Our panel, “Forging a Nation with Transnational Science: Knowledge Production on Chinese Terms, 1880-1960,” consists of four presentations: Rachel Wallner investigates how Chinese translations of British hydrographical texts bolstered Qing geopolitical authority at sea. Guangshuo Yang explains how entomologists and officials manipulated translation in their campaigns to change popular perceptions about insects. J.J.R Strange explores how Organic Chemistry nomenclature developed in China during the first twenty years of the twentieth century, through the lens of four translators’ personal experience as a method to expand on the political stakes for the burgeoning Republican government. Aijie Shi considers the knowledge-making of living fossils to be the national symbol of Republican China by connecting the forming Chinese nation onto the track of evolutionary narratives with an emphasis on stability through the elaboration of science. All presentations are based on case studies about translation, standardization, and epistemological shifts in modern Chinese scientific traditions. In this way, our panel explores how the language, categories, and systematic conventions of science were sites of politically complex processes from the late Qing through the Republican era. Our papers address the nonlinear development of science, the transnational circulation of ideas, the re-appropriation of science for local needs, and integration with existing epistemological traditions. Taken together, these papers reveal the intimate relationship between shifting epistemic authority on one hand and the cultural-political dynamics of state formation on the other. Ultimately, that relationship empowered Chinese scientists to come to terms with Chinese nationalism in a global world.