Making Living Fossils the Symbol of the Nation: Nation and Evolutionism in Early 20th-Century China

The introduction of Social Darwinism at the turn of the twentieth century rekindled a wide spectrum of intellectual pursuits of the survival and perfection of the forming nation. The passionate exaltation of progress as the panacea for China’s sociopolitical problems stands at one end while negation of the unilinear model of progress at the other. This paper proposes a third direction to consider evolution in relation to the change and persistence of the nation, a static one, through the case of living fossil species: the living beings lacking any evolutionary changes over geological time. The paper starts with an archaeology of the concept of living fossil as it was translated into Chinese and settled with the modern Chinese term huo huashi. The neologism, the paper shows, was a combined result of Japanese loaned term kaseki and Chinese vernacular language reform. Following the translation and localization of the paleontological knowledge solidified in the neologism, the paper further traces the history in which three living fossil species: Ginkgo, Baiji and Dawn redwood, which are indigenous to China, were identified. Focusing on the case of Dawn redwood (shuishan in Chinese), the first living fossil species native to China that has been named after Chinese scientists and proposed to be the national symbol of China before Giant Panda was considered, I argue, it, for the first time in twentieth century China, connected the forming Chinese nation onto the track of evolutionary narratives with an emphasis on stability through the elaboration of science.