Animals between Universality and Locality: The Emergence of Experimental Biology in Republican China

In 1926, Robert Kho-seng Lim founded the Chinese Physiological Society (CPS) in Beijing. Drawing on the resources of its leaders—most of whom were employed by foreign-backed, wealthy research institutes—the CPS trained biologists to experiment on live animals and distributed expensive laboratory equipment and materials to other establishments in China. It was the first Chinese society dedicated to experimental biology; at a time when “descriptive” taxonomy and morphology were dominant, it thus fostered not only experimental physiology, but also experimental biology more generally in China. This paper tells this history through the laboratory animals used in biology experiments and the buildings in which they were housed. It argues that the animals, bred from local species and standardized so to be able to participate in universal experimental science, signified the simultaneous locality and universality of experimental biology as it emerged in China in this period. Animal houses, where animals were made standard and kept separated from the local environment, were a critical part of the process of making science universal. By tracing how CPS scientists built animal houses to insulate the science conducted within from local residents’ knowledge—as well as residents’ responses, or lack thereof, to the animal experiments—the paper also provides a cultural history of experimental biology. More than simply a way of practicing science, experimental biology signified Chinese elites’ scientism: their imaginations for inclusion into international networks of universal science and hopes that science could help China progress along a path to modernity. Animals and animal houses, the paper shows, were the material foundations of such aspirations.