Rural Crisis and the Science of Agriculture in Late Qing China

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, few crises in China were more unsettling for state and society than famines and natural disasters. Although historians have recognized the impact of these crises on politics in the late Qing period, their influence on science and technology remains relatively unexplored. This paper examines how environmental calamities and subsistence crises in China’s hinterlands shaped the development of agricultural science, with particular attention to knowledge and uses of plants. When the North China Famine (1876-79) brought hunger to millions of farmers across the northern provinces, it sparked calls to distribute hardy early-ripening varieties of Japanese grains and expand the cultivation of sweet potatoes. In subsequent decades, weather-related disasters and the threat of famine increased the attention devoted to taking advantage of botanical resources, both foreign and domestic, for the improvement and increased resilience of farming. Working in conjunction with new institutions for agricultural science established by the late Qing state, officials and agronomists searched for, gathered, and shared unfamiliar plant varieties across international boundaries and provincial borders for use in acclimatization experiments and rural extension work. By exploring the science of agriculture under the dark cloud of rural crisis, this paper eschews a primarily anthropocentric view of modern science in China that traces its growth to imperial competition or state building. Instead, it shows that the ongoing hazards of life in rural China, driven by crises of varying duration and magnitude, created an underlying rationale for new initiatives in agriculture throughout the country.