This paper examines the shifting semantic cadences of the soybean as global economic conditions re-shaped Chinese scientific and medical enthusiasm for the soybean. Older associations as a famine crop, base for fertilizer, a source for cooking, lubrication, and lighting joined newer, techno-scientific visions of the soybean as a global industrial commodity and modern foodstuff. Intensified imperialist competition between Japan and Russia transformed the agricultural and industrial landscape of northeastern China, and one byproduct of this competition was the transformation of the soybean into a global cash crop whose economic value lay well beyond its agricultural origins. The soybean, in this globalized context, captivated the attention of late Qing, early Republican intellectuals, because it portended a brave, new world driven by technological innovation, yet still organically tied to a notion of Chineseness. The Chinese anarchist Li Shizeng especially sought to enlighten his fellow countrymen about the soybean’s technological potential to revitalize and transform Chinese industry in a manner that also embraced its agricultural and culinary heritage. His efforts to raise the soybean’s profile by extolling its many industrial and gastronomic uses articulated a Chinese path of modernization and gestured to a more intimate re-appraisal of the meaning of food for an aspiring nation.

In Republican China, controversies over antiquities and fossils management during Western expeditions in China prompted new laws and policy regulating foreign biological expeditions in China’s interiors. Luo Guihuan has examined the restrictions introduced by Academia Sinica to limit Westerners’ collecting endeavors of Chinese fauna and flora while Fan Fa-Ti has analyzed the ways in which natural history was incorporated into the nation’s body in Republican China. However, most of these “restrictions” triggered by nationalistic sentiments were targeted on terrestrial exploration, mostly in Northwestern China (such as the Central Asiatic Expeditions of the American Museum of Natural History), where the spotlight was placed on fossils or endangered species such as pandas. Historians of science have suggested that animals and plants are not just objects of naturalists’ interests but also subjects of nationalists’ sentiments in the age of Western imperialism. But most of the available evidence came from terrestrial flora and fauna, without much discussion of the connection between nationalism and marine flora and fauna. Drawing from the evidence of the marine biological surveys in Republican China, this paper explores the relationship between marine biological expeditions and nationalism, and suggests that while coastal biological organisms were imbued with local meanings, marine biological research in Republican China was essentially a transnational enterprise and not restricted the same way as land-based investigations. 

During the Japanese colonial era (1910-45), biology was the scientific field in which the largest number of Korean researchers was active. Korean biologists trod diverse paths of academic growth, encompassing both those who had majored in the discipline at universities and those who had developed as biologists while working as apprentices of Japanese researchers. This presentation will track how several researchers who had graduated from universities during the colonial period and were active as key figures in South Korean biological circles after the Liberation (1945) remembered and used their experiences related to biological research during the colonial era. Especially, it will elucidate how plant physiologist Lee Min-Jai (1917-91), ichthyologist Jeong Mun-Gi (1898-1995), and entomologist Kim Chang-Whan (1920-2013) assessed and understood the legacy of colonialism by examining the different ways in which these figures reflected their respective careers and research data during and from the colonial period in their post-Liberation research activities. As such, this will be both an approach to the analysis of the formation of modern biology in South Korea and one of the specific attempts to evaluate the colonial period in the overall history of science in Korea.

Traditionally, barley was the second most important crop in the Korean Peninsula. When Japanese colonial authority in the early 20th century transplanted Japanese agricultural science and related discourses to Korea, it became the main agenda to increase production and consumption of barley, to spread the growing demand for rice over the Japanese Empire. While plant breeding scientists developed higher-yielding new varieties, nutritional scientists propagated a variety of discourses that emphasized nutritional value of barley, and the colonial government mandated (partial or whole) replacement of rice with barley in everyday diet. This triangle of agro-science, nutritional science, and coercive administration even survived dissolution of the Japanese Empire in 1945 and remained the backbone of South Korean food policy by the late 1970s. When South Korean government declared the accomplishment of the Green Revolution of rice in 1977, self-sufficiency of barley was officially acknowledged as the next goal. It soon turned out, however, that this “second phase” of the Green Revolution was an unreachable goal. Despite considerable innovations from the agricultural scientists, which could contribute to actual increase in barley production, people’s memory of coercive consumption led them to avoid barely. Meanwhile, influx of affordable wheat flour from the US also provided alternative options to Korean consumers, which had never been available in the previous Japanese Empire network that emphasized self-sufficiency. By showing the demise of barley cultivation in South Korea, this paper illustrates how the interaction among science, society, and state is embedded in the artifact of barley.