From the China Medical Board to the China Foundation: The Network of Interlocking Patronage and China’s New Scientific Community, 1920s–1930s

This essay examines the financial context of the development of modern science in Republican China (1912–1949) during the 1920s. At that time, funding for related endeavors was channeled first through the China Medical Board of the Rockefeller Foundation and then through the China Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Culture, a body that oversaw part of America’s remission of indemnities paid by China under the Boxer Protocol (1901). Although both entities drew their entire funding from U.S. sources, the transition from the private foundation as principal patron to the backflow of indemnities can be seen as a process through which Chinese promoters and practitioners of science earnestly sought and eventually secured control of resources for their own institution-building efforts. Still more important, active Chinese involvement extended the role of these funding agents from mere donors of physical assets to portals where concerned individuals and organizations intersected. It was this new capacity that smoothed the way for a self-perpetuating scientific community to emerge and prosper well into the 1930s.