East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine (EASTM - Universität Tübingen)

Andrews, Bridie

Special Issue on the History of Chinese Medicine: Introduction from the Guest Editor

Handwerker, Lisa

116                                                                                                  EASTM 41 (2015) 
 
 
Yanzhong Huang, Governing Health in Contemporary China, New York and 
London: Routledge, 2013, 192 pp. 
Lisa Handwerker 
[Lisa Handwerker, PhD, MPH, received her Masters in Public Health from UC 
Berkeley (1985) and her doctorate in Medical Anthropology from UC San 
Francisco and UC Berkeley (1993). Her doctoral fieldwork was “The Hen That 
Can’t Lay An Egg: the Social Significance of Infertility in Beijing, China.” Lisa 
has been traveling, working and living in China on and off since 1979 and speaks 
Mandarin Chinese. She is a trained cross-cultural mediator. Since 1999 she has 
taught at California State University East Bay (formerly Hayward), as a lecturer, 
in several departments. Currently, Lisa serves as a community member on the Alta 
Bates Hospital Ethics Committee. Contact: lhandwerker@me.com] 
Today in China, with a population well over a billion,1 health, health care 
delivery and resource allocation are pressing issues. Yanzhong Huang, 
Associate Professor at the John C. Whitehead School of Diplomacy and 
International Relations, Seton Hall University, and a Senior Fellow for 
Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations, makes a significant 
contribution toward understanding post-Mao health care in China.  
The book’s main thesis is driven by an important question: Why did 
post-Mao China fail to reproduce the kind of success in the health sector 
that it had achieved in the economic sector? (p. 4) or paraphrased “why do 
Chinese public health indicators fail to match China’s economic perfor-
mance?” The book examines the political context, policy decisions and 
dynamics that have led to a missed opportunity to make significant 
improvement in people’s health status. According to Huang, since 1980 
China has achieved an average of ten percent economic growth annually, 
lifting more than six hundred million people out of poverty (p. 1). Yet, 
between 1981 and 2009 official data suggests that average life expectancy in 
China only rose by five years compared with an increase of almost 33 years 
between 1949-1980 (p. 1).  
In order to explain China’s political processes, policies, and health 
dynamics the book is divided into six chapters. The book’s earlier chapters 
lay out the theoretical basis for the arguments that follow in later chapters. 
In the introductory chapter, Dr. Yanzhong Huang argues it is precisely 
because of many Post-Mao policies, including economic reforms, that 
                                                          
1  According to National Data of the National Bureau of Statistics of China 
population clock (http://data.stats.gov.cn) there are more than 1,365,357,692 
people as of September 11, 2014 1:37 pm. According to the U.S. Census Bureau 
Clock, this represents about 19 percent of the world’s population.  
Reviews                                                                                                  117 
 
health care in China is suffering. Huang hypothesizes, “reform-induced 
institutional dynamics, when interacting with Maoist health policy struc-
ture in an authoritarian setting, have not only contributed to the rising 
health challenges in contemporary China, but also shaped the patterns and 
outcomes of China’s health system transition.” (p. 22).  
The book’s findings draw on a decade of scholarship in contemporary 
China that the author began as a graduate student at University of Chicago. 
Dr. Huang relies on case studies, interviews with scholars, government 
officials, leaders of non-governmental organizations and public health 
professionals and statistical data (He draws heavily on Ministry of Health 
charts and figures in China and accepts them as accurate). He distinguishes 
between policies and institutions and as such makes a theoretical contribu-
tion, as well as providing insight into the underlying causes of a poor 
delivery system in post-Mao China. This system is embedded in many 
larger contexts including family, society, politics, economics, relationships 
etc. 
Chapter Two, ‘Health Governance under Mao 1949-1976,’ discusses 
Mao’s emphasis on goals of equality and universalism and the ways these 
influenced the evolving health care system. Mao’s ‘prevention first’ policy 
and mobilization-based public health proved very effective in tackling 
some major public health challenges. Readers learn about Mao’s push for 
health care for all including the barefoot doctor systems’ attempts to level 
inequity and provide greater access to health care in rural areas. During 
these years, preventive campaigns paralleled the evolution of the party-
state in post-revolutionary China (p. 52). Dr. Huang draws on demogra-
pher Sydney Goldstein’s “bandwagon” concept or the rush of political 
actors to back emerging winners in the policy process (p. 8). He states, 
under Mao, the use of bandwagon was an important phenomenon, impact-
ing the motives, expectations and behavioral patterns of bureaucratic 
public actors.  
Chapter Three, ‘Providing Care for All: Health Care Reforms in Post-
Mao China’ further explores the dramatic health care reforms that began in 
the early 1980s under Deng Xiaoping, along with economic reforms. 
However, by the twenty-first century it was clear that the reform had failed 
to achieve significant improvements in terms of cost, access and equity (p. 
53). According to author Huang, the reasons for this included: 1) the shift 
from “bandwagon politics” to “buck-passing” where suddenly no one was 
accountable. This lack of accountability allowed for both state and non-
state actors to interact with health governance decisions in a fragmented 
and unaccountable system; 2) different approaches between pro-govern-
ment and pro-market entities forced a compromise that often lacked coher-
ence; 3) abuse of the system including bribes and 4) differing understand-
ings about the meaning of “health care” (prevention vs. treatment) (p. 53).  
118                                                                                                  EASTM 41 (2015) 
 
During my doctoral fieldwork on female infertility in China from 1989-
1990 I interviewed patients and health practitioners in health care settings 
including a Western medicine hospital, a Chinese medicine hospital and a 
clinic. In numerous conversations with health colleagues and patients 
about the advantages and disadvantages of both Chinese and U.S. health 
care delivery system, I urged them to keep China’s commitment to univer-
sal health care creating a unique system combining the benefits of both 
Western and Chinese medicine, without following in the footsteps of any 
one country.  
Sadly, the paradigm shift in the 1980s with agricultural liberalization, 
fiscal and bureaucratic decentralization and market-oriented reform 
ultimately undercut the States’ ability to maintain free services, especially 
in the rural areas. It also undermined the State’s ability to prevent and 
control disease (p. 84), especially infectious diseases such as polio, hepatitis, 
HIV/AIDs and SARS.  
Chapter Four, ‘Harnessing the Fourth Horseman: Capacity Building in 
Disease Control and Prevention’ examines the public health challenges 
from 1980s through 2009 as the commitment and resources to build a dis-
ease surveillance and reporting system lessens. The publicly documented 
failure of the HIV and SARS campaigns points to China’s new dynamics 
between science and politics with politics informing health decisions, the 
state-society relationship, and the government-making top down decisions 
leading to a bureaucratic infrastructure in the health delivery field. These 
crises underscore the importance of pursuing a national agenda that 
balanced both social and economic development (p. 92).  
Chapter Five, ‘Building the Ship at Sea: Food and Drug Safety Regula-
tion,’ explores how the coexistence of a heavy-handed state intervention in 
the economic sphere and the state withdrawal from the social sphere posed 
tremendous challenges to food and drug safety regulations in China. Lack 
of accountability, ethics and transparency led to the Sanlu Milk scandal and 
other safety scandals, ultimately leading to the poor reputation worldwide 
of the “Made in China” label. Huang argues that, despite a renewed effort 
in 2009, food and drug safety regulation is still rife with corruption 
pointing to the need for not just regulation but good business ethics too. 
In 2009, public opinion surveys in China ranked health care and food 
and drug safety as among the nation’s top three concerns. In response, 
China’s top administrative body, the State Council, which drafts legislation 
and generally decides the direction of all national policies, in 2009 an-
nounced a health care reform package with five key components: get the 
entire population insured by 2020; lower the cost of basic drugs; boost 
public health services such as prevention and immunization in poorest 
areas; invest in rural hospitals; and restructure largest public hospitals to 
 
Reviews                                                                                                  119 
 
focus on emergency and specialized care (Christopher Beam, “Under the 
Knife,” The New Yorker, August 25, 2014, p. 32-33) 
In Chapter 6, the author concludes with a discussion about the 
implications of health and health care delivery as a governance system. His 
goal is to provide insight into the Chinese healthcare sector crisis in a post-
Mao economy; despite major economic reforms, healthcare and public 
health indicators are poor. Huang argues the buck-passing model interact-
ing with an authoritarian regime, state-society relations and a pre-existing 
policy structure, ultimately shapes the health policy processes and the 
health outcomes in contemporary China.  
Author Huang offers his own suggestions to improve the broken system 
including: 1) Separating public hospital ownership from management and 
ceasing the use of drug sales as the main revenue source for hospitals, 
similar to Taiwan; 2  2) Replacing fee-for-service with diagnostic review 
groups (DRG) and capitation to give those hospitals incentive to hold 
down costs and improve accountability; 3) Enforcing the policies, espe-
cially at the local level in an attempt to reduce corruption. According to 
Huang, the ‘good news’ is the incoming president Xi Jinping has pledged 
to bring higher levels of health care to China’s people—Beijing plans to 
triple its health care spending to $1 trillion by 2020.  
The book covers a wide range of issues over many years. In so doing, Dr. 
Huang demonstrates his impressive knowledge of health policy drawing 
on official government documents and World Health Organization data. 
Although Huang addresses some social context, at times I wanted less 
focus on historical information including data analysis and more focus on 
the social relations embedded in medicine and health policy, such as 
doctor-patient relationships in specific local contexts. As I was writing this 
review, I came across Christopher Beam’s above-mentioned article in The 
New Yorker about the Chinese health care reforms. It examines the health 
care reforms and its mixed results; while officials proudly declared that 
ninety-five percent of the Chinese population had some form of basic 
medical insurance in 2009 as compared to thirty percent in 2003, concerns 
about accessibility, affordability and quality are on the rise, as are violent 
encounters between patients and doctors (p. 33). Coincidentally, Beam 
interviewed Dr. Huang for his article focusing on increased violence by 
patients toward doctors. Huang told him “that the spate of violent inci-
dents reflects the failure of the reforms to solve the problem of affordability 
and access.” Patients still expect the best from the big urban hospitals and 
when they do not get it they get very upset.  
My training as a Medical Anthropologist and qualitative researcher 
                                                          
2 Of every $100 spent on U.S. health care, $10-$12 goes for drugs, in China it is 
$40-$45. 
120                                                                                                  EASTM 41 (2015) 
 
leads me to want to know more about these patients’ expectations and to 
read more reflexivity in understanding the “dynamic processes” in general; 
in Dr. Huang’s book I missed the voices of the patients, staff, doctors and 
administrators, including the personal stories about the ways in which the 
reforms have impacted them.  
In sum, this book has several important applications. First, policy 
analysts seeking to understand a rapidly changing Chinese economy will 
learn how, as Virchow, a prominent early thinker in the development of 
social medicine, said: “Medicine is social science. The structure of health 
services reproduces the political economy of the country and politics is 
nothing else but medicine on a larger scale.” (p. 135) Second, as a teacher at 
the university level, I recommend the book for upper division health care, 
public health administration, and cross-cultural health policy classes. Third, 
as the world economy and international security becomes increasingly 
vulnerable to major disease outbreaks such as SARS in China and more 
recently, Ebola in Africa, the book demonstrates how we all stand to benefit 
when the global world health system is in better shape. My hope is this 
book, with its insights, will have a practical result of achieving positive 
health care in China’s rapidly changing economy and that China will lead 
the way in creating a better health care model. 
 


Yanzhong Huang, Governing Health in Contemporary China

Review Article on Joy Yueyue Zhang, The Cosmopolitanization of Science: Stem Cell Governance in Chin

Döring, Ole

The Predicament of Theory: How The Cosmopolitanization of Science: Stem Cell Governance in China by Joy Yueyue Zhang Illustrates the Need for Advanced Groundwork for Cultural Studies

Vetrov, Viatcheslav

Reviews                                                                                                  121 
 
Pascal Crozet and Annick Horiuchi (eds.), Traduire, transposer, naturaliser: 
La formation d’une langue scientifique moderne hors des frontières de 
l’Europe au XIXe siècle (Translating, Transposing, Naturalizing: On the 
Formation of Non-European Modern Scientific Languages in the 19th 
Century), Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004, 264 pp. 
Viatcheslav Vetrov 
[Viatcheslav Vetrov received his PhD in Sinology at Bonn University in 2009. He 
is the author of the monographs Das Traummotiv im Yuan-Drama: Zur 
Semiotik der chinesischen Formelemente (Wiesbaden, 2010) and Instrument 
Metapher: das „Guanzhuibian“ im Licht der Manuskriptforschung 
(Münster, 2015). He is currently working as assistant professor at the Institute of 
Oriental Studies, Heidelberg University. Contact: viatcheslav.vetrov@zo.uni-
heidelberg.de] 
The nineteenth century was an epoch of rapid mutual epistemic 
approaches between civilisations of the Orient and Occident which at 
previous stages had enjoyed a more or less undisturbed autochthonous 
development. The process of their eventually moving closer together was 
motivated by a variety of factors, most crucially by the imbalance of power 
relations in the colonial age. The strength of colonial powers was 
increasingly associated with their sciences. In order to confront this 
strength on an equal basis, it was therefore necessary to determine the 
exact reasons for the absence of equal scientific methods in the Orient, to 
eliminate obstacles in the way of constructing knowledge systems compa-
tible with those of the Occident, and to ascertain what elements of the 
indigenous traditions should be discarded or maintained in the self-
strengthening process.3 
It was not only the colonized Orient that was in search of answers to 
these questions. For various reasons, the Occident was—and continues to 
be—just as intensely preoccupied with these problems as well: to the most 
influential early works on epistemic paradigms characteristic of Oriental/ 
Occidental civilisations belong Max Weber’s studies on different ways of 
rationalizing the world (Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen, 1915-1919); to the 
                                                          
3 For detailed critical discussions of the relationships between self-strengthening 
movements and translation processes in the Far East, see James St. André’s/Peng 
Hsiao-yen’s “Introduction” to China and Its Others: Knowledge Transfer through 
Translation, 1829-2010 (2012, pp. 11-25), Lydia H. Liu’s Translingual Practice: 
Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity. China, 1900-1937 (1995, esp. pp. 
20-25, “Traveling Theory and the Postcolonial Critique”), Michael Lackner et al. 
(eds.), New Terms for New Ideas: Western Knowledge and Lexical Change in Late Imperial 
China (2001). 
122                                                                                                  EASTM 41 (2015) 
 
most recent ones belong works of authors (e.g. Hans Lenk and Gregor Paul 
(eds.), Epistemological issues in classical Chinese philosophy (1993); Joachim 
Kurtz’ The Discovery of Chinese Logic (2011)) who, being largely inspired by 
Michel Foucault and Edward Said, stress the necessity of a politically 
correct treatment of non-Occidental epistemic systems and of cautiously 
qualifying the exact extent of their ‘otherness.’ 
The title under review is a collection of essays on epistemic shifts in the 
Far and Near East in the nineteenth century. The focus is on the develop-
ment of modern scientific terminologies in Japan (Annick Horiuchi’s 
“Langues mathématiques de Meiji: à la recherche du consensus?”[Meiji 
languages of mathematics: in search of a consensus?], pp. 43-70; Mieko 
Macé’s “La création d’une terminologie médicale dans le Japon du XIXe 
siècle: l’example de la physiologie” [Creating a terminology of medicine in 
19th century Japan], pp. 71-98; etc.), China (Andrea Bréard’s and David 
Wright’s contributions, which are discussed below), and the world of Islam 
(Pascal Crozet’s “Entre science et art: la géométrie descriptive et ses 
applications à l’épreuve de la traduction (Egypte, XIXe siècle)” [Between 
science and art: descriptive geometry and its applicability in the light of 
translation (Egypt, 19th c.)], pp. 171-200; Feza Günergun’s “Chemical 
Nomenclature in Nineteenth-Century Turkey,” pp. 201-235; and S. Irfan 
Habib’s “Transmission of Science through Translation: A Study of Urdu in 
19th and early 20th Century India,” pp. 237-250.) 
The creation of new terminologies under the influence of Western 
sciences is viewed as a complex process, in which indigenous traditions 
often played a significant intermediary role. A detailed investigation of 
these traditional elements against the background of epistemic changes is 
the central point of discussion in most of the articles contained in the 
volume.   
In his article on the Japanese language of botany “Traduire Dodoens ou 
les premiers pas de la botanique européenne en japonais” (Translating 
Dodoens, or: the first steps of European botany in Japanese, pp. 9-25), 
Georges Métailié raises the question, how the science of botany could gain 
so much ground in the relatively short period between 1822 and 1834. The 
year 1834 when Udagawa Yōan’s 宇田川榕菴 (1798-1846) Sources of botany 
(Shokugaku keigen 植学啓原) appeared is generally regarded as the date of 
the birth of Japanese botany. Between 1822 and 1834, two other works had 
been published in which a new modern scientific terminology was minted 
to fit the Western standards of botanical knowledge: Udagawa Yōan’s 
Canon of botany (Botanika kyō 菩多尼訶経, 1822) and Itō Keisuke‘s 伊藤圭介 
(1803-1901) Nomenclature of plants in the Far East (Taisei honzō meiso 泰西本草
名疏, 1829.) To answer his question, Métailié turns to an earlier period of 
scientific transfer between Japan and the West, i.e. to the translations of 
Rembert Dodoens’ Cruydt-Boeck (The Book of Plants) into Japanese since 
Reviews                                                                                                  123 
 
the late eighteenth century. Dodoens’ voluminous work that consisted of 
1,492 pages and 2,000 illustration plates had been published in Dutch in 
1554 and presented to a Japanese shōgun in 1659. Systematic translations of 
this work into Japanese had begun only in the late eighteenth century, after 
Ishii Shōsuke 石井庄助 (1743-?) received the order to translate it in 1792. 
Ishii did not produce a complete translation, however, and his work was 
continued by a number of other Japanese scholars, who completed it in 
1823. For Métailié the curious fact that needs to be elucidated is why these 
scholars devoted themselves to translating a scientific work that was over 
two hundred years old, and did not correspond to the actual scientific 
standards of Linnean classification of plants. According to Métailié, these 
scholars were aware of the fact that the Dutch text represented a synthesis 
of traditional Occidental botany dating back to the antiquity. In order to 
render this foreign tradition accessible to Japanese readers, the translators 
had to resort to some elements of the indigenous Sino-Japanese tradition, 
primarily to Li Shizhen’s 李時珍  (1518-1593) Bencao gangmu 本草綱目 
(Classified Materia Medica, 1596). The convergence of both traditions in the 
act of translation effected the entire terminology of the final Japanese text 
version as well as the commentaries to it - a major part of the translated 
terms was rendered by Chinese characters which were given revised 
meaning, while Latin and Dutch plant names were also given katakana and 
hiragana transcriptions. In Métailié’s view, it is remarkable that no reference 
is made to the Linnean method in general, or to the difference of sexual 
organs which in particular is crucial for the Linnean classification of plants. 
Métailié’s article thus provides a good illustration of the participation of 
the Sino-Japanese tradition as well as of the pre-modern Western botanical 
tradition in the development of radically new scientific terminologies. 
A similar investigation is made into the rise of chemical terminologies 
in China by David Wright in his “‘Changing and Uniting:’ The Translation 
of Terms and Concepts for Chemical Combination into Chinese (1840-
1900),” pp. 147-167. The unification of modern Chinese chemical terminolo-
gies of elements and compounds remained a highly problematic issue until 
well into the twentieth century. Wright presents a number of methods 
applied to the rendering of Western terms in Chinese: using existing terms 
for elements (e.g. tie 鐵 (iron), yin 銀 (silver), jin 金 (gold)), transliteration of 
Western names (e.g. ailumini’en 哀盧彌尼恩  for aluminium), reviving 
obsolete characters (e.g. xin鋅 for zinc), etc. The unification turned out to 
be difficult not because of the presence of these various possibilities as such, 
but was rather conditioned by the slow adaptation of traditional Chinese 
perceptions of chemical substances to the concept of chemical elements as 
provided by Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794), i.e. to the idea of elements as 
“substances into which we are capable of, by any means, to reduce bodies 
by decomposition” (Wright, p. 150). The main difficulty for Chinese schol-
124                                                                                                  EASTM 41 (2015) 
 
ars was the distinction of thing (substance), concept and word. To illustrate 
this problem, Wright cites questions of Chinese readers sent in to John 
Fryer’s science journal Gezhi huibian 格致彙編 (Scientific Magazine), for 
example: “How can something as obviously solid, opaque and black as 
carbon possibly be hidden inside something as white as sugar, or be 
contained in something as insubstantial as air? Can liquid water really be 
made of two gases?” (p. 161). Wright’s article may be regarded as 
supporting the thesis of previous works on the differences between 
traditional Chinese and traditional Western modes of producing defini-
tions and classifications of things, for example Roel Stercks’ The Animal and 
the Daemon in Early China (2002, especially the Chapter ‘Problems of 
Definition,’ pp. 16-21) and Artjom Kobzev’s On symbols and numbers in 
classical Chinese philosophy (Učenije o simvolach i čislach v kitajskoj klassičeskoj 
filosofii, 1994.) 
However, it was not only the difference of philosophical methods of 
observing the natural world and producing scientific abstractions which 
made the process of scientific transfers difficult. Another point of confron-
tation between indigenous traditions and Western scientific methodology 
was the problem of choosing a suitable literary style for scientific transla-
tions. For Oriental scholars, it was often a matter of extreme importance to 
make the newly created scientific terminologies meet the standards of 
traditional literary forms and refined tastes. This issue is reflected upon by 
Andrea Bréard in her “La traduction d’ouvrages de mathématique en 
Chine à la fin du XIXe siècle: un processus d’introduction et d’intégration” 
(Translations of mathematical works in China at the end of the 19th century: 
a process of introduction and integration, pp. 123-146) and by Feza 
Günergun in her “Chemical nomenclature in nineteenth-century Turkey” 
(pp. 201-235). In Bréard’s analysis, prominent attention is given to the 
concept of elegance (ya 雅 ) in nineteenth century Chinese translations. 
Whereas Yan Fu 嚴復 (1853-1921), who was one of the most influential 
Chinese theorists of translation, appealed for elegance as an indispensable 
criterion of good scholarly translations,4 Hua Hengfang 華蘅芳 (1833-1902) 
remonstrated in his Xuesuan bitan 學 算 筆 談  (Essays on Learning 
Mathematics, 1882) against literary elegance, because trying to be elegant 
could induce violations of mathematical logic (A. Bréard, op. cit., p. 132.) 
On her part, Feza Günergun analyses the competition of Turkish and 
Arabic in the scientific translations of nineteenth-century Turkey, where 
conservative literary taste made it necessary that new terms for chemical 
compounds be given in Arabic—the highly respected language of Islam—
and not in everyday Turkish (Feza Günergun, p. 212.)  
                                                          
4 Yan Fu, Preface to Tian yan lun 天演論 (On Evolution, 1898), Beijing: Shangwu 
yinshuguan, 1981, p. xi. 
Reviews                                                                                                  125 
 
In his contribution “La traduction scientifique à l’ère Meiji: la fabrication 
des manuels de santé japonais” (Scientifique translation in the Meiji era: the 
fabrication of Japanese manuals of health, pp. 99-119), Beat Ringger turns 
to a field of knowledge which is in many ways different from all the rest of 
the sciences (botany, mathematics, chemistry etc.) covered in the volume. 
His topic is hygiene (yōjō 養生) and manuals of hygiene care (eisei ron 衛生論), 
a genre which had come to be popular in Japan in the nineteenth century. 
In contrast to other branches of knowledge, hygiene presented a specific 
case, as it allowed the perceptions of body care as they had been tradi-
tionally channelled through Daoist and Confucian classics to merge har-
moniously with modern Western hygiene discourse. Ringger explicates this 
phenomenon through the material of Uratani Yoshiharu‘s 浦谷義春 
(nineteenth century), Yōjō no susume 養生のすすめ (Recommendations for 
hygiene, 1876). Uratani pays attention to the importance of body care in the 
following words: 
Endowed with an intelligence which enables him to 
understand all things of the world perfectly, man should 
also know what is harmful to his body (mi 身 ). This 
knowledge is nothing else than the knowledge of yōjō 
(hygiene, 養生).Yōjō is the origin of health (kenkō 健康) and 
health is the fundament of energetic effort, endurance, 
happiness and longevity (benrei nintai fukuun chōju 勉励忍
耐福運長寿, p. 103). 
In his text, Uratani appears not merely as a propagator of a healthy way of 
life, but as a participant in the creation of a generally accessible new 
terminology of health: every time he has to deal with some terms which 
might confront his readers with difficulties of comprehension, he is careful 
to introduce them in as simple a way as possible. For example, when 
introducing the Western concept of “rheumatism,” he renders it first in 
kanji 僂麻質斯 (ru ma chi su), katakana and hiragana, and then provides a 
short Japanese definition: “It is a disease causing pain which is usually 
called ‘the disease of shoulders’ or ‘the arm disease of the fifty-year old.’” 
(p. 111) 
A further important theme which Ringger discusses in connection with 
the formation of new body care terminology is that of nationalist rhetoric: 
in Meiji Japan, the concept of a healthy body transcended the private 
sphere and was understood as a matter of national priority (priorité 
nationale, p. 114.) Making this observation, Ringger touches upon a subject 
which since the nineteenth century has been crucial not only for Japanese 
self-strengthening programs, but for the whole field of creating scientific 
terminologies in the global context. The implementation of this purity and 
126                                                                                                  EASTM 41 (2015) 
 
health rhetoric in scientific taxonomies remains a wide-spread means of 
academic communication even up to the present day.5 
Another contribution which is methodologically different from the rest 
of the articles in the discussed volume, is Shigehisa Kuriyama’s “Transla-
tion and the history of Japanese irritability,” pp. 27-41. Kuriyama’s analysis 
is concentrated on the fate of a medical concept (shaku 癪, irritability), which 
up to the Meiji had been part of a commonly understood lexicon, and 
which fell out of use completely after the introduction of the latest Western 
medical knowledge in the late nineteenth century. Kuriyama reconstructs 
the original Sino-Japanese semantic components of this concept, and 
illustrates deep correspondences between the constitution of scientific 
terminologies and scientific methods: the fact that shaku has virtually disap-
peared from contemporary Japanese is due to Japan’s conversion to an 
anatomically-based nosology and the fading of haptic consciousness. 
The volume under discussion provides not only valuable information 
on the formation of modern non-European scientific terminologies, it also 
displays a variety of perspectives—philosophy, rhetoric, language world-
view, stylistics—to approach these processes. For anyone interested in the 
modern transfers of knowledge between East and West it will be a helpful 
and instructive reading. 
 
 
                                                          
5 For further details see my article “Zur Dekonstruktion des Un/Gesunden in 
philologischen Taxonomien: Westlich-Chinesischer Renaissance-Diskurs” 
(Deconstructing Good and Poor Health in Philological Taxonomies: the 
Renaissance-Discourse in China and in the West, Oriens Extremus 2012, pp. 231-268), 
where health and purity are discussed as an indispensable part of the politics of 
language propagated by such ideologically different characters as Xu Zhimo 
徐志摩, Liang Qichao 梁啟超, Hu Shi 胡適, and Mao Zedong 毛澤東, among others. 
For a more recent remarkable example of using health rhetoric in academic 
discourse, see Brent Nongbri’s Before Religion (2013), where the “unhealthy practice” 
(cf. op. cit., p. 159) of using the term “religion” in religious studies is criticized, and 
where the reader is admonished to purge his/her vocabulary of words designating 
nonexistent things.     


Pascal Crozet and Annick Horiuchi (eds.), Traduire, transposer, naturaliser: La formation d’une langue scientifique moderne hors des frontières de l’Europe au XIXe siècle (Translating, Transposing, Naturalizing: On the Formation of Non-European Modern Scientific Languages in the 19th Century)

east.org, admin

 East Asian 
Science, Technology, 
and Medicine 
 
Number 38 (2013) 
2014 
 
A journal dedicated to the study of traditional and modern 
East Asian science, technology, and medicine. 
 
Editor-in-Chief 
Hans Ulrich Vogel 
Asien-Orient-Institut 
Abteilung für Sinologie und Koreanistik 
Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen 
eastm@uni-tuebingen.de 
 
 
Editors 
Christine Moll-Murata                                                       Ulrich Theobald 
Fakultät für                                                                   Abteilung für 
Ostasienwissenschaften                                             Sinologie und Koreanistik                                   
Ruhr-Universität Bochum                      Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen                 
                                                                    
                                                        
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Abteilung für Sinologie und Koreanistik, Tübingen 
 
 
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Iwo Amelung, Sinologie, Institut für Orientalische und Ostasiatische Philologien, Goethe 
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Bridie J. Andrews, Department of History, Bentley College 
Francesca Bray, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh 
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Morris Low, Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Queensland, 
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Paul U. Unschuld, Horst-Götz-Stiftungsinstitut für Theorie, Geschichte und Ethik 
Chinesischer Lebenswissenschaften, Charité, Berlin 
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Zhang Baichun, Institute for the History of Natural Sciences, Chinese Academy of 
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This journal is printed on acid-free paper.                                        ISSN #1562-918X 


EDITORIAL

FRONT AND BACK COVER

Helliwell, David

Reviews                                                                                                                  135 
 
Timothy Hugh Barrett, The Woman Who Discovered Printing, New Haven 
and London: Yale University Press, 2008, 176 pp.  
David Helliwell 
[David Helliwell is Curator of Chinese Collections in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. 
He is interested in the Chinese book as an object, and is currently engaged in a 
project named Serica to catalogue and selectively digitise the Bodleian’s pre-
modern Chinese holdings, which date to the beginning of the seventeenth century. 
Serica project: http://serica.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/; associated blog: http:// 
oldchinesebooks.wordpress.com. Contact: david.helliwell@bodleian.ox.ac.uk] 
The invention of printing in China in the middle of the first millennium has 
long fascinated cultural historians, not least because of the apparent 
indifference to it in the country of its origin by contrast with its cataclysmic 
effect in Europe, to which it supposedly spread some thousand years later. 
For half a century after its first publication in 1925, The Invention of Printing 
in China and its Spread Westward by Thomas Francis Carter was considered 
the standard western work on the subject, and remained the only work 
until the appearance in 1983 of the small but coruscating jewel by Denis 
Twitchett Printing and Publishing in Mediaeval China (based on a talk given 
to the Wynkyn de Worde Society in London in 1977), followed two years 
later in 1985 by Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin’s compendious and not entirely 
satisfactory Paper and printing section of Needham’s Science and Civilisation 
in China. Recent decades have seen the production of many more special-
ised accounts and different approaches, of which Professor Barrett’s work 
must be considered not only one of the most original, but also the most 
readable.  
The author sets out his stall in the introduction, where the contents of 
the work’s nine chapters are described. His argument in summary is that 
the development of printing was driven by religion at the hands of the 
Empress Wu, who usurped the throne for the two decades 684-705 AD. 
Ironically, it was the bitter memory of her reign that braked its impetus for 
over a century, until its widespread use was first noted on 29th December 
835 in the Old Tang history (Jiu tangshu 舊唐書; 17 xia 下), and at greater 
length in the encyclopaedia Cefu yuangui 冊府元龜 (160:5b) in connection 
with the printing not of religious texts, but of calendars. The dust jacket 
ascribes this intermission in the development of printing to the fact that its 
most prominent supporter was a woman, but within, this improbable 
assertion does not feature prominently. Rather, the interesting possibility is 
raised in chapter eight that it might have been due to a growing hostility to 
136                                                                                                  EASTM 39 (2014) 
 
foreigners and their religion, with which the nascent printing industry was 
associated. 
The spread of Buddhism in the fifth century had required the produc-
tion of multiple copies of short texts (or “spells”) to be produced and 
disseminated as relics embodying the presence of Buddha rather than as 
reading material. Although the technological requirements for printing 
were in place by the end of that century, the abundant supply of paper and 
the use of the brush had made it possible to satisfy demand in manuscript. 
But the social and religious turmoil of the following century were 
increasing demand to the point where some improved method of produc-
tion was required. In his fourth chapter, the author introduces the 
intriguing notion that the sense of insecurity (the seed-corn of religion) in 
China at this time may have been heightened by the same cloud of volcanic 
ash that obscured the light of the sun for a year in 536 as noted by 
Procopius, one of the many fascinating cultural parallels that Professor 
Barrett draws in the pages of his book. 
The sixth and seventh chapters are more tailored to the book’s title, and 
adduce a wealth of evidence, much of it new, to suggest that the Empress 
Wu not only perceived the potential of printing to achieve her aims, but 
exploited it on a grand scale; the eighth chapter continues the story of 
printing through the following century from what little can be gleaned 
from the historical record until the technology becomes widespread from 
the ninth century. As the author states in his introduction, “these chapters 
will certainly be hard going for any reader of history who expects a stream 
of effortless revelations”. The evidence has moved us closer to the probable 
reasons for the development of printing, as well as the time frame within 
which this development took place, but it continues to create a vacuum 
into which these conclusions are drawn rather than provide us with the 
reassuring certainty of a figure for printing comparable with Cai Lun 蔡倫 
(c. 50-c. 121) for paper. 
An example of such a vacuum is the fact that whilst the earliest written 
reference to printing does not occur until 835, the first two extant printed 
texts are still the dharani of the stone pagoda in Pulguksa erected in 751 in 
Kyongju in Korea, and the million dharani (baiwan ta tuoluoni 百万塔陀羅尼) 
commissioned by the Empress Shōtoku in 764 in Japan in gratitude for the 
suppression of a rebellion. Into this vacuum rushes the idea that it must 
have been the elaborate funeral obsequies for the departed empress that 
required vast numbers of spells to be produced, which were distributed not 
only throughout the empire, but far beyond it, along with the technology 
that produced them. If only one survived! 
On this point, the author bemoans the fact that no one researching the 
beginnings of printing in Europe is put into his situation. Here, the tech-
Reviews                                                                                                                  137 
 
nology is not only a thousand years younger, but the evidences are 
abundant, if not total, and have been scrutinised by hundreds of scholars 
over many decades. The reverse is the case in China, where the technology 
emerges at a time when written historical sources are few, where examples 
of what it produced amount to little more than scraps. Furthermore, in the 
west there is no community of scholars engaged in the study of Chinese 
printing history comparable with the community engaged in the study of 
their own. 
All this makes Professor Barrett’s book the more remarkable for the 
number and variety of sources he has located, and the realisation of their 
relevance to his thesis. His book is an ornament to the shelf of any scholar, 
because unlike the work of many academics these days it is not only 
comprehensible, but actually enjoyable. 
Regrettably, the modern practice of lumping footnotes at the back of the 
book with separate sequences for each chapter has been followed. In the 
case of a book like this, replete with new ideas of which the source is as 
interesting as the idea itself, the only place for a footnote is at the foot of the 
page, as its name would suggest. There is also no bibliography of works 
cited. It surprises me that university presses produce books in this way, 
and that authors tolerate it. Physically as well as intellectually however, the 
book will stand the test of time: it is printed on good paper, and has a 
stitched binding. 
 


Timothy Hugh Barrett, The Woman Who Discovered Printing

Alleton, Vivienne

Reviews                                                                                                                  117 
 
Joachim Kurtz, The Discovery of Chinese Logic, Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2011, 
471 pp. 
Vivienne Alleton 
[Viviane Alleton (1930-...) received her PhD from University Paris VI in 1983. 
She had been Professor («Directrice d’études») at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en 
Sciences Sociales (Paris) on a Chair untitled «Language, Knowledge and Society in 
China» from 1991 to 2009. Her researches and publications deal with (1) the 
grammar of modern Chinese, particularly adverbs, modal verbs, and generally all 
that correspond to the implication of the speaker into his discourse, (2) Chinese 
writing system and its representations. Contact: v.all@orange.fr] 
The discovery of Chinese logic followed three centuries of attempts to 
import Western logic. From the beginning of the seventeenth to the end of 
the nineteenth century, successive efforts on the part of the Jesuits and 
Protestants to introduce the notions of logic into China failed to elicit any 
interest. This situation changed in the early years of the twentieth century, 
and at the same time, discussion arose over the ancestry of Chinese logic, 
which was seen to date back more than two millennia. This rediscovery of 
the neglected aspects of the intellectual history of China pushed Western 
logic back to second place.  
Joachim Kurtz relates this story in great detail, devoting four chapters to 
the introduction of this science from the West. The fifth chapter deals with 
the discovery of fragments of logical theorizing in ancient Chinese texts, 
and the Epilogue focuses on contemporary discourse on the question of a 
specific “Chinese logic”. Along with the history of this “rediscovery”, he 
provides the terminology used at each stage. 
The Jesuits produced the first texts introducing European logic in China. 
Matteo Ricci, in the Tian zhu shiyi, “The True Meaning of the Lord of 
Heaven” (1603), used Aristotelian terms from the perspective of Confucian 
moral philosophy. One example is his translation of “cause” as suo yi ran 
“that by which the things are the way they are”. The response to these texts 
was friendly, the impact nil. 
In 1623, Giulio Aleni published the Xi xue fan “General Outline of 
Western Knowledge”, a taxonomy of sciences, including an accessible 
presentation of logic. Among the collections of books brought from Rome 
at this time, there was a monumental work in two volumes, In universam 
dialecticam Aristotelis, which offered a clear introduction to contemporary 
European logic. Francisco Furtado and Li Zhizao teamed up to work on the 
translation of this text from 1627 to 1629, producing the Mingli tan, whose 
ten scrolls (c. 600 pages) have been preserved. The authors invented 
118                                                                                      EASTM 38 (2013)/2014 
 
entirely new terminology, with hundreds of neologisms. Although they 
avoided phonic borrowings, the quantity of new words was dissuasive. 
They did not try to adapt any of the ancient Chinese terms, as had been 
done in some other fields. From this entirely new lexicon, not one word has 
survived. Lacking any connection to Chinese tradition and with a strong 
Christian bias, it had a very small number of readers, and few copies were 
produced. 
After the Manchu conquest and the beginning of the Qing dynasty, 
Ferdinand Verbiest took advantage of his position teaching mathematics 
and astronomy to the emperor Qian Long to suggest the idea of compiling 
a Chinese version of European philosophy. The Jesuit spent five years 
(1678-1683) preparing this book, the Qiong li xue, which was designed as a 
“trap” for converting the emperor to the Catholic religion. Although this 
text does not present specific grammatical difficulties, the terminology is 
opaque for the Chinese reader and the book was perceived as “another 
missionary ploy” designed to destabilize Chinese canonical writings. The 
work was soon forgotten. 
For two centuries, European logic was not even mentioned in China. 
The post-Newtonian science presented by the Protestants after 1875 was 
quite different to what had been tentatively introduced by the Jesuits. The 
translation of Bacon’s New Organon was received with interest, as there was 
a desire to open up new horizons, but also with some reluctance, due to the 
religious context of the presentation and to the implications of the text. 
Joseph Edkins provided the first presentation of logic for a wide 
audience in a “comprehensive biography” of Aristotle for the Peking 
Magazine. In the 1880s, he was in charge of the translation of a series of 
Science Primers, including a volume on Logic. He presented logic as one of 
the three topics of European philosophy, along with physics and ethics, but 
he did not demonstrate why this discipline presented an interest for the 
Chinese. The language he used included an entirely new set of expressions, 
but they were mainly paraphrases. The success of this work was modest.  
Another important protagonist was John Fryer, a prolific translator. His 
Lixue xuzhi (1898), “What we know about logic”, did not place logic in the 
taxonomy of sciences. The discipline was also absent from the theories on 
the “Chinese origin of Western knowledge” that began to flourish. 
After China was defeated in the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-1895, the 
search for a new order was felt to be urgent. In this context, the most 
important actor was Yan Fu (1853–1921), who saw logic as a necessary 
basis for new scientific and political programs, replacing intuitionism and 
the traditional reliance on ancient texts. He insisted on experimental 
procedures. In addition to his many other activities (articles in the 
newspapers, public talks, etc.), this prolific translator published works in 
Reviews                                                                                                                  119 
 
the field of logic: Tian yan lun [“On evolution”], Mule mingxue [an 
adaptation of John Stuart Mill’s System of Logic], Mingxue qianshuo [a 
translation of William Stanley Jevons’s Logic Primer]. These works, which 
are sometimes more like paraphrases than strict translations, were of little 
help in understanding logical procedures. However, they raised interest in 
the topic and, after more than 250 years of indifference, secured a place for 
logic on China’s intellectual map.  
In 1898, logic was introduced to the curriculum of the Imperial 
University as an elective discipline, and it became part of the Upper 
Normal Schools’ introductory course in “general education”. Recruiting 
professors was problematic and the teaching was rudimentary, but the 
publication of a large number of textbooks translated from Japanese 
secured a position for logic in the science curriculum. Other scholars 
contributed to this development, such as Wang Guowei, who, in 1908, 
provided a new rendition of Jevons, or the Catholics, who added the 
Buddhist contribution to the picture. One characteristic of the texts dealing 
with logic published during this period was the widespread presence of 
graphic and symbolic representations. This use of the symbolic resources 
found in the Chinese tradition of exegesis, although not standardized, 
seems to have been efficient. 
Within no more than a decade, logic was incorporated as a non-
sensitive field, and seen as a methodological tool, either as an ancillary of 
natural sciences or as an extension of traditional Chinese philology. 
The discovery of logical discourse in ancient Chinese texts occurred 
gradually after 1895. Yan Fu, in his Tian yanlu (1898), identified, in the Shiji, 
some references to induction and deduction, and suggested parallels be-
tween European logic and Chinese philosophy. However, he did not go 
further. It was from the year 1880, in Meiji Japan, that more serious 
discussions were initiated on the subject of “Eastern” contributions to uni-
versal philosophical problems and that the term “Chinese logic” was first 
used. Japanese scholars considered that ancient authors such as Mencius 
had taken the rules of logic into account without, however, constructing 
coherent theories.  
At the turn of the twenties century, four influential scholars touched 
upon these issues. Liu Shipei suggested reviving ancient Chinese logic and 
supplementing it with Western logic. Zhang Bingling focused on the 
diversity of the Chinese intellectual heritage. He referred to the forms of 
reasoning in Indian dialectics and compared them to European syllogistic 
reasoning and to the fragmentary insights preserved in the Mohist canon. 
Liang Qichao did not consider it necessary to find explicit logical theories: 
he chose to examine the logical implications in discursive practices. Wang 
Guowei was the author of a short essay about “The Logic of the Non- 
120                                                                                      EASTM 38 (2013)/2014 
 
Canonical Masters of the Zhou and Qin Periods” (1905). These four authors 
agreed on two points: there is explicit evidence of logic in ancient Chinese 
thought, and the most valuable sources for retrieving it are the Mohists and 
Xunzi. They diverge, however, about the terminological framework. 
Joachim Kurtz limits his presentation to the “age of discovery”. In the 26 
pages of his Epilogue, he describes how, shortly before 1900, logic was 
incorporated into the system of education, and how the discovery of 
fragments of logical discourse in ancient texts resulted in the invention of 
an unbroken Chinese tradition.  In the first half of the 1930’s, Hu Shi and 
Zhang Bingling assumed that there was a basic historical continuity from 
classical Chinese thought to modern logic. Since the properties of names 
were “a shared concern of all ancient thinkers”, they claimed that Chinese 
logic had its own identity, blurring the distinction between explicit logical 
statement and implicit logical structure. After 1949, the impact of Marxist 
ideology and nationalism resulted in a systematic promotion of particular 
features of the Chinese tradition. The Academy of Social Sciences was in 
charge of a large inventory that resulted in a multi-volume anthology 
which is still in the making. However this Maoist vision did not put a stop 
to the polemics about the existence of a specific “Chinese” logic. 
J. Kurtz’s personal point of view is that the “protracted hunt for explicit 
theories” in de-contextualized fragments is of no use: in his opinion, it is 
only when we understand how arguments were presented and addressed 
in every field of science and practice that we will be able to give China its 
rightful place in intellectual history. 
An important feature of this book is the attention J. Kurtz gives to 
terminology. Throughout the text, he discusses the choice of technical 
terms and in the appendices (54 pages), he classifies the terms of logic used 
by the authors in the texts he mentions for each period. The bibliography 
includes more than 800 entries. 
This book is a truly an historical and linguistic achievement. J. Kurtz is 
the first author to provide such an exhaustive presentation of the 
progressive introduction of Western views of logic and of the emergence of 
an exchange of views on “Chinese logic”. The definition he gives of the 
heritage of logic in Chinese civilisation is of interest and merits discussion. 
 
 
 


Joachim Kurtz, The Discovery of Chinese Logic

Stanley-Baker, Michael

Paul Unschuld, Huang Di Nei Jing Su Wen: Nature, Knowledge, Imagery in an Ancient Chinese Medical Text; Hermann Tessenow and Paul U. Unschuld, A Dictionary of the Huang Di nei jing su wen; Paul U. Unschuld and Hermann Tessenow, in collaboration with Zheng Jinsheng, Huang Di Nei Jing Su Wen: An Annotated Translation of Huang Di’s Inner Classic—Basic Questions, vol. I & II

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