Darwin in the Middle Kingdom

Darwin in the Middle Kingdom brings science and culture into dialogue to rethink how humans have understood their relationship to the natural world. Taking the Chinese reception of Darwinism as its point of departure, the book examines how scientific developments in Europe and North America shaped modern Chinese culture and society, as Western environmentalism and animal advocacy were in turn informed by the "Middle Kingdom," or China as a civilization and a cultural other. The book's scope extends far beyond China and Charles Darwin: it traces the afterlives of evolutionary theory across a wide range of disciplines—from ecology, paleoanthropology, and ethology to philosophy, history, and linguistics—over the past century and a half. At its core, the book develops the concept of ecological consciousness, or the awareness of interconnections between lifeforms, ecosystems, and environments, which emerged in part through the mutual influence of science and culture in Chinese and Western societies. Moving fluidly between Chinese and Western intellectual traditions, and between the humanities and the sciences, the book argues that ecological consciousness is a shared mode of awareness that takes shape through dialogue across different histories and domains of knowledge. Grounded in archival research conducted at major repositories, including the National Archives in College Park and the No. 2 Historical Archives in Nanjing, the study features rare documents cited and reproduced here for the first time. Drawing on a wide constellation of methods, archives, and discourses, Darwin in the Middle Kingdom speaks to audiences across the humanities and sciences as well as to policy professionals and general readers.