Measuring Up, or Why It’s Good to be Tall in Modern China

UC Berkeley's Center for Chinese Studies presents a talk by Jia-Chen Fu on the Chinese anthropometric research of the 1920s and 1930s.

Jia-Chen Fu, CCS Postdoctoral Fellow

This presentation examines the convergence of a medical sub-speciality and the nationalist project of uplift that identified the physical dimensions of China’s children as benchmarks for modern advancement during the first half of the twentieth century. Chinese anthropometric research of the 1920s and 1930s opened intellectual paths for the abstraction and normalization of the Chinese body. By permitting the direct synthesis of the physical and physiological body’s various aspects into numerical patterns of general types, anthropometric research shifted the intellectual landscape of medical practice and public health and encouraged the development of a culture of quantification.