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This thesis examines the ways in which Zhang Zhijiang articulates the scientific discourses in directing Guo-Shu (national martial arts) movement against the historical backdrop of political transition into a modern “nation-state” from the late Qing Dynasty to the early Republic of China. In my examination of the history, I specifically explore the implicated knowledge/power effects of the scientific modernity that inform the modern divisions of the personal and the national; the private and the public; body and gender/sexuality. First of all, this study analyzes how Zhang employs a scientific language in depicting the “traditional” martial arts as merely for self-fulfillment of personal gains so as to incorporate the local resources to advance the institutionalization of Guo-Shu (Central National Institution of Guo-Shu) and the national development of Guo-Shu education at school. The competition between Western-style physical education and Guo-Shu as indicating the divisions of modernity shows what I argue the scientism in Guo-Shu movement, on the one hand. I also investigate how Zhang and his followers utilize the scientific discourses of eugenics to demand women’s participation in Guo-Shu training at home to better the national strength. To promote the Guo-Shu practices by women in domestic domain, as I contend, displaces women’s physical liberation onto the privatization of female bodies for national development, once again instrumentalizing female sexualities for scientific rationality. Drawing on the knowledge/power theory in the philosophy of science, this research identifies the contradictions of scientific modernity that conflates national desires with ultraistic public good by relegating the traditional martial arts and the related social hierarchies of gender and sexuality to unscientific autocratic feudalism. By interrogating the contradictions of scientific knowledge and power, my thesis challenges the dichotomies of feudalism and modernity; backwardness and science. |