Promoting standardisation in modern China: British and American engineers’ organisations, local Chinese engineers, and their transnational networks, 1901–41

Standardisation is a product of the second wave of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and North America. This article examines how Western standardisation practices were introduced, transmitted, and promoted in China during the first half of the twentieth century. In particular, it looks at the critical role played by British, American, and local Chinese engineers in the transmission process. The topics covered in the present article have seldom been considered, and this article tries to fill the gap in scholarship. It analyses the shifting patterns of various standardisation efforts that are closely related to the governance of both cities and the wider nation. Work examined includes that of the Engineering Society of China, led by British engineers, which initiated standardisation in the Shanghai International Settlement in the early twentieth century; that of the Association of Chinese and American Engineers, founded by engineers of China and the USA, which, after World War I, began to implement the standardisation of railway infrastructure, with the cooperation of the Ministry of Transportation of the Beijing government; and efforts in the 1930s under the Nanjing government to establish an ‘engineering’ or ‘technocratic’ state, which included the execution of national schemes for the development of industrial standardisation. From the period of World War I until the 1930s, the orientation and practices of American standardisation strategies dominated China; then, due to the worsening situation of the Chinese–Japanese War, ideological tendencies and national strategies for standardisation began to diverge.