Making Science Popular: Readers, Nation, and the Universe in Chinese Popular Science Periodicals, 1933 - 1952

In 1933, a group of scientists and educators based in Shanghai published a magazine they hoped would spread science to China's "ordinary" people, entitled Kexue huabao 科學畫報. The direct translation of the title is "Science Pictorial," but the publisher included an English title – Popular Science – on the cover of this Chinese language journal. This dissertation deconstructs what "popular science" meant in Republican China through three sets of questions: who participated in popularizing science in China? Who were their audiences? And what kinds of narratives about science emerged in popular publications? I use the journal as an entry point to examine how scientists, politicians, publishers, and writers undertook the mission of "scientizing China." "Treating the journal as an archive, I mine its texts, images, regular columns, formatting, para-textual elements, readers' letters, circulation figures, and its relationship to other science dissemination projects. I find that science popularizers viewed images and objects as integral to transmitting scientific knowledge and crucial to reaching their target audiences. Kexue huabao attempted to appeal to women, children, and "ordinary people" by mobilizing the notion of science as everyday knowledge. In the process of bringing scientific knowledge to China, the publisher engaged a transnational repository of texts and images and used these to construct a vision of science as universal. The dissertation demonstrates that in 20th century China, science was seen not only in terms of nation-building but also as a global framework of knowledge.