Bringing together history and anthropology, this panel examines how external epistemological forces—Japanese agrarian science, Western engineering expertise, cross-strait interpretive frameworks, and transnational ethnographic methods—shaped modern China’s political, ecological, and cultural landscapes in paradoxical ways. Rather than clear dichotomies of enemy and friend, these knowledge-based interventions produced unintended consequences. The four papers reveal how technical knowledge, scientific methods, and interpretive paradigms reconfigured ecological systems, state sovereignty, ethnic narratives, and scholarly practice—sometimes welcomed, sometimes unrecognized, always transformative.

Dong Jo Shin’s study reveals the political irony in Manchuria’s ecological transformation. Examining Korean migrant farmers’ wet-rice cultivation from the late nineteenth century, Shin demonstrates how a region, long deemed unsuitable for rice, became transformed. This agricultural breakthrough, welcomed by Chinese landlords and later by Chinese Communists for its superior productivity, came from an unexpected source: cold-tolerant rice varieties developed by Japanese imperial agronomists for colonial Korea and carried into Manchuria by Koreans fleeing that exploitation. Thus, Japanese imperial science took root across the border in socialist China. Shin reveals an uncelebrated “cropscape” crisscrossing multiple regimes yet delivering shared economic benefits.

Iris Ai Wang examines early twentieth-century flood control and hydraulic engineering in the Hai River Basin to reveal how environmental crises unsettled Republican China’s claims to river sovereignty. After the 1917 flood, Western-led conservancy commissions pressured the Chinese state to redesign waterways, restore navigation, and stabilize urban order. Through joint commissions, European and American engineers expanded authority over inland rivers, permanently reshaping the North China Plain. These projects privileged Tianjin’s commercial interests, demonstrating how hydraulic modernization redistributed power, subordinated state sovereignty, and linked environmental management to uneven urban-centered development.

Peng-hui Wang traces the modern afterlives of the Qiang “Poisonous Cat” legend to show how indigenous knowledge travels across oral, academic, and visual media. Originally embedded in village life as a mechanism of social regulation, the legend was abstracted through anthropological scholarship into a comparative historical object. A recent Sinophone comic further translates this stabilized knowledge into visual narrative for broad publics. Comics, Wang argues, do not merely illustrate minority histories but reorganize epistemic authority, transforming community-bound practices into portable historical knowledge. This translation chain foregrounds media as historical infrastructure shaping circulation, interpretation, and scale within a Sinophone public sphere.

Finally, Lu Wang situates twentieth-century Chinese ethnography in Southwest China to reassess anthropology’s formation as a historically contingent practice. Tracing links between local gazetteers, socialist ethnic classification, and post-reform interdisciplinary dialogue, the paper shows how ethnography adapted foreign models to Chinese intellectual traditions. Rather than passive imitation, ethnographic writing evolved alongside state projects of knowledge and governance. By examining shifts in style, method, and purpose, Wang demonstrates how ethnography shaped modern understandings of China while redefining the discipline’s epistemic and political commitments, with Southwest fieldwork serving as a generative laboratory across shifting twentieth-century contexts.

Together, these papers demonstrate how agrarian science, environmental management, and the production of ethnographic and indigenous knowledge operated as durable infrastructures of power, linking ecology, expertise, and minority governance across imperial, republican, and socialist transitions in modern China.