Government and academy in Republican China: History of Academia Sinica, 1927-1949

This dissertation investigates the history and legacy of modern China's leading institution of advanced research, the Central Research Academy (Zhongyang yanjiuyuan), better known in the West as Academia Sinica. The establishment of Academia Sinica in 1927 marked the formal institutionalization of science in China, not only forging a working alliance between government policy-makers and academics, enabling the development of a scientific society, but also bringing science and technology directly to bear upon China's nation-building efforts in its drive to become a modern, industrialized state.; Consisting of thirteen research institutes that concentrated on natural and social sciences, Academia Sinica was founded as part of the Nationalist Government's new state-building project. Academia Sinica's central goal was to conduct academic research, to help the government make scientific policy, and to guide, coordinate and promote China's nation-building efforts. During the Republican period, Academia Sinica recruited the brightest Chinese talent from home and abroad for government service. It also engaged in a series of cultural and scientific undertakings, such as founding libraries and laboratories, participating in various international conferences, popularizing scientific knowledge through public lectures, publishing learned journals and monographs, standardizing scientific terminology, and setting up new research agencies in cooperation with the government.; Based on archival research in the Second National Historical Archives in Nanjing, the Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, the Institute of Modern History, and the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica in Taipei, this dissertation is the first historical study in English of Academia Sinica. It examines China's centralized academic system both as a self-regulating community and as a partner with government during the Republican period. It also investigates the history of Academia Sinica through several interrelated aspects, such as Academia Sinica's profound influence on China's scientific institutionalization; the selection of models for Academia Sinica in a rapidly changing Chinese society; the emergence of professional scientists and scientific professionals in Academia Sinica and their ideological impact on China's scientific community; the conflict and cooperation between professional autonomy and bureaucratic patronage during the Republican years over the issue of scientific freedom; and the change and continuity in modern China's scientific system through the 1949 political transformation.; Academia Sinica was a product of its time, a time when China was attempting to break with its cultural tradition and to reestablish itself as a modernized nation-state in a large part through the advancement of science and technology. The history of Academia Sinica, therefore, is not simply a narrative of an institution, but the story of an important group of Chinese intellectuals and their interaction with the government at a critical juncture in twentieth-century Chinese history.