serial entrepreneur, consumer products magnate, and do-it-yourself modernist. Through Chen's career, Vernacular Industrialism in China traces a fascinating history of everyday innovations.--Christopher Rea, author of The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China

About the Author

Eugenia Lean is professor of history and East Asian languages and cultures and current director of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University. She is the author of Public Passions: The Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican China (2007).