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Mesure et sciences sociales

Wu Dingliang (1894–1969) and the Statistical Definition of a Chinese Race

Wu Dingliang (1894-1969) et la définition statistique de la race chinoise
Andrea Bréard
p. 71-98

Résumés

Au début du xxe siècle, définir les caractéristiques chinoises en termes quantitatifs permettait des comparaisons et apportait des réponses scientifiques dans la recherche de la position relative des Chinois dans l’évolution historique des êtres humains et des origines de l’humanité, ce qui remettaient en cause les notions antérieures culturellement définies d’une race chinoise. En se concentrant sur le travail et le réseau scientifique de Wu Dingliang 吳定良 (1894-1969), cette contribution analysera la construction statistique d’une notion de race chinoise et complètera l’histoire du laboratoire de biométrie de Karl Pearson (1857-1936) à Londres, une histoire qui a négligé la circulation et le destin aux contours nationaux des connaissances biométriques et des approches de la notion de « race » à une échelle plus globale, incluant la Chine.

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Notes de l’auteur

Morgane Labbé kindly invited me to present my research on this topic on 6 March 2020 at the Séminaire d’Histoire du calcul des probabilités et des statistiques, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS, Paris). I am grateful for the comments and critical remarks of the audience. Unfortunately, since then, travel and archival research have come to a halt. In particular, I was unable to meet Wu Dingliang’s daughter, who still lives in Shanghai, and had to rely solely on archives available outside China.

Texte intégral

  • 1 F. Dikötter, 1992; id. 1997.
  • 2 T. Mullaney, 2010.
  • 3 G. Müller, 2011.
  • 4 H. Yen, 2012.
  • 5 Y. J. Chung, 2002.
  • 6 Exceptions are J. Zhu, 2018, pp. 185-198 and C. D. Brown, 2008, who do refer to anthropometry in C (...)

1Notions of race in twentieth-century China have been subject to discussion from many points of view: its discursive constructs,1 its definition via an ethnographic classification project during the early years of the People’s Republic of China,2 its transcultural dimension,3 its relation to the rise of nationalism4 or eugenics.5 Yet, little or no attention has been paid to the role of anthropometric practices and statistical methodology.6 Defining Chinese characteristics in quantitative terms allowed comparisons and provided answers in the search for the relative position of the Chinese in the historical evolution of human beings and the origins of mankind that challenged earlier culturally defined notions. As the case of Wu Dingliang 吳定良 (1894–1969), a PhD student of Karl Pearson (1857–1936) in the late 1920s, will show, the scientific approach to the definition of a Chinese race was driven by an international network of actors, collections, and data on Chinese skulls and bones and the institutional and political context in which Wu worked. The activities of this international network were significantly curtailed during the vigorous nation-building campaign in the Nanjing decade (1927–1937) and the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), when artifacts were no longer allowed to leave Chinese territory, and disrupted after the Communist takeover in 1949. By focusing on Wu Dingliang’s scientific work, this contribution looks at the statistical construction of a notion of the Chinese race and, along the way, complements the history of Karl Pearson’s Biometric Laboratory in London, a history which has overlooked the circulation and nationally contoured fate of biometric knowledge and approaches to the notion of “race” on a more global scale, including China.

  • 7 Wu’s suicide and destiny during the Communist era, the Cultural Revolution in particular, is yet a (...)

2The two-part narrative I have chosen is chronological, charting the international intellectual and institutional trajectory of Wu Dingliang until the advent of the People’s Republic of China.7 The boundaries of both parts are defined not only by a specific timeframe – before and after 1934 – but also by different sites of knowledge – the Biometric Laboratory in London and the Academia Sinica in Nanjing – and finally also by different kinds of data. As I follow Wu’s trajectory, weaving together these three parameters – time, place, and data – mainly through his publications, Chinese sources and some unpublished material, I will argue that the emergence of a new statistical notion of “race” was much more data-bound than politically defined before 1949, even if the results of Wu’s work on racial classification were interpreted in the context of contemporary local politics.

1. The 1920s to 1934: the Biometric Laboratory and its large data network

  • 8 See the announcement of Wu’s admission to Nanjing’s Higher Normal School 高等師範學校 (renamed to Nation (...)
  • 9 See M. Münning.
  • 10 Z. Lu & D. Wu, 1922. Earlier, in 1921, Wu, together with another student, published lecture notes (...)
  • 11 See Z. Lu 1924.
  • 12 See A. Bréard, 2006, pp. 15-16.
  • 13 Overseas students had played a crucial role in the transmission of applied statistics to China sin (...)

3From 1918 to 1925 Wu Dingliang first studied at the Department of Agriculture8 and later worked as a Teaching Assistant in Nanjing at the Psychology Department of the National Southeast University 國立東南大學 under the guidance of the linguist, experimental psychologist and educator Lu Zhiwei 陸志韋 (1894–1970, PhD Chicago Univ. 1920).9 In 1922 they co-signed an article on the history of psychology,10 and a collective volume on Binet-Simon intelligence testing, to which Wu apparently contributed, was published in 1924.11 It was later to become part of the PhD thesis submitted by Wu to University College London (see infra). In the mid-1920s, mathematical statistics was an unknown field in China. The only manuals available were two translations from the early 1910s but they do not seem to have circulated widely in China.12 Psychology was one field, though, where statistical techniques were applied and thus an early point of contact for Wu with quantitative approaches to the human sciences.13

  • 14 See the announcements in the Shanghai newspaper Shenbao 申報: 江蘇考試歐美留學詳情 (Details on the Jiangsu Exa (...)
  • 15 See Columbia, p. 201 and Committee, 1932, p. 968.
  • 16 It was possible for Wu to follow courses in other Schools of Columbia University. See Teachers Col (...)

4On 1 January 1925, Wu left Shanghai for the United States with a government scholarship for foreign study from Jiangsu Province.14 For the academic year 1925–1926 Wu figures in the then usual transliteration of his Chinese name as “Woo, Ting-Liang” (or Woo, T. L.) among the students in Columbia University’s School of Education (Teachers College) as a Bachelor of Arts Graduate and among its 1926 alumni with a Master of Art.15 Wu indicates that he read statistics and anthropology during his studies in America, although no such courses seem to have been directly included in the Teachers College’s schedule for 1925-1926.16

  • 17 See the letter by R. A. Fisher to G. M. Morant, dated 26 July 1933: “I imagine that the four Bruns (...)
  • 18 See for example N. Fu & Q. Zhang, 1926, p. 3. This students’ report opens with the sentence that “ (...)
  • 19 See K. Pearson & M. Moul, 1925, p. 5.
  • 20 University of London, 1929, p. 480.

5How Wu then came to Karl Pearson, the Biometric Laboratory in London with its legion of human and mechanical computers17 is unclear. He certainly arrived in England in a climate of “discrimination against Orientals” reported by Chinese overseas students,18 and at a time when Pearson was working on questions of alien immigration into “an already crowded country like Great Britain” from a quantitative point of view.19 Wu’s date of first entry as a post-graduate and research student in the Department of Applied Statistics of University College London is the academic year 1926–27.20 After only two years, on 28 May 1928, Wu submitted his PhD thesis (Figure 1) in three parts: two articles published in Pearson’s Biometrika, of which one was a joint publication, and two texts in Chinese, one of which was an undated anonymous manuscript copy:

  • 21 T. L. Woo & K. Pearson, 1927; T. L. Woo, 1928. Neither paper seems to have been much noticed, but (...)

a. Subsidiary 1: “Dextrality and Sinistrality of Hand and Eye (First Study)” and “Dextrality and Sinistrality of Hand and Eye (Second Study)”21

  • 22 Z. Lu, 1924.

b. Subsidiary 2: “A Booklet on The Chinese Revised Form of Binet-Simon Tests”, actually the above-mentioned collective volume in Chinese edited by his teacher Lu Zhiwei22

c. Subsidiary 3: “The Manual of Experimental Psychology” 實驗心理學 (in Chinese), a photocopy of an anonymous manuscript with handwritten marks which seem to be notes taken by a student in class.

Figure 1. Thesis submitted on 28 May 1928 by Wu Dingliang

Figure 1. Thesis submitted on 28 May 1928 by Wu Dingliang

Note. Subsidiary 1 (left), page from Subsidiary 3 (right).

Sources. UCL archives, London.

  • 23 No explicit source confirms the rejection of his application, but all publications by T. L. Woo in (...)
  • 24 Karl Pearson Papers, 11/1/12/62, letters from the Academic Registrar of University of London to Ka (...)
  • 25 See Karl Pearson Papers, 7/155/1 vs Pearson’s Introduction to T. L. Woo, 1929 and Karl Pearson Pap (...)
  • 26 See K. Pearson, 1932, p. 355, K. Pearson & T. L. Woo 1935, p. 424, and the tables in T. L. Woo, 19 (...)
  • 27 After claiming in E. Elderton & T. L. Woo, 1932, p. 45, that “unfortunately Dr Woo’s β’s suffers f (...)
  • 28 See MRM, typescript letter from K. Pearson to G. M. Morant, 13 January 1934.
  • 29 See the Report of the Executive Council to the Universities’ China Committee in London for 1932–33 (...)

6The exact circumstances for granting a PhD degree to Wu on the basis of the submitted material are unknown, but his failed application for a Doctor of Science degree in 1932,23 two years before he left London and Pearson for the University of Zürich and went back to China, sheds some light on the doubts concerning his qualification. From the letters exchanged between Pearson and the Academic Registrar of the University of London in May and June 1932 we learn that besides language issues, Wu’s actual personal contribution to conjoint publications was questioned and even gave rise to an amendment of the regulations for the D.Sc. Degree of the Faculty of Science. The new version clearly stated that “in the event of a candidate submitting any conjoint work in support of his candidature he must state fully his own share in such conjoint work”.24 Whether Pearson and his collaborators who had published with Wu could not (or did not want to) credit Wu with a sufficient amount of autonomy in the research is unclear. The hesitation between “I” and “we” in the manuscript versions of the conjoint articles prepared for publication by Pearson25 and the constant emphasis on Wu’s exact contribution to common research publications and archival documents nevertheless points towards such a possibility. Pearson himself clearly distinguishes the groundwork done by Wu and the reflective part accomplished by himself.26 Often, in conjoint work that appeared in the journal Biometrika run by Pearson, Wu, not unlike the women in Pearson’s team, is explicitly relegated to the role of the “computer” or the “observer”. That even a female collaborator, i.e. Ethel Mary Elderton (1878–1954), Assistant Professor in the Galton Laboratory, continued to point up Wu’s responsibility for insufficiencies in his quantitative method, is rather telling as to Wu’s social status in the group.27 Nevertheless, Pearson, who labels Woo as “indistinctive”,28 seems to have been very supportive in furthering Wu’s career. Besides five joint publications, Wu had another six individual articles published in Biometrika between 1928 and 1943 and he obtained a studentship in 1933 for his research work in anthropology from the University’s China Committee in London.29

  • 30 See T. Porter, 2004, p. 263.
  • 31 Quoted from G. M. Morant, 1926, p. 417, see also the controversial work by Alice Lee in A. Lee & K (...)

7All but two of Wu’s publications in Biometrika relate to the measurement of human bones, of which seven concern the human skull. Since the nineteenth century, collecting and studying human skulls had been a favourite occupation of archaeologists, craniologists, eugenicists, physical anthropologists, and of Galton and Pearson in particular in the early twentieth century. Pearson’s interest in these skulls was less in the bones per se and what they meant for human evolution than in the related data, the statistical techniques that could be applied to the various measurements, and the mathematical theories that resulted from the statistical data obtained.30 Reconstructing skull capacity from external measurements, for example, was a statistical problem particularly relevant for cases where skull data were incomplete or measured on the living body. Such research was certainly nourished by a general belief in its correlation with intelligence, but neither Pearson nor other workers in his laboratory supported such theories:31

  • 32 I.e. Fujian, a South-Eastern Chinese province.

“We fail to find any evidence adduced to support the statement […] that ‘the Tibetan A group is hybrid and the Hokien32 is a pure type,’ and it is unworthy of a scientific study to draw conclusions such as the following, involving theories which no one has ever attempted to demonstrate. ‘Intellectually,’ we are told, ‘as judged by his cranial capacity, he (the Hokien) is capable of attaining to the highest standard, but the very narrow frontal region (giving the lowest value of all the groups compared) indicates that his powers of initiative and intelligence are relatively low’ […]. We are sorry to see such undisciplined theorising cheek by jowl with valuable biometric measurement.”

  • 33 T. L. Woo, 1930, p. 5.
  • 34 The Chinese material for T. L. Woo & G. M. Morant, 1934 stems entirely from other locations in Eng (...)
  • 35 See Karl Pearson Papers 11/1/16/136, letter to Karl Pearson (dated 7 November 1932) from William P (...)
  • 36 See, for example, the long list of foreign sources on Chinese skulls in the bibliography provided (...)
  • 37 See D. Black, 1930. In Chinese historiography, regret that foreigners and not Chinese natives had (...)
  • 38 On Morant and his relations with Pearson, see I. Clever, 2020, chap. 4.
  • 39 For an overview of the material used, see T. L. Woo & G. M. Morant, 1932, pp. 112-113, in particul (...)

8When Wu came to Pearson’s Laboratory, he found a vast collection of skulls and bones there – but none from China. While he could work on the spot, for example, on Egyptian skulls,33 “the observer (T. L. W.)” had either to travel to “the principal English museums and one Dutch museum” to measure Chinese skulls,34 or to rely on written sources and measurements taken by others and eventually pool the data if their variance allowed to do so. Pearson’s network was certainly helpful in this respect and Wu was introduced to the various collections upon his recommendation.35 Apart from the fact that Wu could not quantify Chinese skulls himself according to his desired measurement standards, or use his own instruments, access to secondary sources in London was not problematic. Wu could delve into a large variety of earlier writings in Latin, German, French, Italian, Dutch, and English36 with measurements of Chinese skulls. This included the very recent publications on the sensational excavations in Zhoukoudian, near Peking, of the Sinanthropus pekinensis full skeletons and skull in 1929 and some earlier pieces by Davidson Black (1884–1934) and others since the early 1920s.37 Looking at the sources used for his “Preliminary Classification of Asiatic Races Based on Cranial Measurements” published together with Geoffrey M. Morant (1899–1964),38 the scarcity and historical contingency of craniological information on Chinese skulls becomes evident. The four series of Chinese male skulls used in their study were from purely non-Chinese sources: a mixture of skulls from unclaimed coolies from Fujian province who had left for Singapore for existential reasons, Chinese soldiers killed in the war with Japan in the Northeastern provinces, skulls collected in dissecting rooms in Peking, and Black’s prehistoric series with skulls from Gansu and Henan Province.39

  • 40 On this now obsolete term, see S. Kotz et al., 2006, p. 6497. The term was erroneously given as (...)

9In order to locate the Chinese series with respect to the other 22 series of Asian races, a single numerical measure, the so-called Coefficient of Racial Likeness (C.R.L), instead of a large number M of characters, was calculated to quantify the resemblance or divergence between two populations:
Image
where ns is the number of skulls in the first group for which the s-th character is available, ms the mean of the s-th character in the first group, and σs2 its variance, and the last term the “probable error”40 to which the coefficient based on M characters would be liable

  • 41 K. Pearson, 1926, p. 105.
  • 42 See K. Pearson, 1928 where he suggests this modification by normalizing to a sample size of 75.
  • 43 An approach Pearson had already defended in K. Pearson, 1901 but illustrated therein only with res (...)
  • 44 K. Pearson, 1926, pp. 111-112.

10Pearson had developed this measure earlier in the 1920s precisely for such statistically challenging cases where craniologists must “compensate for the smallness of our sample by largeness of our character series”.41 In order to make the coefficient independent of variations in the sample sizes of the different series considered, he also suggested normalizing the measure by reducing it to the value it would have if each series was of a standard size, the so-called “reduced C.R.L”.42 Pearson’s coefficient was considered by Wu and Morant as the magic aggregate number that freed anthropometricians from the dilemma “that different measurements suggest incompatible schemes of relationship”. It allowed “racial differentiation” in a single glance by applying “the theory of chance”43 and pitted the power of quantification against the subjective judgements of anthropologists based on skin colour or other impressionistic criteria.44

  • 45 G. M. Morant, 1928, and earlier in G. M. Morant, 1925.
  • 46 P. C. Mahalanobis, 1930.
  • 47 One of these had been studied earlier in G. M. Morant, 1923; it is a far shorter, but “particularl (...)
  • 48 See footnote 43.
  • 49 See T. L. Woo & G. M. Morant, 1932, pp. 129-132.

11Probed by Morant, who had applied the C.R.L. to establish “A Preliminary Classification of European Races based on Cranial Measurements”45 and by the Indian statistician Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (1893–1972),46 Wu and Morant in 1932 established two maps of the Asiatic races plotted according to the measured distances between any two of the 27 series47 and projected onto a virtual geographic background. They thus moved from a tabular presentation to a continuous diagrammatic space which in their words “illustrates the true state of affairs far better than any system of grouping can”. Organized into two separate maps, one for the distinctly different Northern Mongolian group and the other for the three major groups – Indian, Northern and Southern Oriental (Figure 2) – the visual layout chosen to represent interracial connections corresponds roughly to most expectations based on geographical considerations. The value of the reduced C.R.L. serves as a geometric magnitude providing the lengths of the connecting lines between two races on an apparently uniform scale. Yet not all of the possible 351 reduced C.R.L.s were depicted, only some of all possible lines of inter-relationship within the major groups are plotted, along with a few between the groups and just one connection to outsiders (Tibetan A type, Chukchis and Aino), which were not associated with any of the major groups. Besides the reduced C.R.L., the only other numerical value additionally provided in the graph is the cephalic index.48 Even if the classifying power of the C.R.L., which takes all characters into account, is remarkable in the maps, the discussion of whether fewer single measures could nevertheless ensure adequate significance, was not left out of Wu’s and Morant’s article.49

Figure 2. Mapping bilateral relationships between some Indian, Southern and Northern Oriental Races according to the C.R.L.

Figure 2. Mapping bilateral relationships between some Indian, Southern and Northern Oriental Races according to the C.R.L.

Source. T. L. Woo & G. M. Morant, 1932.

  • 50 T. L. Woo & G. M. Morant, 1932, p. 134.
  • 51 T. L. Woo & G. M. Morant, 1932, p. 124. The same conclusion is drawn in T. L. Woo & G. M. Morant, (...)
  • 52 For a clear-cut division between the Northern and Southern Chinese groups, see for example G. Harr (...)
  • 53 See H. Yen, 2014. Already in C. Ling, 1934, p. 39 the results of T. L. Woo & G. M. Morant, 1932 ar (...)

12This biometrically obtained classification of Asiatic races, as the authors state, remained open to modification so that the database could be extended by including additional crania. Such additions were highly probable, given the major joint efforts between foreign and Chinese archaeologists in China at that time. A conceptually important point to note is that this preliminary classification was not considered by the authors to be one either of division, or of ranking between primitive and evolved races, but one of proximity or even unity.50 Concerning the Chinese in particular, the calculated C.R.L.s imply that the Chinese form an extraordinarily uniform type. “There is already”, the authors remark, “a clear suggestion that the greater part of the enormous populations of China conforms more closely to a single racial type than do the present-day populations of several European countries”.51 This observation contrasted with those of earlier anthropologists and ethnologists who found the Chinese to be a highly heterogenous group,52 but it may potentially have nurtured the theory of Chinese monogenesis constructed in the late 1930s and 1940s.53

  • 54 Republished “by arrangement with the Editor of Biometrika” in Academia Sinica’s Monographs of the (...)
  • 55 See for example, Pan’s translation of Francis Galton’s chapter on “The comparative worth of differ (...)
  • 56 On Pan Guangdan, see F. Dikötter, 2012, Y. J. Chung, 2002, and M. W. Foreman, 2020. Pan published (...)

13Unlike all other publications by Wu in Biometrika, his and Morant’s classification of Asiatic races was immediately reprinted in China54 by the Academia Sinica and this Chinese edition was reviewed in two journals. These reviews, one in English and one in Chinese, appeared on 12 and 14 January 1933 in two Shanghai magazines, and, given their overlapping comments and critical remarks, they are most likely not independent of one another. What is more, the editor of the Book Review Section of the first was Quentin Pan, the English name of Pan Guangdan 潘光旦 (1898–1967), the very editor of the weekly review magazine Huanian 華年 in which the Chinese review appeared. Pan was an evolutionary biologist and sociologist trained in America but also China’s most active eugenicist fixated on racial differences,55 with a particular interest in improving the strength of the Chinese people by controlling interracial marriage and reproduction.56 Considering eugenics as a scientific matter, Wu and Morant’s racial classification was central to his interests.

  • 57 A. Yi, 1933. The article being written in difficult technical language, the author nevertheless ex (...)

14The Chinese review, in particular, underlines the novelty and strength of the quantitative approach that provides scientific confirmation of earlier findings with “a higher degree of precision and a higher degree of exactness”.57 Yet, concerning the Northern Oriental group, comprised entirely of Japanese and Chinese, the scientifically determined C.R.L. did not please the reviewers:

  • 58 Chinese idiom, literally “beanstalks frying each other” (dóu qí xiāng jiān 豆萁相煎). The reviewer i (...)
  • 59 Translated from A. Yi, 1933. Cf. the English review G. Pan, 1933 which is in a similar vein.

“According to the authors’ findings, the degree of proximity between the Chinese and Japanese is higher than between any two Asian races. Assuming that the degree of likeness is indeed the manifestation of closeness of blood relationship, then, [how can it be that] in recent times, the two races have failed to get along with each other for a long time. Also, the steadily forward pressing of the Japanese, their endlessly exorbitant demands, isn’t this kind of a situation of ‘close kindred slaughtering one another’58?”59

  • 60 This is now referred to as the “Mahalanobis squared distance”, see T. W. Anderson, 1996 for more t (...)
  • 61 T. L. Woo & G. M. Morant, 1934, p. 249.
  • 62 T. L. Woo & G. M. Morant, 1934, p. 214.
  • 63 T. L. Woo & G. M. Morant, 1934, p. 250.

15The enthusiastic reception of Wu and Morant’s work based upon the C.R.L. in China was not mirrored elsewhere. By 1930, alternatives were already being sought beyond racial discourse,60 and the value of the C.R.L., along with craniometry itself, was brought seriously into question. By 1934, when Wu and Morant published another comparative study in the field of craniometry, they most likely knew about their colleagues’ nascent doubts regarding the C.R.L. Instead of looking at a large number of characters of the human skull for calculation of the C.R.L., Wu and Morant then took a different approach to “aiding the discrimination and classification of the races of modern man”.61 They studied the transverse “flatness” of the facial skeleton by looking at only four correlation indices (four pairs of measurements per skull) and by extending their material to 83 series comprising 4,266 male and 1,630 female specimens “from all parts of the world”. Wu’s knowledge of Chinese certainly helped in determining that the unspecified Chinese samples “marked as criminals, seamen, or merely inscribed as ‘Chinese,’ […] may be the heads of Southern Chinese as the spellings of the names on the skulls are most likely Cantonese or Fukienese”.62 Although the authors warn us “not to attempt to base any scheme of racial classification on the evidence of […] two indices alone” since “racial relationships can only be estimated by taking into account the evidence provided by a considerable number of characters which may not be highly correlated interracially with one another”, they do come back to the idea of mapping the correlation between two quantities only. This results in four (out of six possible) diagrams showing the interracial correlation between each two of the four calculated indices and a discussion of their degree of suggestiveness and coherence in terms of conclusions to be drawn from the diagrams. Unlike in their earlier study, the authors admit that the use of fewer characters allows a more clear-cut distinction between “the compactness of the points representing the Oriental series” and the Indian group, and, they conclude that “there is no evidence that the variabilities of the characters examined differentiate “primitive” and “advanced” races”63 even if racial hierarchization had never been formulated explicitly as a goal of their research.

2. 1934–1949: the Academia Sinica and new data from China

  • 64 According to an entry on Wu’s Professional Service Registration Card of Teaching Personnel from Nat (...)
  • 65 The Oxford University archives, the University Calendar, card registers, and the University Gazett (...)
  • 66 See C. Keller, 1995, pp. 193-195.
  • 67 See The International Committee…, 1934.
  • 68 See T. L. Woo, 1938b, pp. 225, 227.
  • 69 See the correspondence between Galton and Schlaginhaufen concerning an instrument for measuring fi (...)

16When Wu’s and Morant’s work on the flatness of the facial skeleton appeared in Biometrika, Wu might already have left London. According to records, he spent the year from August 1933 to July 1934 in the Anthropology Department of Zurich University to study anthropometry before returning to China.64 Contrary to a persistent myth in Chinese secondary literature that Wu had obtained a second PhD in anthropology in Oxford, his stay in Zurich is plausible for several reasons.65 First, there was a thematic intersection. Professor Otto Schlaginhaufen (1879–1973), Director of the Institute for Anthropology at the University of Zurich had undertaken in the early 1930s a classification of the cephalic indices of a large number of living Swiss recruits and associated them with their geographic origins.66 Second, Wu must have been acquainted to some degree with Schlaginhaufen. They were both founding members of an International Committee for Standardization of the Technique of Physical Anthropology created in 1932.67 Third, they shared an interest in instrumentation. Wu published an article in very perfect technical German in 1938. It discusses an instrument for drawing the contours of hand and feet based on earlier mechanisms developed by Schlaginhaufen’s predecessor Rudolf Martin (1864–1925) and refers to both authors.68 Finally, but this is rather anecdotal, Schlaginhaufen had corresponded with Galton, and while there was no longer any continuous institutional connection between the Biometric Laboratory and Zurich, at least his fingerprints and those of his family members were stored in the London archives!69

  • 70 See “Proceedings…”, 1929, p. 530.
  • 71 See G. Stemerdink, 2003, p. 81. Wu’s election, along with that of R. A. Fisher’s and R. Pearl, was (...)
  • 72 See Institut international…, 1936, p. 16. Liu Dajun 劉大鈞 (1891–1962), director of the Bureau of Sta (...)
  • 73 See Institut international…, 1930, p. 9.

17Even if we leave Wu’s stay in Zurich aside, he was a well-integrated member of an international network and academic environment and this was helpful for his research in terms of access to data and artefacts during his years in Europe. He became a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1929;70 and in 1931, was the first Chinese person in its history to be elected to the International Statistical Institute.71 He was the sole Chinese member present at its meeting in May in Madrid.72 Wu had already participated in the 18th Session of the Institute in Warsaw in 1929 where he was sent as the official Chinese delegate,73 and he participated again (and for the last time) as member in the 22nd Session in London in 1934, but never delivered a paper until he resigned in 1960.

  • 74 On the complex path to being elected to the Academia Sinica, see J. Guo, 2020.
  • 75 Wu published an obituary of Pearson in Chinese in D. Wu, 1936 in which he ironically concludes tha (...)
  • 76 See T. L. Woo, 1938a, p. 48 where he thanks “most heartily Dr. G. M. Morant, London, for his many (...)
  • 77 See R. Wu & X. Wu, 1997, p. 274.

18Going back to China in 1934 meant that Wu would lose many of his contact points in this international network, since communication was less direct, access to foreign publications and funds for travelling abroad extremely limited. Upon his return in the summer of 1934, Wu joined the newly founded Institute of History and Philology of the Academia Sinica. He became the Director of its Anthropological Laboratory, and, due to structural reorganization, the Director of the Institute for Anthropology in 1944. In 1948 he was elected to the Academia Sinica, the highest academic recognition possible in China at that time.74 Wu never returned to England or the United States, but even after Pearson’s death in 1936,75 he maintained close contact with Morant76 and continued to publish in English until 1949, both abroad in Biometrika and in The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, but mainly in his own Institute’s Anthropological Journal which he launched in 1938.77

  • 78 T. L. Woo, 1938b, p. 230. Wu uses the same data again in D. Wu, 1957, comparing it with measuremen (...)
  • 79 See the announcement of Wu’s measurements in primary and middle schools and his travels through ce (...)
  • 80 See Y. J. Chung, 2002 for a history of the Chinese eugenic movement in a transnational context and (...)

19The most dramatic methodological change during his first years in China was Wu’s new focus on the living Chinese. As his above-mentioned publication in German shows, it was no longer based on skull collections or published measurements in foreign-language sources but grounded in an empirical study of the living. Applying his new instrument to the measurement of anthropological characteristics of Southern Chinese pupils and students, his field work, undertaken in the years from 1935 to 193778 was in line with the aims and scope of the eugenics movement in China and it is presented from this viewpoint in the press.79 Eugenics in China was, as other fields of knowledge transmitted from abroad, adapted to local values, political contexts and interests, and aimed mainly at the improvement of physical health, not so much through measures based on genetic research but rather through public hygiene campaigns, physical education and the improvement of medical infrastructure and communication.80

20Foreigners, too, were interested in large scale biometric studies of the Chinese people, yet always in a comparative perspective. China was still an unknown region in their databases and they wanted to obtain more extensive numbers produced on the basis of standardized measurements:

  • 81 P. H. Stevenson, 1938, p. 1.

“No longer may it be that biometric studies of the Chinese people constitute a virgin field of anthropological research. Yet the field in question is singularly lacking in studies which possess the merit of adequacy either in regard to the numbers of individuals measured or the scope. With few exceptions, […] physical anthropological investigations of the living Chinese this far reported have in the main dealt with relatively few measurements on likewise relatively small groups of individuals. […] The study herein reported is intended to be the first of a series which will, it is hoped, overcome in a measure the inadequacies mentioned above. […] The results of this extensive statistical analysis should provide not only a detailed anthropometric appraisal of the population under consideration but also a suitable baseline for the comparison of other similarly adequate data from other parts of Asia.”81

  • 82 On the entangled history of this notion in reference to the Chinese people, see J. Yang, 2020.
  • 83 Quoted and translated from Y. Lu, 1937, p. 203. The author compares data on prehistoric Chinese an (...)

21This comparative goal is in stark contrast with Wu’s new research orientation, where another obvious change was his reduced focus upon China. Rare peripheral comparative observations such as the conclusion that “the occurrence of nutrient foramina for the Chinese and the English clavicles are not appreciably different” rather read like a defense in reaction to the foreigner’s trope of the “Sick Man of East Asia”.82 In China this was a well-known topos which motivated programmatic quantitative research on brain size and intelligence. One suggested way of escaping the Chinese “inferiority complex” stemming from unfavourable comparisons of skull capacity, was to improve nutrition:83

“According to the author’s personal opinion, when measured against the splendour of ancient Chinese culture, the brain is by no means inferior in any degree to that of the Westerners. However, it is a fact that its development is incomplete and nutrition is insufficient. All this suffices to influence the functioning of the brain. Therefore, in China’s national renaissance and cultural construction, the way of nutrition cannot be neglected!”

據作者個人意見,以中國古代文化之燦爛衡之,其,腦決不至於較西人低至若何程度。惟發育不全,營養不足,或為事實。凡此皆足以影響之工作。故於吾民族復興,文化建設,營養之道不可忽也。

  • 84 See T. L. Woo, 1941b, pp. 84-86 for references to European authors defending this position. Metopi (...)

22Wu was also interested in the capacity of Chinese crania, but for another reason: metopism was an anomaly of the human skull associated with a highly developed brain and thus correlated by many Western authors with racial superiority.84 Since all previous studies lacked data on metopism in Chinese skulls, Wu measured 358 specimens obtained from public graveyards in Kunming in Southwest China. He determined the rate of occurrence of metopism to be the highest of all races ever found and entered into a kind of discourse that is rarely seen in his publications. While adopting the terms of racial hierarchy, he refrained from drawing any conclusions:

  • 85 T. L. Woo, 1941b, p. 84, 86. This attitude contrasts with earlier anthropological writings in Chin (...)

“If Schwalbe’s hypothesis [i.e. that metopism can be attributed to a greater development of the frontal lobe] were accepted, the Chinese race, then should be at least as superior as the Europeans. But whether different percentage values of metopism simply indicate the racial differentiation of the anatomical constitution of this particular suture or connote the rank of the racial superiority, are problems deserving further research.”85

  • 86 See for example Wu’s survey of an ethnic group from Guizhou T. L. Woo, 1942, p. 45.
  • 87 See T. L. Woo, 1938a; id., 1941a; id., 1941b; T. L. Woo & Y. Yen, 1941. In T. L. Woo, 1938a p. 2, (...)
  • 88 T. L. Woo, 1943, p. 36.
  • 89 T. L. Woo & Y. Yen, 1941, pp. 95-96.
  • 90 See F. Slowik, 1945, p. 33. Reference is made to T. L. Woo, 1938a. For others using Wu’s and Moran (...)

23In general, Wu avoided comparisons with data from foreign regions on the grounds that measurements made by other observers were based on subjective norms.86 He undertook clavicle, humerus, skull and malar bone measurements on material that had been recently excavated in Anyang by colleagues from his Institute in Nanjing or that he had obtained himself from unclaimed graves.87 Wu’s focus upon Chinese bones cannot simply be explained by the nationalist context, a common interpretative framework in Republican-era historiography. Wu was also constrained by the fact that he “had limited access to the literature while working under difficult war conditions”88 or simply because there were no specimens from other countries available in his Institute’s collection.89 Even if Wu was always personally suspicious about data obtained from other authors despite their repeated claims as to the precision and authority of their numbers, he occasionally used anthropometric data from published sources faute de mieux. Outside China, Wu’s work was received with a degree of scepticism similar to that he himself maintained towards his foreign colleagues. For example, one of Schlaginhaufen’s doctoral students in Zurich questioned Wu’s pooling of prehistoric and contemporary Chinese specimens, concluded his criticism on a shattering note, but then made extensive use of Wu’s data throughout his dissertation.90

  • 91 See T. L. Woo & G. M. Morant, 1934 “translated” to D. Wu, 1940.
  • 92 See D. Wu, 1940, p. 31, n. 7: “This article is translated from the author’s original publication. (...)
  • 93 Cf. T. L. Woo & G. M. Morant, 1934, p. 198 “made to order for Dr Woo by Messrs W. F. Stanley and C (...)

24Besides the two above-described obvious data-driven changes in Wu’s work back in China, more subtle changes in his writings can also be observed. His “translation” into Chinese of the above-mentioned article on the “flatness” of the facial skeleton, originally published together with Morant in 1934, is particularly revealing as to his notion of a Chinese race.91 The article is not precisely a translation, even if Wu says so in a footnote at the very end and claims sole authorship of the original.92 He adds two figures for the non-specialist, one showing a special instrument made specifically to suit his purpose,93 and another showing the different points of measurement in a drawing of a facial skeleton. Important anthropological information about the material used was not included in the Chinese version, and along with this amendment, a conclusive remark about the unity of the Chinese from the original article was dropped:

  • 94 T. L. Woo & G. M. Morant, 1934, p. 214.

“for all the characters with which we are dealing the two [Chinese] series differ insignificantly from one another, although these samples were collected in various parts of South China and its neighbouring islands. This accords with the belief that the Chinese race is homogeneous in its physical type.”94

  • 95 D. Wu, 1940, p. 25: “人恆謂蒙古族類,鼻骨最低平,實非事實。”

25What remains in the Chinese version is a tentative conclusion about sexual differences of mean values and the question of whether their magnitude correlates with the degree of “primitiveness” of races. Since Asians and Europeans turned out to be less differentiated sexually than others, they would thus fall into the category of “advanced” races. In Chinese, Wu partially avoids this hierarchical jargon and replaces it with the notion of historical time, contrasting “modern” and “primitive” races and, again, warns at the end that more material was necessary to confirm this hypothesis. In two instances, Wu repeats his claim that the study disproves the common belief that Mongols (his translation for “Orientals”) have the flattest nasal bone or face of all races.95 “For Eskimos it is even worse!”, he says, and specifically omits one of the four maps of interracial correlation indices in which the Chinese natives are in a rather isolated location close to the bottom of the scale.

  • 96 D. Wu, 1940, pp. 25-26. It is interesting to note that the English terms he indicates in brackets (...)
  • 97 See D. Wu, 1956a, for work on instruments and D. Wu, 1948, for first signs of a more programmatic (...)

26Finally, it is remarkable in that all expressions containing the form “race” are given in both Chinese and English in the translation. An entire nomenclature was created to communicate terms such as “interracial correlation”, “racial group”, “racial classification”, “racial series”, and “racial arrangement”.96 Wu was probably not familiar with the technical language of his own field, as reflected in earlier translations and writings in physical anthropology. This was his first publication of biometric content in Chinese after 13 years of writing articles in English (and one in German). It also marked the final years of his presence in foreign journals, brought about by World War II, the dismantling of the Institute of Anthropology in 1948 and the official founding of the People’s Republic of China on 1 October 1949. A very different stance on the Chinese race and ethnic minorities and a forceful rejection of all Western mathematical approaches to the human and social sciences obliged Wu either to turn to practical aspects or align himself with the interests of the Communist Party.97

Conclusion

  • 98 Rather revealing of the different conceptions and vocabularies is a 1930 bibliography of Western a (...)
  • 99 See Morant’s very explicit statement in G. M. Morant, 1934, p. 105 and D. Wu, 1943; see D. Wu, 196 (...)
  • 100 See T. L. Woo, 1943, p. 45.

27Before 1949, there was no consensus among intellectuals in China on notions of race. While some vehemently denied racial differences, others defended Western eugenicist theories and discrimination on the grounds of racial inequality.98 Statistics, and in particular biometry, was, by definition, an approach that allowed a distancing from the notion of race as applied to individuals: calculations are always based on means, variation is taken into account and quantified when samples from supposedly homogenous groups are measured. There is no “pure race” for unbiased biometricians,99 and there are never definite conclusions, since their databases are open-ended and subject to historical and archaeological contingency. Yet, not unlike in experimental physics, the hypotheses used to design a research framework affect the outcome. Wu’s approach, via that of Pearson, is based on the very basic assumption that primitive and civilized communities and thus racial groups do exist, that the latter are homogenous and that their data can be pooled. Yet, the many quotations from Wu’s writings provided in this article show that he did not draw any discriminating conclusions from these hypotheses and his statistical inquiry, if he drew any conclusions at all. He remained extremely vigilant, even after returning to China, with respect to both racial and sexual differences.100

  • 101 See, for example, the case of the German-trained physician Hu Dingan 胡定安 in Y. J. Chung, 2010, p.  (...)
  • 102 For the latter see D. Wu, 1956b.

28Measurement data and the growing abundance of available archaeological material, and, after 1934, access to samples from living Chinese, clearly determined Wu’s biometrically motivated outlook on race as shown throughout this article. Furthermore, back in China, like many of Wu’s compatriots who in the 1920s and 1930s had studied abroad and returned to China with an idealistic idea of science in the service of a China in peril,101 Wu’s research took a nationally contoured orientation. He turned his attention to questions investigated by the Chinese eugenics movement, such as brain size and physical strength or the anthropometric measurement of ethnic minorities in the borderlands. Wu also became involved with other themes that were more culturally grounded and common tropes of foreign discourse: he verified statistically common beliefs such as the flatness of the face of Asian races or the frequency of the so-called “Mongolian spot” among Chinese infants.102 In the absence of Wu Dingliang’s private archives, it is hard to determine his personal stance on the notion of “race”, but gathering from what shines through his writings, he made substantial efforts to give it a statistical definition, without questioning the very notion itself.

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Bibliographie

Primary sources

Archives

The National Archives, London (UK):

Adam Matthew, Foreign Office Files China & Japan, FO 371 17047 f. 148

Adelaide University (Australia):

Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher (1890–1962) Papers, MSS 0013

University College Special Collections, University of London (UK):

Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911) Papers

Karl Pearson (1840–1972) Papers

Durham (UK):

Martin and Ruth Morant personal archives

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Notes

1 F. Dikötter, 1992; id. 1997.

2 T. Mullaney, 2010.

3 G. Müller, 2011.

4 H. Yen, 2012.

5 Y. J. Chung, 2002.

6 Exceptions are J. Zhu, 2018, pp. 185-198 and C. D. Brown, 2008, who do refer to anthropometry in China; the most detailed general history of anthropometry in China in Chinese is J. Du, 2013, yet none go into methodological details.

7 Wu’s suicide and destiny during the Communist era, the Cultural Revolution in particular, is yet another story and has been investigated by Du Jing based upon extensive archival material from Fudan University, Shanghai in a chapter entitled Wu Dingliang zhi si ji shenhou de “gaiguan lunding” 吴定良之死及身后的“盖棺论定” (Wu Dingliang’s death and the fact that “no verdict can be pronounced on a man until after his death”) in J. Du, 2013, pp. 145-185.

8 See the announcement of Wu’s admission to Nanjing’s Higher Normal School 高等師範學校 (renamed to National Southeast University in 1921) in the Shanghai newspaper Shenbao 申報: 南京 (Nanjing) 25 July 1918, p. 7.

9 See M. Münning.

10 Z. Lu & D. Wu, 1922. Earlier, in 1921, Wu, together with another student, published lecture notes of Lu’s talk on “Errors of logic regularly committed by educators”, see D. Wu & S. Zhang 1921.

11 See Z. Lu 1924.

12 See A. Bréard, 2006, pp. 15-16.

13 Overseas students had played a crucial role in the transmission of applied statistics to China since the Republican era. For an overview see W. Yuan & H. Li, 2021.

14 See the announcements in the Shanghai newspaper Shenbao 申報: 江蘇考試歐美留學詳情 (Details on the Jiangsu Examinations for Studying in Europe and the United States, 28 July 1924) p. 11, 蘇省選派歐美留學學生揭曉 (Jiangsu Province Announces the Selection of Students to Study in Europe and the United States, 29 July 1924, p. 11) and 江蘇留美官費生放洋有期 (Time of Sailing to the United States of America for government-funded students from Jiangsu Province, 27 November 1924, p. 10). When Wu’s scholarship exactly ended is unclear, but the 1930 report of the Board of Directors of the China Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Culture includes a summary of Wu’s “research on human skulls at the Galton Laboratory of the University of London, England” which relates mainly to the Egyptian skulls studied in T. L. Woo, 1930. See Zhonghua, 1930, pp. 38-39.

15 See Columbia, p. 201 and Committee, 1932, p. 968.

16 It was possible for Wu to follow courses in other Schools of Columbia University. See Teachers College, p. 32.

17 See the letter by R. A. Fisher to G. M. Morant, dated 26 July 1933: “I imagine that the four Brunsvigas now in use by the members of the Department will be retained for a time, though I should hope ultimately to replace them by electrically driven machines” (Ronald Fisher Papers, MSS 0013, Correspondence files).

18 See for example N. Fu & Q. Zhang, 1926, p. 3. This students’ report opens with the sentence that “for racial prejudice (zhongzu egan 種族惡感) and discrimination against Orientals (paizhe dongfang minzu 排斥東方民族), England is the worst place!”

19 See K. Pearson & M. Moul, 1925, p. 5.

20 University of London, 1929, p. 480.

21 T. L. Woo & K. Pearson, 1927; T. L. Woo, 1928. Neither paper seems to have been much noticed, but Dr A. Barreras, Director of the Service for Forensic Medicine in Habana, Cuba, wrote a letter to Pearson on 14 May 1932, asking for a copy of the article. See Karl Pearson Papers, 11/1/2/16.

22 Z. Lu, 1924.

23 No explicit source confirms the rejection of his application, but all publications by T. L. Woo in Biometrika after 1932 are signed “By T. L. WOO, Ph.D.” See for example T. L. Woo & G. M. Morant, 1934, p. 196: “By T. L. WOO, Ph.D., in conjunction with G. M. MORANT, D.Sc.”

24 Karl Pearson Papers, 11/1/12/62, letters from the Academic Registrar of University of London to Karl Pearson, dated 2 June 1932 and 8 June 1932.

25 See Karl Pearson Papers, 7/155/1 vs Pearson’s Introduction to T. L. Woo, 1929 and Karl Pearson Papers, 7/138/1 vs T. L. Woo & K. Pearson, 1927.

26 See K. Pearson, 1932, p. 355, K. Pearson & T. L. Woo 1935, p. 424, and the tables in T. L. Woo, 1929, where the “Introduction to Tables for η2 computed by Dr T. L. Woo” (pp. 1-8) was most likely written by Pearson himself.

27 After claiming in E. Elderton & T. L. Woo, 1932, p. 45, that “unfortunately Dr Woo’s β’s suffers from two defects when used for our present purpose”, it is subsequently underlined that the β’s used are calculated by Wu. See for example idem p. 46: “β’s as found by Dr Woo”, p. 49 a table with the title “Dr Woo’s Values for √β1 and β2” or stressing p. 50 that “samples taken from a normal population to be of constant size” was “a condition not fulfilled by Dr Woo’s material”. On Miss Elderton’s status, see R. Love, 1979. In Pearson’s correspondence with Morant, frequent mention is also made to Woo’s “slips.” See, for example, Martin and Ruth Morant personal archives (now “MRM”), typescript letter from K. Pearson to G. M. Morant, 14 April 1934. Even worse, Pearson believes that “he never appeared to keep his arithmetic. Unless one gives him in each case the appropriate formula to use – and sees he uses it – he is hopeless” (MRM, typescript letter from K. Pearson to G. M. Morant, 15 April 1935).

28 See MRM, typescript letter from K. Pearson to G. M. Morant, 13 January 1934.

29 See the Report of the Executive Council to the Universities’ China Committee in London for 1932–33 together with accounts from 30 November 1931 to 31 March 1933. Adam Matthew, Foreign Office Files China & Japan, FO 371 17047 f. 148.

30 See T. Porter, 2004, p. 263.

31 Quoted from G. M. Morant, 1926, p. 417, see also the controversial work by Alice Lee in A. Lee & K. Pearson, 1901, in particular pp. 255-260, contextualized in R. Love, 1979, pp. 149-152.

32 I.e. Fujian, a South-Eastern Chinese province.

33 T. L. Woo, 1930, p. 5.

34 The Chinese material for T. L. Woo & G. M. Morant, 1934 stems entirely from other locations in England (Royal College of Surgeons, Cambridge, Oxford, British Museum) and Netherlands (Leiden, see p. 214). All malar bones, incl. 63 southern Chinese specimens for T. L. Woo, 1937, were located at the Royal College of Surgeons, London, where Wu measured them in 1934 (see p. 114). Earlier, Morant, when he was still a PhD student in craniometry, had already worked on certain Asian skulls in the Natural History Department of the British Museum, see G. M. Morant, 1924.

35 See Karl Pearson Papers 11/1/16/136, letter to Karl Pearson (dated 7 November 1932) from William Plane Pycraft (1868–1942), osteologist, Assistant Keeper of the osteological collections in the Natural History Museum, London: “Dr Woo brought me your letter, & is now at work here. May I say that so long as I am here any student that you may send to me will receive all the help I can possibly give him. Could he possibly come with higher credentials!”

36 See, for example, the long list of foreign sources on Chinese skulls in the bibliography provided in D. Wu, 1944, pp. 24-30.

37 See D. Black, 1930. In Chinese historiography, regret that foreigners and not Chinese natives had led the excavations is often stressed without providing concrete references. See for example W. Yuan & Y. Li, 2019, p. 1: “he [Wu Dingliang] regretted that his country’s treasures had to be studied by foreigners”. On the collaboration between Chinese and foreign actors in the excavations, see P. L. Huston, 2008 and S. Schmalzer, 2008, pp. 37-46. Narrative of this kind was challenged earlier by Chinese scholars in the context of a vigorous nation-building campaign during the Nanjing decade (1927–1937). See G. Lai, 2018 in contrast to the simplistic account in G. E. Guldin, 1988, p. 7.

38 On Morant and his relations with Pearson, see I. Clever, 2020, chap. 4.

39 For an overview of the material used, see T. L. Woo & G. M. Morant, 1932, pp. 112-113, in particular D. Black, 1928.

40 On this now obsolete term, see S. Kotz et al., 2006, p. 6497. The term was erroneously given as Image in M. L. Tildesley, 1921, p. 248 and perpetuated in subsequent publications, even in R. A. Fisher, 1936, p. 60, but corrected in the Biometrika publications from vol. 18, no. 1/2, 1926 on. See K. Pearson, 1926, p. 107.

41 K. Pearson, 1926, p. 105.

42 See K. Pearson, 1928 where he suggests this modification by normalizing to a sample size of 75.

43 An approach Pearson had already defended in K. Pearson, 1901 but illustrated therein only with respect to a single character, the cephalic index. It gives the ratio between breadth and length of the skull multiplied by the factor 100, or in standard terms of anthropometric characters: I = 100 B/L.

44 K. Pearson, 1926, pp. 111-112.

45 G. M. Morant, 1928, and earlier in G. M. Morant, 1925.

46 P. C. Mahalanobis, 1930.

47 One of these had been studied earlier in G. M. Morant, 1923; it is a far shorter, but “particularly interesting” series, the Tibetan B type, comprising only 15 skulls and few, yet suggestive, characters. See T. L. Woo & G. M. Morant, 1932, p. 116.

48 See footnote 43.

49 See T. L. Woo & G. M. Morant, 1932, pp. 129-132.

50 T. L. Woo & G. M. Morant, 1932, p. 134.

51 T. L. Woo & G. M. Morant, 1932, p. 124. The same conclusion is drawn in T. L. Woo & G. M. Morant, 1934, p. 214 for two other Chinese series: “This accords with the belief that the Chinese race is homogeneous in its physical type”.

52 For a clear-cut division between the Northern and Southern Chinese groups, see for example G. Harrower, 1926, pp. 596-597, a general discussion in C. Li, 1923, and earlier Y. Koganei, 1902, p. 133.

53 See H. Yen, 2014. Already in C. Ling, 1934, p. 39 the results of T. L. Woo & G. M. Morant, 1932 are quoted to underline common ancestry in ancient times.

54 Republished “by arrangement with the Editor of Biometrika” in Academia Sinica’s Monographs of the National Research Institute of Social Sciences, Nanjing, May 1932, and dedicated by T. L. Woo “To Dr. Tsai Yuen-Pei The President Of The Academia Sinica, Mr. Yang Chien The Secretary Of the Academia Sinica and the Directors of the affiliated National Research Institutes, Academia Sinica.”

55 See for example, Pan’s translation of Francis Galton’s chapter on “The comparative worth of different races” from Hereditary Genius (1869) in a supplement on eugenics in G. Pan, 1936.

56 On Pan Guangdan, see F. Dikötter, 2012, Y. J. Chung, 2002, and M. W. Foreman, 2020. Pan published many articles in English in the China Critic (see L. A. Rocha, 2012) and in Chinese in Huanian, a weekly magazine for young people.

57 A. Yi, 1933. The article being written in difficult technical language, the author nevertheless expresses his wish for it to be not only translated into Chinese, but also formulated in simpler terms.

58 Chinese idiom, literally “beanstalks frying each other” (dóu qí xiāng jiān 豆萁相煎). The reviewer is most likely referring to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in September 1931 and the subsequent southward advance.

59 Translated from A. Yi, 1933. Cf. the English review G. Pan, 1933 which is in a similar vein.

60 This is now referred to as the “Mahalanobis squared distance”, see T. W. Anderson, 1996 for more technical details. It would go beyond the scope of this paper to detail all technical and historical issues related to the C.R.L. A separate paper on its global history was presented at the conference “Biographies of Numbers” held at the Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, 7–9 July 2022, and will be published thereafter as A. Bréard, “The Rise and Fall of the ‘Coefficient of Racial Likeness’: Discriminatory Numbers and the Global History of Statistical Method”.

61 T. L. Woo & G. M. Morant, 1934, p. 249.

62 T. L. Woo & G. M. Morant, 1934, p. 214.

63 T. L. Woo & G. M. Morant, 1934, p. 250.

64 According to an entry on Wu’s Professional Service Registration Card of Teaching Personnel from National Zhejiang University 國立浙江大學在職教職員登記表, in the family archives of Wu Dingliang’s daughter, Shanghai. Wu might nevertheless have spent some time in London in 1934, see n. 27.

65 The Oxford University archives, the University Calendar, card registers, and the University Gazette with entries for Advanced Students, although very complete in terms of student and alumni records, contain no references to Wu. The same holds for Zurich: neither the UZH archives, nor the documents of the Julius Klaus-Stiftung für Vererbungsforschung, Sozialanthropologie und Rassenhygiene of which Schlaginhaufen was a co-founder and President from 1922 to 1968, and which are partially preserved in the State Archives of Zurich (Signatur Z 70.427) show any traces of Wu’s stay. I am grateful to Sandra Morach (UZH Archiv), Karin Huser (Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich), Faye McLeod (University Archives, Bodleian Library, Oxford), and Jacqui Collier (Degree Conferrals Office, Student Registry, Oxford University) for their kind assistance.

66 See C. Keller, 1995, pp. 193-195.

67 See The International Committee…, 1934.

68 See T. L. Woo, 1938b, pp. 225, 227.

69 See the correspondence between Galton and Schlaginhaufen concerning an instrument for measuring fingerprints, their heredity, forms for collecting data, and sending family fingerprints to London, dated 26 July, 2 August, and 23 September 1903 (Francis Galton Papers, 2/9/6/10/1/26).

70 See “Proceedings…”, 1929, p. 530.

71 See G. Stemerdink, 2003, p. 81. Wu’s election, along with that of R. A. Fisher’s and R. Pearl, was announced in China in the journal Shiyou 社友, vol. 15, 1931, p. 3.

72 See Institut international…, 1936, p. 16. Liu Dajun 劉大鈞 (1891–1962), director of the Bureau of Statistics of the Legislative Yuan in Nanjing since December 1928, participated as delegate of the Chinese government. See entry for “Liu Ta-Choun (D. K. Lieu)”, ibid., p. 10 and A. Bréard, 2019, p. 315.

73 See Institut international…, 1930, p. 9.

74 On the complex path to being elected to the Academia Sinica, see J. Guo, 2020.

75 Wu published an obituary of Pearson in Chinese in D. Wu, 1936 in which he ironically concludes that “through his death, we lose a great master in statistics, but the loss to science, can certainly not be reckoned quantitatively! (豐特統計學上失一大事,科學上之損失,實不可以數量計葉)” (p. 684). Cf. G. M. Morant, 1936, which is very similar to D. Wu, 1936.

76 See T. L. Woo, 1938a, p. 48 where he thanks “most heartily Dr. G. M. Morant, London, for his many helpful suggestions and criticisms of this paper”. Unfortunately, no letters between Morant and Woo have been preserved either in the UCL archives or in Morant’s son’s home in London. Information on Morant’s son’s archives was kindly provided by Dr. Iris Clever who generously shared the correspondence between Pearson and Morant with me. See MRM.

77 See R. Wu & X. Wu, 1997, p. 274.

78 T. L. Woo, 1938b, p. 230. Wu uses the same data again in D. Wu, 1957, comparing it with measurements taken twenty years later in 1956, thereby showcasing the improvement of living conditions in the People’s Republic.

79 See the announcement of Wu’s measurements in primary and middle schools and his travels through certain districts of Zhejiang province in “Wu Dingliang shi celiang…”, 1936.

80 See Y. J. Chung, 2002 for a history of the Chinese eugenic movement in a transnational context and X. Jiang, 1931 for anthropometry in the context of physical education.

81 P. H. Stevenson, 1938, p. 1.

82 On the entangled history of this notion in reference to the Chinese people, see J. Yang, 2020.

83 Quoted and translated from Y. Lu, 1937, p. 203. The author compares data on prehistoric Chinese and European skulls and results of IQ tests performed on Chinese and American children in order to stress the importance of improving the physical and mental health of the Chinese in the context of a national rejuvenation campaign. See also J. Fu, 2016 for the relation between anthropometry and public health in Republican China.

84 See T. L. Woo, 1941b, pp. 84-86 for references to European authors defending this position. Metopism designates the condition of having a persistent metopic suture, located between the eminences of the frontal bone. It normally closes sometime between the first and tenth year of life.

85 T. L. Woo, 1941b, p. 84, 86. This attitude contrasts with earlier anthropological writings in China. Cf. Y. Chen, 1925, p. 5 translated in F. Dikötter, 1997, p. 7.

86 See for example Wu’s survey of an ethnic group from Guizhou T. L. Woo, 1942, p. 45.

87 See T. L. Woo, 1938a; id., 1941a; id., 1941b; T. L. Woo & Y. Yen, 1941. In T. L. Woo, 1938a p. 2, n. 1, Wu announces yet another article “ready for publication” entitled “A First Study of the Chinese Skull Excavated from Hsiao T’un, Anyang”, but it seems to have never seen the light.

88 T. L. Woo, 1943, p. 36.

89 T. L. Woo & Y. Yen, 1941, pp. 95-96.

90 See F. Slowik, 1945, p. 33. Reference is made to T. L. Woo, 1938a. For others using Wu’s and Morant’s data from G. M. Morant, 1924 and T. L. Woo & G. M. Morant, 1932 in spite of doubts, see for example W. D. Hambly, 1947, p. 51.

91 See T. L. Woo & G. M. Morant, 1934 “translated” to D. Wu, 1940.

92 See D. Wu, 1940, p. 31, n. 7: “This article is translated from the author’s original publication. The sections of measurements and correlations from the original publication, rather technical in nature, have been omitted, but this does not alter the main conclusions of the present article.” The original publication is referred to explicitly without indicating Morant as co-author.

93 Cf. T. L. Woo & G. M. Morant, 1934, p. 198 “made to order for Dr Woo by Messrs W. F. Stanley and Co. The breadth of the middle arm was reduced to 2.5 mm., and the outside arms were made 10 cm. long. All the measurements needed could be readily taken with these calipers on all the skulls examined.” D. Wu, 1940, p. 19: “作者因將該規加以改造, 將中間一腳寬度,減至二,五公厘,兩端腳增長至一0公分,以此規測量各種標本,均無不適用矣。” (The author has modified the ruler by reducing the width of the middle leg to 2.5 cm and increasing the legs at both ends to 10 cm, so that all kinds of specimens can be satisfactorily measured with this ruler.)

94 T. L. Woo & G. M. Morant, 1934, p. 214.

95 D. Wu, 1940, p. 25: “人恆謂蒙古族類,鼻骨最低平,實非事實。”

96 D. Wu, 1940, pp. 25-26. It is interesting to note that the English terms he indicates in brackets do not always correspond to the original expressions in T. L. Woo & G. M. Morant, 1934. For example, “family of races” becomes “族類(racial group)”, “racial type” is translated as “分組(racial series)”. A more detailed study of the terminology would be necessary to interpret these changes.

97 See D. Wu, 1956a, for work on instruments and D. Wu, 1948, for first signs of a more programmatic political tone, later also D. Wu, 1961.

98 Rather revealing of the different conceptions and vocabularies is a 1930 bibliography of Western and Chinese literature on “Race” in “Guanyu Zhongguo renkou…”, 1930, pp. 284-290. See also F. Dikötter, 1992, pp. 126-163.

99 See Morant’s very explicit statement in G. M. Morant, 1934, p. 105 and D. Wu, 1943; see D. Wu, 1961 for Wu’s view on racial mixing of the Chinese.

100 See T. L. Woo, 1943, p. 45.

101 See, for example, the case of the German-trained physician Hu Dingan 胡定安 in Y. J. Chung, 2010, p. 263, or the programmatic writings of Ren Hongjun 任鴻隽, founding member of the Science Society of China in H. Fan & J. Zhang, 2002.

102 For the latter see D. Wu, 1956b.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Figure 1. Thesis submitted on 28 May 1928 by Wu Dingliang
Légende Note. Subsidiary 1 (left), page from Subsidiary 3 (right).
Crédits Sources. UCL archives, London.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/histoiremesure/docannexe/image/15789/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 4,3M
Titre Figure 2. Mapping bilateral relationships between some Indian, Southern and Northern Oriental Races according to the C.R.L.
Crédits Source. T. L. Woo & G. M. Morant, 1932.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/histoiremesure/docannexe/image/15789/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 1019k
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Pour citer cet article

Référence papier

Andrea Bréard, « Wu Dingliang (1894–1969) and the Statistical Definition of a Chinese Race »Histoire & mesure, XXXVII-1 | 2022, 71-98.

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Andrea Bréard, « Wu Dingliang (1894–1969) and the Statistical Definition of a Chinese Race »Histoire & mesure [En ligne], XXXVII-1 | 2022, mis en ligne le 01 janvier 2024, consulté le 12 juillet 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/histoiremesure/15789 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/histoiremesure.15789

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Auteur

Andrea Bréard

Chair for Sinology with a Focus on the Intellectual and Cultural History of China (Alexander von Humboldt, Professor). E-mail: andrea.breard@fau.de

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Le texte et les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés), sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

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