The People's Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in Twentieth-Century China

  • Sigrid Schmalzer
University of Chicago Press: 2008. 368 pp. $85 9780226738598 | ISBN: 978-0-2267-3859-8

Participation in scientific discovery is generally restricted to academic elites, and the specialized character of many scientific fields can make them seem impenetrable to the public. However, many non-specialists find evolutionary science attractive because of the appeal of basic questions that ask who we are and where we came from. Evolutionary science also enjoys a broad social impact because of its tendency to become intertwined with religion, politics and culture. This is especially true in China, which, in spite of rapid progress, still lags behind western countries in most scientific disciplines. However, palaeontology and palaeoanthropology have emerged as exceptions because China's rich fossil resources both contribute to scientific advances in these fields and stimulate wide public interest in them.

China's rich availability of early human remains has inspired its citizens to get involved in fossil hunting. Credit: STR/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Credit: P. GOETGHELUCK/SPL

The connections between palaeoanthropological discoveries, the public understanding of science in twentieth-century China, and broader issues of cultural transformation and national identity are the main themes of The People's Peking Man, a highly original book by US historian Sigrid Schmalzer. Schmalzer spent a year visiting the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, where many leading students of Chinese fossil hominids, such as Peking Man (skull reconstruction pictured, right), have been based over the years. In preparing her book, Schmalzer interviewed many active and retired Chinese scientists, as well as amateur enthusiasts and even the son of Pei Wenzhong, the palaeoanthropologist who in 1929 discovered the first skullcap of Peking Man.

Schmalzer focuses on social and intellectual history, and does not dwell on either the strictly scientific impact of the Peking Man fossils — now known to be of the early human species Homo erectus — or the frequently recounted story of their discovery. However, Schmalzer does an excellent job of putting the finds in their proper historical and cultural context. For example, she emphasizes that non-specialists play a significant part in fossil discovery in China because many of them have long experience of collecting bones for medicinal use, and may know the fossil sites of a given area better than any qualified researcher.

The discovery of the legendary Peking Man fossils was greatly facilitated by this unique tradition, as Schmalzer explains. Early scientific visitors found mammalian fossils awaiting discovery in apothecary shops, and it was lay knowledge of where to find abundant 'dragon bones' that led scientists to the limestone fissure that eventually produced the Peking Man skullcaps. Although the practice of digging for bones to sell in apothecary shops is not as common today, commercial digging has increased in China owing to the expanding market for fossils as collector's items. Although such operations create their share of problems for the science of palaeontology, they have brought large numbers of people into the search for fossils and have therefore resulted in the discovery of more specimens. Some significant recent advances in Chinese palaeontology could not have taken place without this commercial digging.

The contributions of non-specialists to science in China are not restricted to field activity, and the various forms of public participation in science represent one of Schmalzer's main interests. The state has long been interested in popularizing science for various purposes, including the eradication of superstition and its replacement with the principles of what it calls rational socialism. Chinese citizens, particularly in Mao Zedong's era, benefited from a good system of popular-science education and, in some cases, even had the opportunity to get directly involved in scientific activities. This emphasis on science dissemination and mass participation in science continues to have a considerable effect on modern Chinese society. One result is that technology and agriculture are better developed in China than the basic sciences, partly because the former are more easily understood and accessible to the general public. However, government efforts to bring science to the Chinese masses sometimes crossed over into counterproductive attacks on scientific 'elitism', particularly during the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

As a scientific discipline with profound implications for the origin and diversification of humans, palaeoanthropology has inevitably contributed to shaping human identity. In this regard, Schmalzer makes a strong case for the key role of palaeoanthropology in the intellectual history of modern China. Her book draws on a wide range of academic and popular sources to show how scientific ideas about human evolution have influenced political and ideological currents in Chinese society, and how ideology has influenced — most scientists would probably say distorted — the scientific interpretations in return.

The People's Peking Man is not a primer on the fossil record of Chinese hominids or the latest interpretations of human evolution. In one or two places, Schmalzer even seems to flirt with postmodernist scepticism about the empirical validity of science, asserting that “the boundary between science and non-science is blurry, contested and constructed”. However, Schmalzer's book finds a great deal to say about issues as diverse as the historical significance of Chinese fossil humans, the search for yetis (called yeren, or 'wild people' in China), changing concepts of human identity, and the conflict between top-down science dissemination and bottom-up mass participation in Chinese science. She also explores other diverse issues that include the connections among science, politics, religion and culture, and the relationship between professional scientists and the general public. Schmalzer presents all these topics in a lively, accessible and thought-provoking way.