European University Institute Library

Death in Beijing, murder and forensic science in Republican China, Daniel Asen

eng

index present

non fiction

Death in Beijing

electronic resource

dictionaries

1055245362

Daniel Asen

Science in historyCambridge Social Sciences eBooks

murder and forensic science in Republican China

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.--, Provided by publisher

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