This book, within the vision of the study on the image history, clearly manifests the development of Chinese image science and technology of over 2000 years based on compendium, while having briefly sorted out expositions by scientists since ancient times in China, demonstrates the spiritual course, ideas of thinking and forms of life and reveales profound humane ideas, basis of sentiments and styles of the spirit featured by Chinese image culture. The historic outline of images is clear-cut along with authenticated inter-attestation for clues of images and texts. Historic facts concerning images are ecologically diversified, while historic documents about images are properly chosen, in addition to the integration between liberal arts and science and perfect combination between images and texts. Blessed with nice integration between images and texts, this book serves as reference to experts, scholars, undergraduates and postgraduates related to the study on image history, history of science and technology, study of history and news communication.

A systematic historical survey of Chinese thought is followed by an investigation of the historical-metaphysical questions of modern technology, asking how Chinese thought might contribute to a renewed questioning of globalized technics. Heidegger's critique of modern technology and its relation to metaphysics has been widely accepted in the East. Yet the conception that there is only one—originally Greek—type of technics has been an obstacle to any original critical thinking of technology in modern Chinese thought. Yuk Hui argues for the urgency of imagining a specifically Chinese philosophy of technology capable of responding to Heidegger's challenge, while problematizing the affirmation of technics and technologies as anthropologically universal. This investigation of the historical-metaphysical question of technology, drawing on Lyotard, Simondon, and Stiegler, and introducing a history of modern Eastern philosophical thinking largely unknown to Western readers, including philosophers such as Feng Youlan, Mou Zongsan, and Keiji Nishitani, sheds new light on the obscurity of the question of technology in China. Why was technics never thematized in Chinese thought? Why has time never been a real question for Chinese philosophy? How was the traditional concept of Qi transformed in its relation to Dao as China welcomed technological modernity and westernization? In The Question Concerning Technology in China, a systematic historical survey of the major concepts of traditional Chinese thinking is followed by a startlingly original investigation of these questions, in order to ask how Chinese thought might today contribute to a renewed, cosmotechnical questioning of globalized technics.

"This study of the intimate connections between science and society in China shows that science and technology, far from saving China, as the country's leaders promise, are producing unanticipated, often deeply disturbing effects"--

Chinese poetry has a long history of interaction with the visual arts. Classical aesthetic thought held that painting, calligraphy, and poetry were cross-fertilizing and mutually enriching. What happened when the Chinese poetic tradition encountered photography, a transformative technology and presumably realistic medium that reshaped seeing and representing the world? Shengqing Wu explores how the new medium of photography was transformed by Chinese aesthetic culture. She details the complex negotiations between poetry and photography in the late Qing and early Republican eras, examining the ways traditional textual forms collaborated with the new visual culture. Drawing on extensive archival research into illustrated magazines, poetry collections, and vintage photographs, Photo Poetics analyzes a wide range of practices and genres, including self-representation in portrait photography; gifts of inscribed photographs; mass-media circulation of images of beautiful women; and photography of ghosts, immortals, and imagined landscapes. Wu argues that the Chinese lyrical tradition provided rich resources for artistic creativity, self-expression, and embodied experience in the face of an increasingly technological and image-oriented society. An interdisciplinary study spanning literary studies, visual culture, and media history, Photo Poetics is an original account of media culture in early twentieth-century China and the formation of Chinese literary and visual modernities.

Here, at last, is the massively updated and augmented second edition of this landmark encyclopedia. It contains approximately 1000 entries dealing in depth with the history of the scientific, technological and medical accomplishments of cultures outside of the United States and Europe. The entries consist of fully updated articles together with hundreds of entirely new topics. This unique reference work includes intercultural articles on broad topics such as mathematics and astronomy as well as thoughtful philosophical articles on concepts and ideas related to the study of non-Western Science, such as rationality, objectivity, and method. You’ll also find material on religion and science, East and West, and magic and science.

This book presents a collection of memoir papers on the development of modern and contemporary optics and optoelectronics in China from the 18th to 20th centuries. The papers were written by famous scientists in China, including members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering, sharing their experience in different fields of optics and optoelectronics development. This is a unique book in understanding the natural science history of optics and optoelectronics. It gives you the general idea about how the western optical science spread to China in the 17th to 18th century; the cradle of the contemporary optics in China; Birth, development and application of lasers in China; high energy and high power lasers for laser antiballistic missile and laser nuclear fusion; development of Chinese optical communication and optical information storage; laser and infrared optics research for space science; development of Chinese optical instruments, etc. Contents: West Science vs. East (Gan Fuxi); Optical Science and Technology in China in the First Half of 20th Century (Gan Fuxi); The Cradle of the Contemporary Optics in China (Gan Fuxi); The History of Research and Development of Optical Glass in China (Gan Fuxi); Birth and Early Development of Lasers in China (Gan Fuxi); Laser ABM OCo One of the Strategic Defense Means in Early Time (Gan Fuxi); Memory of the Early Days OCo Quantum Electronics Research in the Institute of Electronics (Lin Fucheng); Chinese Laser Research Opened to the World (Gan Fuxi); Breakthroughs and Development of Semiconductor Lasers in China (Wang Qiming and Huang Yong-Zhen); Development of the Solid State Laser Materials in China (Gan Fuxi); Development of High Power Lasers in China (Fan Dianyuan); Establishment of the Daheng Company OCo A Pioneering Work of Chinese Scientific and Technological System Reform (Gan Fuxi); National 863 High Technology Program Promoted the Development of Optoelectronics in China (Gan Fuxi); Open Up the Optical Information Storage Technology in China (Gan Fuxi); Progress of Optical Communications in China OCo Fragments of Personal Reminiscences (Fang Zujie); The Course of Development of Astronomical Optical Instruments (Pan Junhua); Infra Red Optics Research and Application in Satellite Monitoring (Xue Yongqi); High Speed Imaging and Monitoring Research and Development (Hou Xun); Research on Laser Cooling and Time Standard in Optical Wavelength Range (Wang Yuzhu); Industrial Development of Optical Instruments in China (Zhuang Songlin). Readership: Students and scientists who are interested in the history of optics and optoelectronics in China.

This book makes a unique and timely contribution to world/global historical studies and related fields. It places essential world historical frameworks by top scholars in the field today in clear, direct relation to and conversation with one other, offering them opportunity to enrich, elucidate and, at times, challenge one another. It thereby aims to: (1) offer world historians opportunity to critically reflect upon and refine their essential interpretational frameworks, (2) facilitate more effective and nuanced teaching and learning in and beyond the classroom, (3) provide accessible world historical contexts for specialized areas of historical as well as other fields of research in the humanities, social sciences and sciences, and (4) promote comparative historiographical critique which (a) helps identify continuing research questions for the field of world history in particular, as well as (b) further global peace and dialogue in relation to varying views of our ever-increasingly interconnected, interdependent, multicultural, and globalized world and its shared though diverse and sometimes contested history.