Life of Ding Wenjiang, China's first modern geologist, part 3

And a bit on the life of Wu Zhihui, early Chinese anarchist, intellectual, troublemaker, and student of Darwinism and evolutionary theory.

Greetings, welcome back for your weekly Asian studies fix. There, I said it.

This week, after one week off, a week in which I shared my thoughs on Russ Meyer, classic exploitation film maker, and his private life, we have an actual essay or column by me on something related to Chinese history. Specifically, it focuses on the efforts one young man made to learn modern science and help his nation by learning science and the great risks he took as a teenager to get his education. It’s a very interesting story.

As stated, the last week I was busy and spending time not just speaking (bad) Vietnamese but also cooking (not great but not bad) Vietnamese food. Now how can you too learn to do these amazing things? Well, watch YouTube. ¹ OK, I also read a lot of cookbooks and even took some cooking lessons in Vietnam and if I cooked more food more offen I would be better, but YouTube was and is a very big source. (For better or worse, the best cooking school I found in Hanoi closed years ago when the American partner, a professional chef who came to Vietnam to study cooking found himself staying for a while, eventually made his way home and is now working as a health department restaurant inspector in a municipality in the USA, so mentioning it by name would serve no real purpose.)

Finally, most readers know that I am also interested and involved in Emergency Medical Services and prehospital care (ambulance work) and have had another article published in that field this week: JEMS -NY Holds EMS Mental Health and Wellness Symposium July 30, 2025 Check it out, if you’d like.

I do plan a political column this week, probably for Thursday, but there are no plans for a Tuesday column this week. As always, thanks for stopping by again.

NOTE: This is the third part in a multipiece series on the life of Ding Wenjiang, China’s first foreign educated geologist, one of the important people in the “Peking Man” paleontological digs of the 1920s and 1930s, and an important figure in early twentieth century China. For the first two parts please see The Saga of Ding Wenjiang, early Chinese scientist, Part one, naming China's first geologist and the traditional way of choosing a fortuitous name and The early Education of Ding Wenjiang, China's first foreign trained geologist .

Ding Wenjiang goes to Scotland with no way home, doesn’t starve or die, meets some of the wacky radical thinkers of his time along the way, and gets himself into college largely by luck.

After realizing that study in China was not likely to set him on a path to helping his nation modernize, Ding Wenjiang soon decided to study in England. Study in England had been suggested and encouraged for him by a man named Wu Zhihui. Wu was a radical intellectual 23 years older than Ding who had been forced to flee both China and Japan, both times for involvement in radical politics. (In Japan, he had led nine Chinese students in Japan to occupy a Chinese government office that refused to give them paperwork necessary for study at a Japanese military academy and then tried to avoid arrest by committing suicide by jumping in a moat.) ^[i] Wanted by the authorities in both China and Japan, Wu had wound up studying in Edinborough, Scotland. Among the subjects he studied were not just radical politics, but also evolutionary theory and paleontology.^[ii]

Why evolutionary theory and paleontology? How would those help a nation modernize? What was Wu thinking when he enrolled at great personal expense in this course of study?

          Wu, like many Chinese intellectuals of his time, considered science to be useful not just as an end in itself but also as a way to gain insight into ethical and political questions. Within the Taoist and Confucian traditions, learning and ethics were heavily intertwined. In Chinese tradition, it was believed that through observation of nature, one could gain insight into political and social problems. This attitude was often carried through when Chinese intellectuals studied Western science. Sometimes this led to misinterpretation or misunderstanding of the science involved and its relevant principles.    

          Wu believed that Darwinism showed a path where man could improve, adapt and change to survive and prosper under new conditions. Although some might question whether this really is what Darwin wrote about or described, to Chinese intellectuals who saw their nation and society under attack in several ways during a time of unprecedented change, this was the message they needed to hear. Darwinism provided Chinese intellectuals with the belief that change in man's abilities, nature, and status was possible and that one means to achieve these changes and navigate and follow the required course was through application of the scientific method.^[iii]

Wu Zhihui, like so many others (but not me, it seems) has a wikipedia page, if one wishes to learn more about him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_Zhihui

         

Wu Zhihui, aka Wu Jinheng, in 1941, many years later. He lived to be 88 years old and died in Taipei, Taiwan having fled to the island with the Republic of China government in 1949. (He obtained a degree of respectability when the Republic of China government was founded and he took employment with the government. Such a nice smile.



Increased respect for science among Chinese intellectuals came about in part because of an ideological void, as traditions and philosophies that had been respected for centuries or even millennia in some cases, proved unable to respond to the threat from the West and its ideologies and technologies. And there was a belief among many in China that if the source of Western strength lay in “science” then science must be important and should be respected and studied, even if in some cases this belief was formed in the absence of any real understanding of what science was or what the scientific method was. Therefore, there was often a misinterpretation of Western science even while it was being promoted. With Darwinism, ideas of social change and adaptation, cooperation and social competition were often promoted while the fundamental basis of considering science as a rational method for ordering and interpreting observations about the world was often neglected.^[iv]