| China and Albert Einstein: The Reception of the Physicist and His Theory in China, 1917–1979 Subjects: Einstein Albert 1879–1955 -- Influence; Einstein Albert 1879–1955 -- Travel -- China; Relativity (Physics); China -- History -- May Fourth Movement 1919; China and Albert Einstein is the first extensive study in English or Chinese of China's reception of the celebrated physicist and his theory of relativity. Tracing the influence of Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century and Western missionaries and educators in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as they introduced key concepts of Western physical science and paved the way for Einstein's radical new ideas, Danian Hu shows us that Chinese receptivity was fostered by the trickle of Chinese students sent abroad for study beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and by the openness of the May Fourth Movement (1916-1923). |