Abstract
Science popularization, or science communication, has held its ground as a favorable cultural device since the coming out of new China, but it was not until 1980s that science popularization studies in China moved into the stage of theoretical integration. This paper briefly reviews the scenarios of public science popularization in China over 60 years in different cultural contexts, traces the development of science popularization studies at the theoretical level by discussing the main issues in the period of theoretical integration, and summarizes the basic characteristics of science popularization studies in China.
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Notes
- 1.
At the end of sixteenth century, the first wave of ‘science communication’ from the west to China began. It mainly took the form of translations of S&T works into Chinese by Chinese intellectuals and western missionaries.
- 2.
This number is obtained from the ‘List of published literature on science popularization studies’ in the Report on the development of science popularization studies in China (2002–2007) (Ren Fujun et al. 2009). The list includes of all the papers collected in the China Knowledge Resource Integrated Database (www.cnki.net) run by Tsinghua University. The database was searched using keywords such as ‘public understanding of science’, ‘education of science and technology’, ‘science popularization’, ‘science communication’, ‘scientific literacy’ and ‘scientific culture’. The numbers of papers in each year were 2002 (125 papers), 2003 (280), 2004 (244), 2005 (246), 2006 (558), 2007 (342).
- 3.
This was the principle guiding the westernization movement after 1860 in the late Ching Dynasty. The westernization movement was a reform initiated and organized by the Yang Wu group, most of whom were imperial officials influenced by western culture who aimed to make the feudalist Ching Dynasty strong and prosperous. The idea of ‘Chinese culture the body, western science the limbs’ was well expounded in Chang Chih-tung’s Quan Xue Pian (English edition: China’s only hope). The work consisted of two parts with 24 separate papers. The first part persuaded people to stick to Confucian ideas and be loyal to the feudalist emperors, while the second part called for learning science and imitating the western institution without shaking the governance of traditional Chinese culture. Those ideas were incorporated into the guiding principle of the westernization movement.
- 4.
Chinese-American researcher D.W. Kwok made a sound comment on scientism in China in the first half of the twentieth century in his book Scientism in Chinese thought, 1900–1950: ‘Scientism, in general, assumes that all aspects of the universe are knowable through the methods of science. Proponents of the scientific outlook in China were not always scientists or even philosophers of science. They were intellectuals interested in using science, and the values and assumptions to which it had given rise, to discredit and eventually to replace the traditional body of values. Scientism can thus be considered as the tendency to use the respectability of science in areas having little bearing on science itself. In China, the desire for national growth was accentuated by the weakness in technology, and it is thus not surprising to find among her Western-educated intellectuals great enthusiasm for science’ Kwok (1965:3).
- 5.
The National Science Conference was a milestone that established an unshakable place for S&T from then on. This was the springtime for science in China.
- 6.
The proposal was first initiated on the National Symposium on Science Writing in May 1978 and was reaffirmed at the Conference of Association of Chinese Science Writers in 1979 and the Second National Congress of CAST (the China Association for Science and Technology) in 1980.
- 7.
In 1991, Study on science popularization (which was edited by CRISP and was not an officially published journal from 1987 to 2005) first published a translated part of the Science and engineering indicators 1989 report that examined public attitudes to S&T in the United States (Shi 1991). Following that, the 1990 report on attitudes of the American public to S&T written by Jon D Miller was also translated into Chinese and published in the same journal (Li 1991).
- 8.
Huang analyzed research papers on science culture indices, focusing on PSL, and came to the conclusion that studies on this theme went through three periods: the beginning period, when the issue gradually came onto the research horizon (1950s–1970s); the mid-term period, when large numbers of papers came out (1980s); and the upsurge period, when PSL became one of the research focuses in this field (from the 1990s till now).
- 9.
‘Living science’ is regarded as forming from the process of requiring, understanding, acquiring and using knowledge based on the demands of people’s everyday lives. This knowledge is possibly derived in the systematic sense from academic science or post-academic science, and is probably the perceptual, intuitionistic and useful but unsystematic common sense formed in people’s ordinary life (empirical cognition). Living science is connected tightly with basic living demands; giving importance to accessibility and perception; integrating with social knowledge; making instrumental and practical result the priority; and connecting inherently with cultural tradition deposition (Zeng and Li 2009).
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Ren, F., Yin, L., Li, H. (2012). Science Popularization Studies in China. In: Schiele, B., Claessens, M., Shi, S. (eds) Science Communication in the World. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4279-6_4
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