Death in Beijing: Murder and Forensic Science in Republican China

by Daniel Asen

Overview

In this innovative and engaging history of homicide investigation in Republican Beijing, Daniel Asen explores the transformation of ideas about death in China in the first half of the twentieth century. In this period, those who died violently or under suspicious circumstances constituted a particularly important population of the dead, subject to new claims by police, legal and medical professionals, and a newspaper industry intent on covering urban fatality in sensational detail. Asen examines the process through which imperial China's old tradition of forensic science came to serve the needs of a changing state and society under these dramatically new circumstances. This is a story of the unexpected outcomes and contingencies of modernity, presenting new perspectives on China's transition from empire to modern nation state, competing visions of science and expertise, and the ways in which the meanings of death and dead bodies changed amid China's modern transformation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781316711958
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	07/28/2016
Series:	Science in History
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	15 MB
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About the Author

Daniel Asen is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Rutgers University, Newark. His published research has investigated the social and cultural contexts of science and medicine in late imperial and twentieth-century China, with attention to transnational and global perspectives. His work has been published in Social History of Medicine and East Asian Science, Technology and Society, as well as within edited volumes on legal history and the history of medicine in China. He is a member of the American Historical Association, the Association for Asian Studies, and the International Society for Chinese Law and History.

Table of Contents

Introduction; 1. Suspicious deaths and city life in Republican Beijing; 2. On the case with the Beijing procuracy; 3. Disputed forensics and skeletal remains; 4. Publicity, professionals, and the cause of forensic reform; 5. Professional politics of a crime scene; 6. Dissection and its discontents; 7. Legal medicine during the Nanjing decade; Conclusion: a history of forensic modernity; Glossary; Bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

'Dealing with the dead involved many important things in Republican Beijing. In this profoundly original study in political, urban, and intellectual change, Asen shows how methods of forensic examination with a millennial pedigree paradoxically participated in the construction of the modern state.' Pierre-Étienne Will, Collège de France

From the Publisher