Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
opens a Partner Group
at the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences
of the Chinese Academy of Sciences


The partner group is the first group of this kind in the humanities. The establishment of the partner group is based on a general agreement that was signed by the President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and by the President of the Max Planck Society on February 23rd, 1999.

China‘s long and continuous tradition gives the exceptional opportunity to study long-term developments of knowledge in a context different from that of European science. For this reason, research on Chinese science opens up possibilities for cross-cultural studies in the long-term development of science. The partner group will focus on an exemplary case of such a long-term development that can be pursued exhaustively within a reasonable framework of time and resources, the development of mechanical knowledge in China from antiquity to the early modern period. Research within the partner group will be guided by a number of specific research questions, in particular the question of the interaction between practical and theoretical knowledge and the question of the interaction between domestic and external knowledge traditions over a period of more than a millenium. It will coordinate its research with the research project on the history of mechanical thinking at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in order to establish a cross-cultural perspective on the emergence and development of experiential science.

Through the dissemination of research results and publications in English, the work of the partner group will make the work of the Chinese historians of science accessible to non-Chinese scholars. At the same time, it will give young Chinese scholars the opportunity to join international research on history of Chinese science as well as the history of science in the West. It is a major goal of this initiative to strengthen the voice of Chinese historians in the international discourse.
The group will base its work on a long tradition of textual studies pursued in China and also in the West. But its research questions and its systematic goals make it also necessary to break new ground in including sources that have so far been neglected, in particular those regarding practical knowledge, and to establish a far more comprehensive collection of sources than it is presently available.

Traditionally, Chinese historians paid great attention to the acquisition of texts and to their philology. Since the 1930s, Chinese scientists and historians of science have laid a basis in the study of texts on mechanical knowledge handed down from ancient times. They found historical materials from the time up to the 16th century. In spite of these significant efforts in collecting texts, it remains a major deficit of the present state of research that no systematic documentation of sources on the history of mechanics is available, not to speak of translations that provide a controlled access to the original Chinese terminology. Studies exclusively dedicated to the history of mechanics in China are still rare exceptions. While these studies represent pioneering achievements, many of them tend to translate historical knowledge into modern terminology and therefore do, in general, not provide a sufficient basis for addressing the research questions of the partner group.

While, traditionally, history of science focuses mainly on sources that are considered to contain scientific knowledge, the group will also give an emphasis to sources containing practical knowledge in order to study aspects of the relation between practical and theoretical knowledge. The transfer of knowledge on mechanics from Europe in early modern times will be investigated in view of its interaction with the Chinese tradition. The group will furthermore investigate the connection between practitioner‘s knowledge as it can be reconstructed from the historical sources and the practitioners‘ knowledge still to be found in contemporary China. Such an approach has turned out particularly fruitful in the research on the knowledge necessary for the construction of balances with unequal arms that was documented and is being analyzed by a joint research team of the institutions. It is therefore planned to generalize this approach and to document more extensively traditional working processes of craftsmen relevant to the study of mechanical knowledge. On the basis of an examination of the secondary literature, a nearly complete collection of documents and passages on mechanical knowledge, which are interspersed in a huge body of sources, can be made for the time up to the 16th century. Additionally, a cross-disciplinary reexamination of the Chinese sources on mathematics and technology will be carried out in order to incorporate texts that have so far been neglected in the context of mechanics.

With the help of the specialists at the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences, the work of the group ought to be a contribution to the history of science conceived as a cultural history of knowledge.

Prof. Dr. Zhang Baichun has been elected head of the partner group. The group will furthermore consist of three staff members, Associate Prof. Dr. Lu Dalong, Associate Prof. Dr. Tian Miao, and Associate Prof. Zou Dahai, as well as four to six student fellows and domestic and international visitors. The operation of the group started in July 2001.

An international advisory committee has been formed for the partner group. It consists of the following scholars:
Prof. Jürgen Renn (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Germany), Prof. Liu Dun (Institute for the History of Natural Sciences, China), Prof. Hans Ulrich Vogel (University of Tübingen, Germany), Prof. William G. Boltz (University of Washington, U.S.A.), and Prof. Fung Kam-Wing (University of Hong Kong, China).