| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Yung-Chen Chiang. Social Engineering and the Social Sciences in China, 1919–1949. (Cambridge Modern China Series.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2001. Pp. xiv, 299. $59.95.

In this illuminating study of the blossoming of modern social science in China in the decades before the Communist Revolution, the focus is on money. The quality of Chinese social research in the 1930s or so has been remarked on before; years ago, Maurice Freedman asserted that, outside the West, "China was the seat of the most flourishing sociology in the world, at least in respect of its intellectual quality" (British Journal of Sociology 14 [1963]: 1–19). Now Yung-Chen Chiang shows us what made this research possible. 1

Social science began to be taught in Chinese universities in the 1920s and 1930s, largely by Chinese who had studied abroad, many with American doctoral degrees. Underpaid and overworked, without time or means for social research, they could only repeat in their teaching and writing what they had learned in foreign textbooks and classrooms. As Xiaotong Fei, who would become China's leading sociologist, recalled, "in college, we . . . learned from books about Chicago gangs and Russian immigrants in America, but . . . little or nothing about the Chinese gentry in the town and the peasants in the village" (Hsiao-tung Fei, Earthbound China: A Study of the Peasant Economy in Yunnan [1945], p. viii). Developing a social science relevant to China would require outside funding, as this study, the first such to be based on American institutional archives as well as Chinese social science publications, shows convincingly. . . .

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