UC Irvine

This dissertation examines the early history of the meter, the liter, and the kilogram in modern China. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, foreign and Chinese elites began to condemn the profusion of different metrological practices and systems across China as chaotic and backward. The growing consensus that China needed to have one measure produced different proposals for standardizing weights and measures in late Qing (1644-1911) and Republican China (1911-49). In the Nanjing decade (1927-37), the Guomindang (GMD) government ratified one of these possibilities, setting out a two-track plan for China to embrace the metric system within a few years. This study analyzes records produced by the different groups which lobbied for, led, conducted, and responded to the Nanjing government’s metrological reform to specify the objectives, priorities and values which animated it. Officials from the National Bureau of Weights and Measures insisted that they were enforcing an orderly, scientific system of measurement which would inculcate modern habits of mind and practice in Chinese society; facilitate economic planning and China’s industrialization; and, the development of science in China. In practice, the comprehensive, exacting regulatory regime they established to keep every instrument and act of measurement in line worked to assert the Nanjing government’s absolute and ultimate authority over all metrological matters in China. In the 1930s, the state-building project to ensure compliance with the legal system of measurement produced mixed results among diverse metrological communities which found that they had to contend with an intrusive, demanding state in addition to choosing metrological practices which served their own needs for order, convenience, and legibility. Metrological reformers had to respond to merchants who refused to give up their old tape measures and steelyards, and scientists who asserted their right to design China’s system of measurement. When they did so, they clarified that metrological reform sought, above all, to centralize metrological authority in the Nanjing government, and consolidated the considerable progress towards national metrological standardization achieved by a national network of inspectors of weights and measures.